This would surely make anyone’s skin crawl.
Hundreds of daddy longlegs blanketed the outside of a backpacker’s tent in Alaska’s remote Lake Clark National Park, a video recently posted by the national park shows in frightening detail.
The arachnids — known as harvestmen which are not actually spiders — were crawling over every inch of the tent’s screen just above the head of the person inside, the footage shows.
The camper pans over the tent with a flashlight, illuminating the hundreds of moving daddy longlegs covering the tent in thick piles.
Lake Clark National Park & Preserve shared the bone-chilling video on Halloween alongside a spooky poem.
“In the remote depths of Lake Clark’s vast, wild landscape, a weary backpacker settles in for a night at camp after a long day of exploring,” park officials wrote in the post to Facebook. “Little do they know, creatures of the night lurk in the woods, waiting for the opportune moment to strike fear.”
The real-life horror is not for the faint of heart, the officials warned.
“Snuggled into their warm sleeping bag, the tired explorer nods off to dreamland…suddenly they are jolted awake with the sense of being covered by creepy crawly creatures of the forest, only to discover their nightmare has become a reality,” the post said. “Hundreds of daddy longlegs have engulfed the tent!”
Many commenters said they were second-guessing their next camping trips.
One person called the clip “one of the creepiest Halloween videos” they saw online that day.
But the national park was not done scaring people.
The next day, officials posted a second clip from the inside of the tent during the daylight with clusters of harvestmen huddled together across the tent screen.
The park service explained that scientists don’t know for certain why dozens of daddy longlegs gather tightly together in packs called “aggregations” but they have several speculations over the common behavior.
“This behavior is common among these leggy creatures, but there’s no straightforward explanation for why they do it,” Lake Clark National Park & Reserve said in the Facebook post. “Researchers speculate that aggregations form for mating, humidity control, or to deter predators.”
Harvestmen form aggregations more often in the fall when the weather is often dry.
The small body-long-legs design makes them prone to drying out and grouping up helps keep in the humidity, park officials said.
Daddy longlegs lack silk and venom glands — which differentiates them from spiders — and aren’t known to bite humans. They are actually considered to be beneficial because their diet includes bugs and other pests.
The peculiar-shaped arachnids are considered cousins of spiders and are actually more closely related to scorpions.
