A murder scene

When I'm occasionally asked if I have a website I feel like replying "in every corner of my house."
Today I noticed that in one corner a particularly nasty murder had taken place: a daddy longlegs was crouching over the silk-wrapped body of a house spider. The immobilised victim would be shortly be sucked dry by its killer through a hole pierced in its shroud.

Pholcus phalangioides , also known as the long bodied cellar spider, has legs many times the size of its body. It shares the name daddy longlegs with the similarly dangly-limbed cranefly and harvestman, but unlike them this one is a relentless predator that hunts down a variety of insects, other spiders and, in lean times, its own kind.
It is synanthropic, meaning it coexists with people, enjoying the warmth of their dwellings, and it can be found all over the world except the polar regions. It is one of the more useful species to reach Australia since it kills the indigenous poisonous spiders. The long-held belief that its venom would be highly injurious to humans if only its fangs were long enough to puncture our skin has been found to be a myth: it is is actually only mildly poisonous. It hunts by twitching the webs of other spiders so as to mimic the struggles of trapped prey: when the eager web owner emerges for the meal it becomes one itself. The daddy longlegs' own web is a rather haphazard affair that has no particular aesthetic appeal.

I cannot resist quoting a description of the daddy, and mummy, longlegs' sex life but I suggest that the squeamish and/or prudish give this paragraph a miss.
When ready to copulate, the male spider makes couple of silk threads, then places his genital area on the thread and starts rubbing along the thread which stimulate his sexual organs. This action produces secretion containing his sperms, which is drawn toward his poison fangs, which is sucked up by his palps. Now the male is ready for the mating and goes in search of a female. When he finds the female, he lets her know of his intentions by vibrating his whole body on her web. As the female approaches, the male caresses her first pair of legs, which quickly wins her favour. He then inserts both of his palps in the female vulva. Often the copulation goes on for hours with varying attempts in which the male withdraws his palps, reloads it with sperms and inserts it back into the female vulva. If the mating goes undisturbed, then the male is not eaten up. He remains in her immediate vicinity until death overtakes.While this is happening, its is not unusual to find another male spider waiting for his turn. The female lives for about 3 years. But the male lives only for a year, copulates and dies.

Pholcus phalanioides's touchy-feely legs, its disturbing lovelife and its venomous propensities make this etiolated spider something of a nightmare. Curiously, it was the only spider species described by the early Swiss entomologist Johann Kaspar Füssli who first recorded it for science in 1775. Füssli was the brother of the artist John Henry Fuseli whose most famous painting is The Nightmare (1781).
Unsettling though the picture is, it does not to my knowledge include any spiders.