A woman has jumped out of a moving van because she saw a spider.

A lot of people are scared of spiders. For instance, if I see a spider in the bathroom, for the next week or so until that spider moves on or dies, that bathroom now belongs to the spider. However, not many people are so freaked out by the little guys that they would jump from a moving vehicle and let that vehicle roll into a river.

On Sunday, an unnamed woman from Georgia, USA, went to go kayaking in the Etowah River, Atlanta. She was reversing the van to get the kayak closer to the water when she saw that a spider had begun to crawl onto her lap whilst she was still driving.

Taking no more time to notice that she was still on a slope and perhaps should put the van into park, she decided to abandon the vehicle right that second. She jumped from the vehicle whilst it was still moving, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Successfully out of the vehicle where the harmless spider was, she then had to watch in horror as the spider – and her van – rolled all the way down the slope and into the river.

Despite perhaps appreciating that at least she'd got rid of the spider and it had likely drowned, she then had to look on helplessly as her vehicle completely sank into the river.

"She stated that it floated downstream a few feet and within seconds, it was totally submerged," Georgia State Patrol said in a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"A passerby in a boat attempted to locate the van, but without success."

There are around 54 species of spiders in Georgia, according to Spider ID, most of which are harmless. There's a good chance she jumped out of the car to avoid a perfectly ordinary spider. However, there are two species of venomous spiders in the state. Henning Von Schmeling, from the Chattahoochee Nature Center, told TripSavvy that Black Widow and Brown Recluse spiders live in the state, the Black Widow being the much deadlier of the two. Should you find either in your car, you should pull over calmly rather than bail immediately and let your automobile carry on without you.

This is far from the first time someone has taken drastic action to avoid dealing with a small spider. In 2017 a man set his mobile home alight trying to set fire to a spider using a home-made flamethrower. Then, in 2018, another man who had clearly learned nothing from the first person's mistakes, grabbed a lighter and set fire to a spider he spotted in his apartment. The spider then ran around on fire and ended up on his mattress, which also caught fire. This then set his flag collection on fire (of course he had a flag collection), which went on to burn down a lot of his apartment with it.