If Spiderman Was Deadpool

This is a story my dad told me from when he was a college freshman in the late ’80s. Apparently, my uncle, who was still in high school, had gotten himself a pet tarantula around that time and had it in some sort of cage-type setup in their kitchen.

One day, not long before spring break, my grandmother was tasked with feeding it and, naturally, the tarantula jumped out of its cage and fled right into a sink filled with dishes and soapy water and died. 

When my dad came home not long after, he ended up taking the tarantula’s corpse and shellacking it to a piece of wood in a way that made it look like it was still alive. He then brought it back with him to school a few days earlier than he’d initially planned. During those few extra days, he put up several “Missing Pet” signs for it all over campus. 

As people in his dorm started returning, he would sneak the dead tarantula into their rooms while he pretended to help them with their luggage, and, since this wasn’t out of the ordinary for him, they never suspected anything until they ended up finding it. He told me he lost count of how many people he pranked in his dorm before word got out of what he was doing.