Man pulls out a spider from his ear

When Liam Gomez awoke feeling dizzy and with a soft scratching sound inside his head, he phoned his work and said he was suffering with vertigo and earache.

But as the 27-year-old web designer plunged a cotton bud into his ear to try to unclog it, he was horrified when it emerged laced with spider legs.

The self-confessed arachnophobe was then forced to spend a torturous hour scraping out the remnants of the creepy-crawly from his ear one body part at a time.

Mr Gomez, from Folkestone, Kent, said:

My initial reaction was just to get the bloody thing out of me as fast as possible - I was obviously revolted as I hate spiders!

Once I'd calmed down a bit I did then think 'well, that's one for Facebook!.

But his eight-legged nightmare may not be over, as he is praying that the spider was not a female which laid eggs inside his skull.

Mr Gomez, who has vowed to wear earmuffs to bed from now on, had swept away a spider nest from his hallway the night before.

He said: 

I arrived home from work on Tuesday evening to discover a spider's nest above my front door, with lots of hatchlings.

So I swept them away with a broom, and went to bed. The next morning, I woke with blocked ears and vertigo, so I called in sick to work.

I put a couple of drops of olive oil in my ears and decided to go back to sleep for a bit - I could feel tickling in my ear, but put it down to the oil.

When I woke up a couple of hours later, I could still feel the sensation, but also hear a faint scratching sound, so I decided to investigate with a cotton bud.

It came out clean, apart from a single leg! It was at that point I thought - oh god, I know what that means!.

I used a hairpin and the cotton bud to retrieve the spider, making sure to count the legs coming out, then made sure to give my ear a good clean!

Total sod's law as I'm an arachnophobe - absolute nightmare! And the irony is - I'm a web designer for a living!'

Mr Gomez, who suffered the ear infestation on October 8, added: 

I definitely think ear muffs are the way forward!