I want to see what kind of spider it was if she knows it's not a Tarantula. The biggest spiders we have up there are Wolf Spiders that get to be the size of your palm but that's legs included. Definitely not as big as she said. Maybe it's one of those cave dwellers they recently found in the Or caves.
edit : self edit for remarks about condoning smacking the daylights out of a person that should have been a little more civil towards someone that ( probably ) had made a simple mistake