Random animal stories

At a party earlier this evening, someone told me to step back, that a spider had run out and stopped between my shoes.  I did, and a large spider sat there, everyone looking down at it, someone calling it a Hobo spider.  I don't know what it was, but it held its ground when I tried to get it to run off before someone stepped on it.  (And it seems that Hobo spiders are very difficult to tell apart from similar spiders without a microscope, so who knows what it was?)

A friend told me a story about finding an possum in his bed, and originally thinking it was his cat, actually petting it to get it to settle down, apparently, it was trying to burrow, and calling it by the cat's name until he saw his cat staring back up at him from the floor.  Seeing the cat, he threw back the covers, scaring both himself and the possum.  The latter crawled under the bed, hissing, and refusing to be lured, coerced, or forced out of the room, and since he couldn't get it to leave, my friend went and slept on the couch, leaving the patio door open.  By morning it was gone.

Another friend had mentioned waking up from a nap and finding a giant spider on the pillow.  She jumped out of bed to show her husband, and by the time she came back, it had gone.  When she was going to bed later, she looked all over for it, not wanting to be surprised again, but had no luck, until, she found it on her nightstand, hiding inside the hollow part of a ring.  She took it outside.