Full disclosure: There’s only so much room in the headlines here so it should be established upfront that it’s not clear if 36 year-old Long Island man Sean McDermott was definitely hallucinating the spiders due to huffing nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas. In fact seeing insects or spiders crawling around is not a particularly common effect of the inhalant, which opens the possibility that there were a large quantity of arachnids dwelling in the now-burned out townhouse in Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania it was some other narcotic that prompted McDermott to assert fire was the most effective solution to the infestation. Or that other narcotic caused him to hallucinate the spiders.
That and other unanswered questions linger after this report by 6ABC on the havoc McDermott hath wrought. It still however does a pretty admirable job putting it altogether: McDermott and a friend were in the townhouse that he owns (or owned) in the mountainous Pennsylvania countryside on Monday when the fiery behavior began. The article lists McDermott as living in East Moriches, New York – deep in the MAGA part of eastern Long Island – but does not elaborate on whether he was in the process of moving or had bought the townhouse as a rental/vacation property or what.
In any case, the friend later told cops that McDermott “kept putting the fires out and McDermott kept lighting them” to immolate the real, exaggerated, or imaginary spiders. At some point both men had left to go to separate destinations but arrived back at the house at the same time to find it engulfed in flames. Local fire crews spent the next eight hours trying to put out the fire that gutted the townhouse and damaged no fewer than three adjoining/nearby units to an unclear extent.