"Nightmare" video of redback spider killing venomous snake goes viral

A battle between a venomous spider and a deadly snake has captivated the internet after a video of the faceoff went viral this week. 

The minute-long video, which has garnered nearly 4.5 million views since it was posted on Facebook Wednesday, shows the redback spider reeling in an eastern brown snake, considered the world’s second most venomous land snake, and attempting to bite the wiggling reptile.

Employees from North Vic Engines, an automotive company in Cobram, Australia, walked in on the unsettling scene in the store’s warehouse. Brenton Maher began to film the encounter as soon as the spider closed in on the snake.

“This is it! This is it!” Maher shouted as the spider approached. 

“Kill shot, kill shot, kill shot,” another chanted.

In the end, it appears the spider came out victorious. As the spider bit into the snake’s skin, the snake began to spasm and eventually stopped moving. 

Warning: This video contains graphic language.

“We had a visit today from a baby snake,” North Vic Engines posted on Facebook, along with the video. “Lucky our pet redback found it and killed it for us!”

Viewers admitted they were haunted by the encounter.

“Two fears at once. I would quit,” one Facebook user quipped.

“Nightmare!” another added.

Some skeptics claimed the snake was caught on a fish hook. The next day, Maher took to Facebook to debunk the claims, posting another video of a snake caught in a spider web.

“For all the people that are telling us that our snake was hooked on a hook, here’s another one caught in a spider web,” Maher said. “And he is actually still alive.”

Apparently, snake and spider confrontations are not all that rare of a sight at the company — or the country in general, as Maher pointed out to Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper.

“It’s pretty common around here in the country. We have spiders and snakes and it’s pretty normal,” he told the paper. “Obviously they’re not nice and you don’t want too many of them but you’ve just got to deal with them. They’re spiders and you can’t control them.”

This isn’t the first time a large Australian spider has terrified the internet. 

In October, jaws dropped around the world after another Australian man posted a video of a huntsman spider carrying a whole mouse in its mouth up the outside of a refrigerator.

Unlike the brown snake, the mouse somehow managed to avoid death. Perhaps huntsman spiders are more forgiving than redbacks, which bite up to 10,000 people in Australia every year.