For Elaine, because I frickin' hate spiders too

Since I am the resident male-with-a-clue on our campus, and the science guy, and the animal guy, I am often asked to scoop up various creatures that wander into or near classrooms. I have rescued snakes, squirrels, birds and lizards over the years, but no year was quite like the 2005-2006 school year. In the 1st month and a half of 2005 we recieved almost 1 1/2 times our average annual precipitation here in southern Nevada. In addition to flooding damage in the mountainous areas, these record rains produced the best spring desert flower blooms in 50 years, and they had some interesting effects on a variety of animals' life cycles here in the Great Basin desert. We discovered one such unusual occurance when we came across a bonafide plague of Mormon crickets in a valley that separates two mountain ranges in our state that summer. These little beasts are shaped like crickets, are the color of cockroaches, and cannibalize each other. We drove through a swarm of crawlers (they don't fly) that must have literally numbered in the 10's of millions. The road, desert and mountains on the horizon were all colored the same red-brown as the bugs, because they were nose-to-ass for miles in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Gross, yet fascinating.
But that's not the creepiest thing to spawn as a result of the record rainfall.
The week before school started in 2006, I was there doing my teacherly thing when one of the 2nd grade teachers told me she found a 10 legged spider in her room, but it ran away. She wondered if I know what it was. I had no idea, and thought nothing more of it. A week later, the 1st week of school, one of our kindergarten teachers told me she had a spider trapped in a laundry basket in her room. She said it came out of her closet, and it kind of chased her as she tried to put the basket over it. Curious, I went to dispose of the thing.
I had never seen anything like it. It was big, maybe 2 inches long, sort of spider looking, but with 10 legs and the most wicked jaws I have ever seen. Here'a drawing of one. I became morbidly fascinated. How had I lived here 6 years and never even seen one of these things? I scooped it into a jar and began researching...
It turns out that these creatures are not spiders at all, but a non-poisonous arachnid with the strongest jaws of any animal in the animal kingdom per size. The great white shark has nothing on these things. Here a famous picture of one eating another, taken in Iraq. It's easy to see how they could spawn alot of half-truthful myths/nightmares. I turns out their 5th pair of legs aren't actually legs, but specially adapted mouth parts. If you are interested in all the gory details, click here for the best page on these creatures, which are actually called solphugids. Their common name is the camel spider or the wind scorpion, and there is a huge body of urban mythology surrounding them, mostly spawned by soldiers in the 1st Gulf War, where they were often seen in the deserts.
So I became obsessed with these things for a short time. That 1st night, I did a search for camel spiders in Henderson NV on google, and I came across this article. Take a good, close look at the size of that thing: and these guys were popping up in huge numbers all over the area. I found out later that normally there aren't nearly so many, but that the massive rains of earlier that year were tied somehow to their lifecycles, and that was why they were so prolific that summer.
So my guess is that what you saw was one of these. If not, then you've gotta see one in person, because it will give you the willies unlike any other spider-thing you'll ever see.