If I see it again I'll be forced to burn the house down.

A few years ago, I was broke. I lived in a big, early-1900s house with a bunch of other guys who were also broke.

We could barely scrounge up the money for toilet paper and food, so cable and internet were unaffordable luxuries.

It was close to the town college, in a small college town, so for most of the year we could keep ourselves entertained by doing college things - building slip-and-slides with landscaping plastic and discarded mattresses, playing wiffleball in the yard, the usual stuff you do when you're poor and bored and the weather is nice.

But around November, the days get shorter and the weather gets cold. People stop coming by to hang out. There's not enough daylight to goof off outdoors. We'd pool our money and go buy some cheap liquor and play cards.

But eventually, even that starts to get old.

So you try to get creative. You build weird contraptions, learn pointless skills, invent stupid games.

And as creativity wanes, boredom can take a more dangerous turn. Maybe you'll jump off the roof onto a stack of mattresses. Maybe you'll toss a lighter in the fireplace to see what happens. Of course there's the adrenaline... but some darker thrill behind that. A hint of blood lust, so faint that you barely notice.

I don't remember how long it took us to get to that point , but I'll never forget the day that my roommate Mike suggested the spider box.

It was a simple idea. We lived in an old house, and the insulation was horrible. There were spiders in every corner, especially in the basement. That's where the really big, weird-looking bugs lived.

So Mike brought out one of those plastic shoe boxes you can get at the 99 cent store to hold baseball cards and expired batteries and cheap ballpoint pens in.

And inside was the ugliest fucking creature I have ever seen.

It wasn't a spider - it had too many legs - but it looked like a spider. It was long and pale and stalked around the box like it just wanted to bite something.

When you're as bored as we were, a bug like that will hold your attention.

But only for so long...

Within the hour, we were all scrambling to find a spider big and mean enough to kill Mike's bug. We scoured the nastiest, darkest corners of every closet and crawlspace with sticks and pencils and broom handles, gathering up spiders in whatever containers we could find.

Before long, we'd collected somewhere between 20 and 30 spiders between the six of us, and as we caught them, we'd drop them into the plastic shoebox. Of course we'd wait a few minutes to see if the newest spider was going to be the one that killed the beast, but it wasn't until we got the last 4 or 5 spiders into that cramped little box that things started to reach critical mass.

Then it was a spider bloodbath. It was surreal - suddenly every spider in the box just went fucking crazy and started attacking, or being attacked by, other spiders.

The big bug killed a couple as they scrambled around each other trying to wrap their enemy spiders up in web, but the spiders weren't even interested in the bug, they were too busy killing each other. After a few hours and 1.75 liters of Taaka vodka, we had 4 living spiders building nests in the corners of the box, and one big ugly angry demon bug tearing apart carcasses that were left on the floor of the shoebox.

After that night, spider fights were all we thought about. For the next week, we'd spend our free time hunting down spiders to try to kill The Bug, or even just to kill the 4 reigning champions.

But even spider fights can get boring eventually. We needed something to make it interesting. We needed skin in the game.

So on a late weekend night, we decided to up the stakes.

The old spiders were all dead or crippled, The Bug was still on its rampage, and we were all pretty drunk.

My roommate Evan decided that we should clean up the sport, set some rules so we could start making some real bets.

We held the first, and last, spider tournament that night. Twelve spiders went into the box, two from each of us. The lid came off the shoebox, and we all huddled around it with butter knives, straws, whatever we could use to keep the spiders in the fight.

The rules were simple: all twelve spiders would go in the box, and the first person to lose both of his spiders in spider battle would have to wear the spider box for the rest of the night, duct-taped to a baseball cap. The lid would be on, of course, but The Bug would be right there, scurrying around in the box on top of the loser's head.

The fight was anticlimactic. My roommate Ryan's spiders were both wrapped up and sucked dry within 10 minutes.

So he threw back a shot of bottom shelf vodka, put on his spider box hat, and we all had a few laughs at his expense.

Some of our friends came over later, it made a great story, Ryan was showing off the hat and somehow we got enough people and money together to buy a keg and have a nice little party that night.

I wouldn't even remember the fucking spider box - or any of this story, for that matter - if it wasn't for what I saw the next morning.

Ryan had passed out drunk on the living room couch, spider box hat still on his head.

But when I went over to wake him up and tell him to throw the damn thing away, I noticed something horrifying.

The fucking lid was open.

The spiders were gone.

The Bug was gone.

I took off the hat while he was asleep and threw it away. He brings it up from time to time. He thinks he lost the hat while he was drunk.

I've never been able to tell him the terrible truth.

Photo credit: Cesar Carlevarino Aragon