The most skin crawlingly nightmarish hoax this year?

If – like us – you don’t particularly like spiders, then you may want to turn away right about now, because this latest hoax is basically what nightmares are made of.

Bruce Branit really wanted to know what the cause of his bad case of swimmers ear was, so he took his camera phone and recorded the outer part of his ear canal in search of clues. And he found his answer…

Posted onto YouTube along with the following caption, this is what Branit recorded… (arachnophobia sufferer discretion advised)

(Disturbing Content!!!)
Swam at Lake of the Ozarks last weekend and got a super painful ear infection. Totally blocked ear canal. Tried to use my phone’s camera to see if I could see anything. Found this!

It’s pretty much the worst case scenario for anyone who hates those 8 legged critters, and YouTube went pretty crazy with the video scoring hundreds of thousands of views in only a handful of days, with most of the comments expressing a little more than mere shock.

One user says…

JEsus F****** Christ, this is why I sleep with earplugs.

Another says…

dude, seriously, this is the worst situation I’ve ever seen in 2015

And another…

The sequel to this video involves a q-tip on a power drill.

And our favourite…

cut his ear and burn it and bury it in Antarctica

But things get a little suspect when we learn that Bruce Branit owns a visual effects outfit in Kansas City. Is this just a coincidence, or is a little hoodwinkery at play?

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The latter, as it turns out. Branit eventually came clean the following day on his blog, demonstrating that the spider was the result of a little CGI (see below) and the entire hoax had been inspired by a genuinely bad case of swimmers ear. A non-arachnid version of spiders ear, that is.

With that said, the video is still fooling plenty of people on YouTube who haven’t visited Branit’s blog looking for answers.

Did you fall for the hoax? Does it look real to you? Let us know below.