Like many superstitions that have their roots in country customs, this one makes sense for practical reasons. Spiders are useful to farmers because they eat the aphids and other insects that can destroy a farmer’s crops, so it was in the interests of rural people, especially those living in the days before pesticides, to preserve the life of this helpful creature. Spiders were welcomed in the home for similar reasons in that it was better to have a few cobwebs in the corners than for your food (which couldn’t in those days be refrigerated) to become infested with flies. There are mythical sources for the superstition also, with one legend in varying forms, making the harming of spiders a taboo across cultures.
A Christian fable tells how a spider hid the baby Jesus as Mary and Joseph fled with him from King Herod’s men. Joseph had found a cave high in the mountains where Mary could rest as they ran from Herod, who had ordered the killing of all male children under the age of two. The Roman army were close behind and began to search the caves, but when they saw an intricate spider’s web across the entrance to the one in which Jesus lay sleeping they passed by, assuming that it must have been there, undisturbed, for many days.
The Torah tells the parallel story of how David, later the King of Israel, was saved by a spider’s web covering the cave in which he was hiding from an army sent by the King Saul to kill him. In the story of the life of the prophet Mohammed is the tale of how he took shelter in a cave when fleeing his enemies and was saved when a tree sprouted in front of it and a spider built a web between the tree and the cave.
The spider’s usefulness in protecting human life can be traced back even earlier; in AD 77 the Roman scholar Pliny wrote about the medicinal uses of spider’s webs, which were mixed with vinegar and oil and used for healing fractures and cuts. These days we have fewer uses for our eight-legged friends but many of us still put them out the back door with trembling hands rather than risk bad luck by squashing them.
It would lead to some fairly serious pedestrian traffic jams if we tried to adhere to this superstition on the stairways of office blocks, train stations and the shopping malls of the modern world. The best we can do to dispel any bad luck we incur is to keep our fingers crossed or hold our breath as we pass. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, our forefathers were doing their best to avoid it, probably because of the association between stairways and the pathway to heaven. One old English rhyme, passed down by word of mouth, states ‘Never pass upon the stairs, you’ll meet an angel unawares.’
In the mid-nineteenth century the living world was seen as much more closely linked to the spirit world than it is today. Despite the emergence of atheism in the previous century, most people still believed in the afterlife and in the ability of spirits who hadn’t found rest to appear to the living. Accounts of hauntings from this era often describe ghostly figures on staircases: spectral women in white descending the stairs or the ghosts of dead children sitting on the steps.
There may also have been practical reasons for the superstition that stemmed from the narrowness of early staircases. Two people passing on the narrow staircases of fortified medieval castles would leave themselves open to attack from behind. These stairways were also booby-trapped with ‘stumble steps’ which were made different heights from the others in order to trip any attacker advancing up them.
An earlier piece of stairway folklore meant that by the sixteenth century anyone hoping to be married might have appreciated a stumble step, as it was considered lucky to stumble on your way up a staircase and was a good omen of a future wedding in the household. Stumbling on your way down was still thought of as a misfortune though and seen as a sign of bad luck to come. Restoration dramatist William Congreve recorded the belief in his 1695 play Love for Love: ‘But then I stumbled coming down stairs, and met a weasel; bad omens those.’