It was a scary week with the witches, ghouls and goblins all about.

The most frightening thing I encountered this Halloween season was a medium-sized black spider that looked a lot like a black widow spider.  The spider appeared as I was moving firewood into the house to feed the woodstove. 

It didn’t yell BOO, but had emerged from the dark crevices of the woodpile and was crawling on a log in my arms. I dropped the wood quickly and the beast darted away from me, clearly as concerned about me as I was about it.

My naturalist’s curiosity got the best of me. Once composed, I began to stalk the spider, wanting to confirm its identity and, of course, take a picture for this column. As I picked up the log again, the spider froze and curled up in a ball, giving me an opportunity for a close-up. So, was it a widow? True and false was the answer. The spider in question lacked the telltale red mark of the female black widow and instead had a grey/brown marking on its body. With some research, the spider was identified as a false black widow, just not the kind that is notorious for its bite. False black widow spiders can also bite but rarely do, and their bite is less intense than their true black widow relative’s. Both are in the same scientific family, Theridiidae, but they diverge from there.

False black widow spiders are in the genus Steatoda and are also called comb footed spiders, cobweb spiders and cupboard spiders. They are found inside and outside of the house and are generally not aggressive, though false black widow spiders do have venom and can deliver a bite on rare occasions. Lucky for us they have poor vision in all of their eight eyes and rely on vibrations to make sense of their environment.

The likely variety of false widow that I encountered was Steatoda borealis, a creature first scientifically named by French American educator and arachnologist Nicholas Marcellus Hentz in the nineteenth century. 

Hentz was not afraid of spiders and spent a lifetime studying them, though his interest in arachnids might not be the most interesting aspect of his life. Hentz emigrated to the U.S. with his family after his French Revolutionary father was banished from their home country. The family ended up in Pennsylvania, and Nicholas grew up to become an educator, miniature painting artist, collector and documenter of spiders and insects, and very jealous husband.

His wife, Massachusetts writer Catherine Lee Whiting Hentz, was known for penning books with strong women characters perhaps because, as one biographer noted, “of the oppression that Hentz must have felt in her marriage.” She had been called the “beautiful, dissatisfied wife of a jealous schoolmaster,” who was forced to move often, “as a result of other men’s attention” toward her.

Lest you feel too sorry for Catherine, it is important to note that she is best known for her writings defending slavery.

Clearly my interaction with a venomous spider was not the scariest thing I encountered over the haunting season. At least those beasties were more or less out in the open. More disturbing are the sexist and racist ideologies hiding just out of sight in our country’s scientific and societal histories.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, and author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature and The Nature of Martha’s Vineyard.