🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501 ACTIVE

J'ba Fofi

Everything published about the giant spider of the Congo Basin descends from a single family memory.

Where and when was J'ba Fofi sighted?

Location: Boumba-et-Ngoko, sureste de Camerún, CM
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: 2.03, 15.2
Last updated: 2026-10-08

LOCATION

What is J'ba Fofi?

In October 2001 the small journal North American BioFortean Review printed an account that the explorer Bill Gibbons had collected from Margaret M. Lloyd: her parents, driving through the Belgian Congo on their honeymoon in 1938, said they had watched a spider with legs close to three feet long walk across the trail in front of their Ford, and that he could not get his camera out in time. That text names no animal, no people and no place beyond the colony. The name J'ba Fofi, the attribution to the Baka and the whole body of folklore attached to it - leaf lairs, trip lines across game trails, prey the size of a duiker - enter the record only in November 2003, in Cameroon, in a conversation that Gibbons himself opened by telling his hosts the Lloyd story. Karl Shuker, who published the fullest version, glosses the name as great spider; the reference lexicon of the Baka language lists six words for spiders and not one of them is fofi. No specimen, photograph or description has been published, and the record spiders, a South American goliath bird-eater and a huntsman from the caves of Laos, span between 25 and 30 cm.

What is the history of J'ba Fofi?

Everything published about the giant spider of the Congo Basin descends from two moments: a family memory, printed in 2001 and told by someone who was not there, about an afternoon sixty-three years earlier; and a conversation in Cameroon in November 2003. The earliest datable printing is a fanzine, October 2001. The North American BioFortean Review, a small cryptozoology journal co-edited by Chad Arment and Craig Heinselman, ran in its issue #7 (vol. 3, no. 2) a compilation called "CZ Conversations: Giant Spiders", edited by Chad Arment and introduced as "a couple of reports of oversized arachnids taken with permission from a recent discussion on a cryptozoology email list". The African item is credited plainly: the explorer Bill Gibbons collected it "from Ms. Margaret M. Lloyd, who related to him a story of her parents' run-in with a hairy arachnid". Mr and Mrs R. K. Lloyd — the quoted passage spells the surname "Loyd" — were on a motoring honeymoon in the Belgian Congo in 1938 when something crossed the jungle trail ahead of the car. They took it for a jungle cat or a monkey walking on all fours; closer, it was a spider. Mrs Lloyd screamed, her husband fumbled for his camera and lost the shot, and the animal walked on at the same pace, "seemingly unfazed by the wheezing Ford convertible that almost ran it over". The size given is that of a limb: "legs close to three feet in length". Mr Lloyd, "a qualified draughtsman (architect)", thought it was a giant tarantula or some similar ground-dwelling spider. The 2001 text contains no name for the animal: the words j'ba fofi appear nowhere in it. No web, no bird caught in a web, no burrow. No Baka. No place beyond "the Belgian Congo" — a territory of 2.3 million square kilometres. And no witness available to be questioned: the account is the daughter's, and the text itself says the Lloyds remembered the encounter "to their dying day". Michael Newton reprinted it in 2005, in the Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology (McFarland), under the entry "Spiders (Giant)", quoting Arment almost word for word and citing him by issue and page. Newton also repeated the era's yardstick for the largest spider that ever lived: the Carboniferous fossil Megarachne servinei of Argentina, "with legspans exceeding 20 inches". Arment had said the same thing in 2001. Both were repeating a claim that was about to collapse — see the skeptical section below. The name, and every scrap of folklore attached to it, arrive in November 2003, and they arrive in Cameroon. Gibbons wrote up that conversation himself, and Loxton and Prothero quote his account (see below). The name is in print by December 2011, when Terrence Aym's self-published Mysteries of the Multiverse quoted Gibbons's "and indeed they did!" and glossed "Jba Fofi" as a "giant" or "great spider". The fullest published account is by the zoologist Karl Shuker, in his book Mirabilis (2013) and in a long ShukerNature article of 30 July 2014. Shuker says the case "was first brought to attention in 2001, when cryptozoological explorer Bill Gibbons told me" about it, and then dates the rest precisely: during a November 2003 expedition to Cameroon in search of the mokele-mbembe, "Gibbons mentioned to the Baka pygmies the Lloyds' sighting (originally recounted to him by their daughter, Margaret). They were familiar with such creatures and provided him with additional information." Everything later presented as ancient forest lore comes from that single conversation, as reported by Shuker: lairs built like leaf huts near the villages, mighty webs slung between trees with trip lines across the game trails, prey as large as duikers, venom said to be strong enough to kill a person, white peanut-sized eggs, yellow spiderlings with purple abdomens that turn brown as they mature, and a sighting as recent as June 2003. Shuker glosses the name as "great spider" and attributes it to the Baka and to local Bantu hunters of Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero describe the same conversation from the other side in Abominable Science! (Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. 285-286). The 2003 trip was paid for by the American creationist Milt Marcy. Having heard from an English woman that her parents had once seen a spider "at least four or five feet in length", Gibbons — they quote him — asked the villagers "if they knew of any such giant arachnid, and indeed they did!" The monsters, it emerged, lived right around the village; nobody had mentioned them on his two previous visits because he had not asked. On the same trip a witness picked a Diplodocus out of a set of animal flashcards and called it "Brontosaurus" — because he recognised it from television. The size grew as the story travelled. Three-foot legs in the 2001 printing; a leg span of "3-4 ft" in Shuker; "at least four or five feet in length" in the version Gibbons carried into the forest. The peoples involved are not interchangeable, and the geography does not line up. The Baka speak an Ubangian language and live in south-eastern Cameroon, northern Gabon and the north of the Republic of Congo; the Aka, with whom they are often conflated, speak a Bantu language and live in the Central African Republic and northern Congo; the Mbuti live in the Ituri forest of the DRC. Serge Bahuchet's 1989 doctoral thesis at Paris 5, Les Pygmées Aka et Baka, is built on exactly that distinction. The 1938 sighting is set in the Belgian Congo — today's DRC — where the Baka do not live. The name belongs to one country and the founding sighting to another, on the far side of the basin. Nor does the word appear in the reference lexicon. Robert Brisson spent thirty years among the Baka of southern Cameroon and compiled the reference vocabulary, the Lexique français-baka (L'Harmattan, 2010). Its entry araignée is generous: it opens with two terms for the mygale, the big burrowing spider, which are hard to read in the scanned copy, and continues with kpokpópu, the large house spider; kpingbingi, the small one "that dies shrivelling up"; dàdàkálá, the crab spider that can damage river weirs; so a pàpè, the one that spins its web across forest paths; and mbù, "araignée de sorcellerie", the witchcraft spider. None of the legible ones is fofi. The lexicon runs from French into Baka; the place to look fofi up directly is Brisson's dictionary in the other direction, the Petit dictionnaire baka-français, first published in 1979. The French-to-Baka entry does cover spiders in detail, down to the witchcraft spider. This page gives no etymology for the name.

