Glenn Priestley, 73, has gone public with a warning after a spider bite left him unable to walk more than a month later.
The retired builder appeared on ITV’s Good Morning Britain earlier this week to describe the ordeal that began September 16 at his mother’s home in Blackpool, Lancashire. Priestley was renovating the property when he encountered what he called an “unusual” spider coming down a wall.
“It was completely alien to me,” he said on the program. The creature, now believed to have been a noble false widow spider, Britain’s most venomous arachnid, was dark brownish and unlike any house spider he had seen before. Priestley suspects it had been hiding in a blanket that had fallen to the floor, which he later wrapped around himself.
The bite itself caused little initial discomfort. “I got back to the house late that night and had a pain in the leg, pulled up my trouser leg to find it had blown up in size and it was rosy, deep red,” he recalled on Good Morning Britain. The swelling progressed rapidly over the following days. “On the 16th, 17th, 18th, it was rosy red, then on the 25th it was gory. On the 28th it started to wither, but the pain was so excruciating that I couldn’t put my leg down.”
Speaking separately to the BBC, Priestley described how the situation deteriorated. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but a day or so later I experienced a rapidly increasing pain in my leg and discovered it was swollen and highly inflamed and hot to the touch,” he said. Medical intervention came quickly after he sought help. “I went to the doctors the next day and they saw how bad it looked and rushed through blood tests,” he continued. “A day later I was at Blackpool Victoria’s medical assessment unit and ended up staying in hospital for four days.”
The physical toll has proven enduring. More than a month after the bite, Priestley still keeps bandages on the wound and relies on a walker, finding his leg too painful to bear weight. He rated the discomfort to the Blackpool Gazette as “on a level of nought to ten, I’d give the pain an eight.” The swelling, he said hosts, had ballooned his limb to the “size of a large watermelon.”
The noble false widow spider, a distant relative of the notorious black widow, has established growing populations across Britain. Its bite typically causes localized pain and swelling, though severe reactions can require hospitalization. The species originated in Madeira and the Canary Islands before spreading to continental Europe and the UK, where climate change has expanded its range northward.
Priestley has turned his experience into a caution for others. “It’s been a pretty alarming and unpleasant experience,” he told the Blackpool Gazette. “The pain has been really intense. I’d advise anyone else who has a suspected spider bite and starts to feel serious pain to get it checked out right away.”