I saw a brown recluse duck into the shadows near our laundry baskets about an hour ago. My wife and I have been shaking out laundry with tongs, researching homemade pesticides, and trying to not let our skin crawl since then.
Does anyone have any advice for rooting out and killing brown recluse spiders? If so, please share.
Those buggers must be bad in apartments in MO. My wife and I had problems with them in both apartments when we lived in S. County.
Talk to your apartment landlord asap about having an exterminator visit. You can try to catch one if your landlord wants evidence, but essentially I believe that they could be held liable if one of their tennants is bitten. We found that the best way to catch one is to stick a glass over the spider, carefully move a piece of paper under the glass, turn the glass right-side up, place a plastic zip-lock bag over the glass, turn the glass upside down to transfer the spider into the bag, seal the bag and then stick it in the freezer for a few hours.
Additionaly, you could set off a bug bomb or two, but I really recommend buying some glue boards from Walmart. The glue boards are very sticky and are great at catching all kinds of pests like bugs, spiders, and even mice (we have an older home and managed to get a mouse this past winter
).
If you catch one, maybe you can try to feel a little more confident about checking to verify that it really is a brown recluse. There's a harmless brown spider that looks very similar to it. The adult brown recluse is dark brown and hairless with a violin shape on it's back. The neck of the violin points toward the body. If the spider has hair or if it has a brown stripe on the back instead of the violin shape, then it is not a brown recluse. Note also that brown recluse babies are very small, blonde, and just as dangerous as the adults.
The good news is that their name is a good description of their personality. They are reclusive and not aggressive. They have a tendency to come out at night to hunt and the like dark places and usually hunt near the ground. You also may see them around places where water collects. My wife and I would often find them in our bathtub around the drain.
Brown recluse bites usually occur from careless behavior. Shake out your clothes and your shoes before you put them on. Check the pipes going into the walls and make sure that the holes are plugged up. (our second apartment was missing the flanges around the pipes. we stuffed the holes up with paper towels and started seeing the brown recluses much less frequently)
Seriously though, the bites are nasty and can leave a big hole in your skin. My wife and I were fortunate and never bitten after living in two separate apartments that had them. Take consolation in that.
Hand grenades. Works everytime. 
