Thousands of venomous arachnids forced a Missouri family from their house.
Brian and Susan Trost bought the $450,000 home overlooking two golf holes at Whitmoor Country Club in Weldon Spring in October 2007 and soon afterward started seeing brown recluse spiders everywhere.
The couple filed a claim in 2008 with their insurance company and a lawsuit against the home’s previous owners for not disclosing the brown recluse problem.
The home, now owned by the Federal National Mortgage Association, was covered with nine tarps this week and workers filled it with a gas that permeated the walls to kill the spiders and their eggs.
One of the nation’s leading brown recluse researchers estimated there were between 4,500 and 6,000 spiders in the home.
Making matters worse, he said, those calculations were made in the winter when the spiders are least active.
