Lived in a couple places infested with recluses. It certainly caused you to be proactive about things...no sticking hands behind boards in the garage that had been in place for a few months. Laundry got put away immediately, shoes were knocked empty before being put on.
Biggest one I saw was about fifty cent piece. More common were the "quarter" sized ones.
Never bitten though.
There was a study done out of the Universtiy of Kansas. They crawled around some of the old limestone farm houses out in the country. Not sure if anyone has ever seen one of these, but they are marvels of ingenuity. The places stay wonderfully cool in the summer. They discovered hundreds, if not thousands of recluses living in some of these places, however the number of bites was incredibly small. Some of these places had been within the same family for generations and the family histories had very few incidences of recluse bite.
What they determined is that you really have to try to get bitten by one of these things and that the "reports" of recluse bites out there are probably erroneously attributed to browns. They particularly pointed to several medical reports out of the Pacific Northwest that were labeled as recluse bites. As the PNW is well outside the normal stomping grounds of the brown (too wet, too cold), they were probably more likely caused by the hobo spider.
