* No, this is an urban legend. Created to show that people will believe anything--and then going on to be believed. The following is from the urban legend debunking site
www.snopes.com Claim: The average person swallows eight spiders per year. Status: False. Origins: Fear not. This "statistic" was not only made up out of whole cloth, it was invented as an example of the absurd things people will believe simply because they come across them on the Internet. In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of "facts" that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous "facts," among which was the statistic cited above about the average person's swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst's propagation of this false "fact" has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.
Scott McKinstry, Seattle, USA
* This rumour was started in 1993 by Lisa Holst, a columnist for a computing magazine. The article focused on the increasingly common lists of "facts" which had begin to circulate on the internet in the early 1990s. To illustrate her point Holst made up her own list of supposed "facts", one of which was the claim that the average person swallows up to eight spiders per year. In this particular instance Holst apparently took her inspiration from collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. It is, of course, wonderfully ironic that Holst's "false fact" has since become one of the most widely spread myths on the internet.
