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Found this little critter resting along the baseboard in my living room here in East Bend, North Carolina.
I tried to put part of a pen in the image for scale, but didn't want to spook it. It looked to be about 4.5 inches in span, counting the legs.
We get lots of gigantic garden spiders and orb weavers out here, but those just hang out up in their gorgeous webs and this was definitely not one of them. I've never seen a spider this big inside my house before, and I don't have any webs in here!
Can anybody give a tentative ID on it? Thank you so much.
Upon further research, it appears to be a Hogna carolinensis, the Carolina Wolf Spider. Makes perfect sense given my location in NC. Apparently they are super common here. Largest wolf spider in the US, which is why I didn't immediately think wolf; we had little bitty wolf spiders in upstate NY, but this guy was a real whopper! They apparently come crawling inside looking for warmth in the fall.
Not sure how he got in, but he's been returned from whence he came with the help of the "sheet of paper and drinking glass" method.
