Spider with yellow strip on its back?

Question

I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and looked up in the corner to find a fairly large spider with a yellow strip going down its back. Being that I have arachnophobia, I started panicking and wacked at it. It fell and now I can't find it anywhere.

I'm kind of worried that it might be poisonous and I have a child around the house. Does anyone have an idea what this could be?

I live in Cleveland, Ohio btw, so we don't generally have many variations of spiders around most of the time...

Answer 1

If it was a fairly large black and yellow spider sitting in a web with a zigzag pattern in the middle then it was a Garden Spider:

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

They cannot hurt people, no matter how small the person is!

It is not a Black Widow Spider ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_widow... ) or Brown Recluse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_reclu... ) which are the only poisonous spiders in the United States because neither one has ANY yellow on it. I also have arachnophobia so I know what you are talking about BUT you need to just ignore spiders in Ohio and let them eat the insects in your home. The spider cannot hurt your child, no matter how ugly or hairy or spidery it is if it is not a Black Widow or Brown Recluse. And even if it was (which it ISN'T) a bite by either one is easily treated and no one dies from their bites nowadays.