Ernie asks:

> My twelve-year-old daughter wouldn't sleep in her
>  bed because she saw a spider and was told by her
>  teacher that we eat spiders when we sleep.  (I asked
>  her the name of that teacher, so we could "chat", but
>  she declined for fear of embarrassment).
>
>  My almost sixteen-year-old daughter concurred with
>  her younger sister.
>
>  I tried to convince them, but it was like talking to,
>  well, two young girls.
>
>  I can find nothing on the net do debunk their story.
>
>  Is this a legend, or a fact?

This is from snopes.com the Urban Legends Reference Pages:
Claim: The average person swallows eight spiders per year.
Status: False.
Origins: Oh, yuk!

It's hard enough to avoid those horrible wriggly things while we're awake,
and now we have to worry that they're crawling into our mouths while we
sleep? Little Miss Muffett was a piker.
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.

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