Timeline: the documented record of J'ba Fofi

1930 A donor whom the museum labels call only "Mademoiselle Colani" - in all likelihood the archaeologist Madeleine Colani, then excavating in Laos - collects, in caves near the villages of Tham and Na Kay Khia in Khammouane province, the huntsman spiders that will turn out to be the largest ever measured. They are accessioned in Paris in 1933 and wait sixty-eight years for a name.
1938 The alleged sighting: Mr and Mrs R. K. Lloyd, on a motoring honeymoon in the Belgian Congo, say a spider with legs close to three feet long crossed the track in front of their Ford. The account is not written down at the time; it reaches print sixty-three years later through their daughter, Margaret M. Lloyd.
1980 Mario Hünicken describes Megarachne servinei from Carboniferous beds in San Luis, Argentina, as the largest spider that ever lived. Cryptozoologists will use it for a quarter of a century as the yardstick for what a giant spider could be.
October 2001 First datable printing of the case: Chad Arment edits "CZ Conversations: Giant Spiders" for the North American BioFortean Review #7, taking the Lloyd account from a cryptozoology mailing list. It contains no name for the animal, no web, no Baka and no location beyond "the Belgian Congo".
2001 Peter Jäger describes Heteropoda maxima in Zoosystema: body over 46 mm, leg span 250-300 mm, cave-dwelling, from Laos. Jäger calls it the largest known sparassid, or huntsman, spider; it is not African.
2001 By Karl Shuker's own account, this is the year Bill Gibbons first tells him about the case. No published text of 2001 uses the name j'ba fofi.
November 2003 On an expedition to Cameroon funded by the creationist Milt Marcy, Gibbons raises the Lloyds' sighting with his Baka hosts and, in his own words, asks "if they knew of any such giant arachnid, and indeed they did!" Every detail of the folklore - leaf lairs, trip lines across game trails, duiker prey, peanut-sized eggs - dates from this conversation.
2005 Michael Newton reprints the Lloyd account almost verbatim in his Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology, under "Spiders (Giant)", citing Arment. He still gives Megarachne as the largest known spider.
2005 Paul Selden, José Corronca and Mario Hünicken show in Biology Letters that Megarachne is not a spider but a eurypterid, a sea scorpion. The cryptozoological benchmark for giant spiders disappears the same year it is being reprinted.
2008 Simon Braddy, Markus Poschmann and Erik Tetlie describe a 46 cm claw of Jaekelopterus rhenaniae and put the animal at about 2.5 m: the largest arthropod ever documented. It lived in water; the paper notes that gigantism is much more widespread among aquatic arthropods than on land.
2010 Robert Brisson publishes his Lexique français-baka after thirty years among the Baka of southern Cameroon. The entry for araignée lists six Baka words for spiders, including one for witchcraft; none of them is fofi.
2013 Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero publish Abominable Science! and document, from Gibbons's own book, that the Baka testimony followed the question rather than preceding it.
30 July 2014 Karl Shuker publishes on ShukerNature the fullest account of the case, glossing j'ba fofi as "great spider" and dating the Baka material to the November 2003 conversation. It remains the most detailed public source, and it is a secondary one.

