Is a writer named Lisa Holst responsible for the belief that everyone eats eight spiders a year?

Question

If you're reading this there's a good chance you're fan of Snopes.com, and I certainly count myself as the same. However, an issue recently came up a with particular Snopes article that was invoked on this very site to explain where the belief that everyone eats eight spiders a year comes from.

Snopes' explanation is as follows:

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.

That sounds credible, but Lisa Holst, the magazine (or newsletter?) PC Professional, and the text of the article are nowhere to be found on the web. At all. Other than links and references to the Snopes article there's just nothing. It's proving hard to verify that the author or the magazine existed at all! This seems to contradict Snopes' entire thesis that the Holst column was the source of the spider belief in the internet age. How could something so influential disappear without a trace?

The full citation given by Snopes is:

Holst, Lisa Birgit. "Reading is Believing" PC Professional 7th January 1993 (p71.)

The other two citations given in the article do seem to be real, though the Chicago Sun-Times story has the wrong author attributed. I checked it out to see if it was the source of the Lisa Holst information, and it isn't. The other citation is for a book that pre-dates email, so it can't have anything to do with Lisa Holst.

So what's going on here? I see three possibilities

1. Snopes had in their possession the Lisa Holst column when they wrote their article and had a good reason to believe it was so influential, but somehow every trace of it has disappeared from the internet.

2. Snopes made some mistake in the citation, as with the Chicago Sun-Times article, and that's making finding the Holst column darned near impossible.

3. Snopes made up the Holst column out of whole cloth, perhaps as their own version of a "trap street," the fake streets map makers supposedly put on maps to catch other companies copying their material.

So, can anyone find evidence that Lisa Holst and PC Professional existed, outside of the Snopes article? Or that a column by Holst was source for the internet belief in spider consumption?

Answer 1

It turns out that there's a nice chap who already investigated this, and found no evidence of the matter:

I first did a Google search for PC Professional Magazine. No such magazine.

[...]

Google turns up a fair number of hits for Lisa Holst; none of them is a columnist for computer magazines.

[...]

There is a British magazine called PC Pro. I called them. They’ve never changed their name and they’ve also never heard of Lisa Holst or PC Professional Magazine.

[...]

A quick email to the contact form on Snopes asking them where they found the magazine and whether they have a copy of it I can have a look at receives an automated response suggesting I use their search function.

[...]

A call to the Library of Congress confirms that they do not have, in their records, any magazines with the title “PC Professional” They don’t even have anything close.

—Why eight spiders?

A big troll?

User Avery points out that Lisa Birgit Holst is an anagram for This Is A Big Troll. Hmmm.

Conclusion

The facts on this matter are:

• one resource cites a name and a magazine
• nobody seems to be able to confirm the existence of this person or magazine
• the name of the author can be anagrammed to a clue

The only possible conclusion is "there is no evidence that Snopes is correct", and there is something suggesting it is a fake.

Answer 2

As of roughly August 2021, per a note on Lemmino's video investigating the origins of Lisa Holst, Snopes founder David Mikkelson has admitted to fabricating the PC Professional article and the writer. Avery's anagram was correct.

Answer 3

No, an earlier list was published by Margot Anne-Stephanie Vigeant as author of the article Things to Stress Over in Cornell Engineer April 1992, volume 56, number 2, pages 24 and 25, (alternative link to full text):

My first topic for this issue is worries. I've decided that there are just too many well adjusted, un-paranoid people in this school (NOT), so I've decided to wreck their peace of mind by sharing a list of my favorite worries with them. These are the kind of things that just jump into your mind right before you're about to fall asleep - horrible little night gremlins whose goal it is to keep you up just a little bit longer. So here they are, hope you can sleep after this:

The average person swallows eight spiders while sleeping, in their lifetime. What if all eight show up tonight?

Also from 1992, the book Basic Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences Student Workbook and Study Guide says:

4. Foofy read in the newspaper that there is a .05% chance of swallowing a spider while you sleep. She subsequently developed insomnia.

a. What is the probablility of swallowing a spider?
b. Why isn't Foofy's insomnia justified on the basis of this probability?
c. Why is Foofy's insomnia justified on the basis of this probability.
...

4.a. p = .05%/100 = .0005.
b. This is a very low p, indicating that, over the long run, we can expect to swallow spiders only 5 out of every 10,000 times we sleep.
c. Since p is not zero, we do expect to swallow spiders sometimes, and we don't know when it will happen.

Regarding the 1954 book Insect Fact and Folklore mentioned by snopes, search in snippet views in Google Books (which has multiple copies of the book) for words like "spiders", "swallow" and "sleep" shows nothing related to the myth, and as pointed out in the video posted in Michael's answer, a hardcopy of the book does not have such a myth.

Answer 4

Youtuber Lemmino actually located the only possible magazine that matched the description and got a copy of the article sent to him and translated. It contained nothing relevant to the spider story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjlKIjLWq-Y

[Summary of video: youtuber purchases a hardcopy of the 1954 book Insect Fact and Folklore by Lucy W. Clausen, which is paged through on video, and he says that no information related to the eight spiders myth is contained in the book. Youtuber then unsuccessfully attempts to locate 1993 magazine articles corresponding the 1993 article cited by Snopes.]

Answer 5

Two points:

1. The publication of The Pedant's Revolt by Andrea Barham took place after the original Snopes article, not before. The first edition of the book was in 2005. The Snopes article first appeared before then--I haven't found the original article, but there are forum comments from 2002 and 2004 which refer to it. So it was the book that referenced the article, not the other way around.
2. I can confirm the YouTuber research into the 1954 book, as I have a copy as well. There is no reference to any myth about swallowing spiders.