Funnel-Web Spider in Tennessee?

Question

Okay, so I was searching through wikipedia and I came upon a picture of a funnel-web spider which in turn made me remember an experiance a while back. Let's see... I was walking on the road and I see this massive black spider. Its body was very bulky and there didn't seem to be any hairs on it at all, it was solid black like it had been dipped in oil.

Actually to me it looked like a tarantula without hair. Anyways I tried getting it to crawl onto a stick because I wanted to show my mom since I'd never seen a spider like it before. Well as I was walking it kept falling off the stick and I kept trying to get it back on which in turn agrivated it, it reared up and lashed at the stick (something I've never seen a spider do before!)

Everybody thought it could have been a wolf spider, but I looked up pictures and they look nothing like what I saw. This spider was really thick.

Also I've seen pictures of a funnel web, and it looks almost exactly like what I saw. What do you think?

Answer 1

I think they only live in Australia.  But nothing is impossible

Answer 2

Well, there are a lot of families of trap door spiders, mouse spiders, and purseweb spiders that are along side the tarantula family and Australasian funnel web spiders.  They comprise the infraorder Mygalomorphae.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mygalomorph...

They are the primitive and often times large spiders with forward facing fangs, where the rest of the spiders have fangs that point at each other.

They do live in Tennessee, and some of them are endangered.

Here you can browse the different kinds of mygalomorphs that live in the US and Canada.

http://bugguide.net/node/view/46198/bgpa...

*The Araenomorph funnel web is a totally different spider.  In fact, Araenomorphae is the *other* suborder where spiders have fangs that point at each other.  The two spiders have similar common names because they build similar webs.

Answer 3

there's many types of funnel web spider, but the most venomous was the one which live in Sydney , the Sydney funnel-web spider, but here's some probability of the funnel web spider such that it has many family:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araneomorph...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_funne...

The most venomous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_funn...