I bought and moved into a large historic brick home that had been abandoned for 12 years. As you can imagine it was in a state of total disrepair. After clearing out the accumulated garbage from squatters and chased out the raccoons in the attic, the cats in the basement and the large population of mice throughout, I began to gut the structure. Throughout this ordeal I lived in the home and though I had crawled in all sorts of tight spaces and stuck my arm into dark holes I had never been bitten nor seen a brown recluse until my second summer.

I was walking down the stairs to the first floor, via a second set of stairs that I rarely use and saw an rusty colored spider, approximately the size of a fifty cent piece. Whats more is that it didnt run away, but instead reared it front two legs up at me and literally RAN AT me. Needless to say I was taken aback, however my size 13 paratrooper made short work of her (the Missouri Conservation Dept. identified it as a female). Hover it was as if I suddenly became aware that I was sharing my 120 year old home with a whole colony of these marauders. Literally in every nook and cranny I looked I found them. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed them before.
After this I declared war and began to scour the internet for information.

After trying several products and not having the results I hoped for, after spraying and bombing the structure only to find the spiders again and again I decided to, on a whim, purchase Catchmaster traps. I bought 60 and placed everyone of them out the day I got them in the mail and checked them every few hours with reluctant hope.
Nothing happened for two days. Not one spider. However on the third morning I awoke, and did the rounds looking at the traps and noticed that one trap had caught one spider. Now with as many brown recluses that were running amok in my home, I chalked it up to the spider being unlucky, but I decided to give the traps a little more time. It was as if that one spider was merely the scout for the forthcoming battle between the spider hordes and my diminutive traps.
At the end of the first week, I had to throw away traps wearing leather gloves due to the fact that they were so incredibly encrusted with spiders. The record was 41 brown recluses on ONE trap, that I had placed on the landing on mt attic steps. A second trap had 37, which had been placed by the door which led out to the second story porch, which also had a cold air return about two feet away. The front steps, the ones that I had rarely used and had my first encounter on, each step had a trap, and each trap caught anywhere from 1 to 27, with the 27 being caught at the bottom of the stairs, where there is also a cold air return.

I caught well over 500 brown recluse spiders in my 3500sqft home in the months of May-Aug. I swear that I owe the fact that I didn’t end up being bitten is due to efficiency of the traps and the large volume of spiders that were massacred. I just wanted to let anyone that may be doubting the effectivness of these traps, that they are well worth the costs. However remember, you will need to run cycles. I leave the traps out for the time that they are claimed to be good (three months) or unless they become choked in spider carcasses or a stray dust bunny. Then I toss them and wait about 2-3 months, due to the fact that spiders lay eggs and eventually they’ll hatch. So I must lay traps to catch the hatchlings. Invariably I wont catch ALL the hatchlings and some of them will mature and lay eggs, so the process must repeat.
This will be my third cycle of 60 traps since May of 2010 and though it is nearly February in Missouri I still see a spider, however Ive only seen and squished four during the month of January. Also, though you may have to run multiple cycles to destroy an infestation of brown recluses, the evidence that you are making headway is shown by the fewer and fewer numbers of spiders that you’ll catch with every new trap cycle. Dont give up, brown recluses are a fierce foe, but if I can reduce their numbers in my home so dramatically, anything a typical homeowner is up against is cake.

Derek from

MO