Is there a rational explanation for J'ba Fofi?

The most damaging objection is about method, and it comes with a name attached. Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero point out that the Baka testimony exists because Gibbons went looking for it: he arrived with the Lloyd story, told it, asked whether anyone knew of such an animal, and was answered yes. His own account concedes that nobody had raised the subject on his two previous visits to the same place, because he had not asked. The earliest Baka material on record is therefore an answer to a question that already contained the animal. The chain of custody is long and every link is friendly. An event in 1938, seen by two people whose own account has never been printed; their daughter's recollection, passed to the cryptozoologist Bill Gibbons; a post to a cryptozoology mailing list; an edited compilation in a fanzine in 2001, sixty-three years later. The photograph that would have settled the matter was never taken: in the 2001 text Mr Lloyd's "hands were shaking so much from the excitment of the encounter that he missed his chance completely". The physics is worse than the paperwork. Spiders breathe through book lungs and tracheae, which work by diffusion. For insects, which breathe through tracheae alone, Jon Harrison and colleagues reviewed in 2010 the evidence linking the giant insects of the late Palaeozoic to an atmosphere far richer in oxygen than today's. The largest arthropod ever documented, the eurypterid Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, about 2.5 m long and described from a 46 cm claw by Simon Braddy and colleagues in 2008, lived in water, and the same paper observes that gigantism "among aquatic taxa is much more widespread". Spiders have a further problem of their own: as Tom Weihmann and colleagues put it in 2012, they "have no extensor muscles in major leg joints", so their legs are straightened by hydraulic pressure generated in the prosoma; in the large hunting spider they measured, Ancylometes concolor, flexor muscles at the base of the legs did most of the pushing against the ground. Karl Shuker, who takes the reports seriously, reaches the same conclusion as the sceptics: a giant spider "must have evolved a radically different, much more advanced respiratory system, not just a greatly enlarged body". The record holders measure about a foot across. Shuker's own 2014 article gives the title of world's largest spider to a captive female goliath bird-eater, Theraphosa blondi, called Rosi, with a leg span of 11.25 in (28.6 cm) and a weight of 6.17 oz (175 g). The widest huntsman known, Heteropoda maxima, has a body over 46 mm long and a leg span of 250 to 300 mm; Peter Jäger, who described it in 2001, called it "the largest known sparassid spider". It lives in caves in Khammouane province, in Laos, and was described from specimens collected there in 1930 by a donor whom the museum labels call only "Mademoiselle Colani" - in all likelihood the archaeologist Madeleine Colani, then excavating in Laos - and accessioned in Paris in 1933. Meanwhile the fossil giant that cryptozoologists cited in the same years, Megarachne servinei, stopped being a spider: in 2005 Paul Selden, José Corronca and Mario Hünicken - Hünicken had described it himself in 1980 - showed in Biology Letters that it is a eurypterid. Newton's encyclopedia gave it as the yardstick for giant spiders that same year. Finally, the negatives, dated. Shuker closes his 2014 article by conceding that "all of this is sheer speculation, and is likely to remain so" unless a Baka hunter kills one of the animals and preserves its body. A query to the English and Spanish Wikipedias on 8 October 2026 found no article under "J'ba Fofi" or its spellings and no page containing the phrase, while a search for "mokele-mbembe" returned 67 articles in English. In August 2026 the phrase did not occur in any of the forty-four cryptozoology books of the Internet Archive's Cryptozoology Texts collection (32 MB of text, including Heuvelmans, Coleman and Newton), a sweep in which "mokele" appeared in ten of those same books. What survives is one family anecdote, one guided conversation, and a name that the reference lexicon of the language it is credited to does not list among its words for spiders.

Can you visit J'ba Fofi?

There is no site to stand in: the 1938 account sets its encounter on a jungle track in the Belgian Congo — today the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and names nothing narrower than the colony. The second setting is a village of south-eastern Cameroon where Gibbons's expedition was staying in November 2003, which Loxton and Prothero give as Langoue. That corner of Cameroon falls inside the 40 km strip along the border with the Central African Republic where the British Foreign Office advises against all travel. Its stated reason, still on the page on 9 September 2026, is that "highway bandits have stopped travellers and taken hostages for ransom, particularly in the east of Cameroon, close to the CAR border". Cameroon requires a visa obtained before arrival and a yellow fever certificate at entry, and malaria is present in the region all year. The Baka whose villages appear in this story are citizens of Cameroon and of its neighbours, and they entered the story because a foreign expedition passed through and asked them a question. The type specimens of the huntsman spider Heteropoda maxima are in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. Madeleine Colani collected them in the province of Cammon, Laos, in December 1930; they entered the museum under entry number 5-1933 and were still unnamed when Peter Jäger described the species in 2001, sixty-eight years later. Jäger wrote that it "could be the largest sparassid with over 46 millimeters body length and 250 to 300 millimeters legspan".

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-11 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas (folclore)