Cleveland’s friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man awards decency with artsy spiders

Paul Johanni is a devoted people watcher, a trait that serves him well when it’s time to dispatch his spiders.

Using an eclectic mix of colored glass fragments, beads, thin wire and adhesive, Johanni, a sort of 86-year-old benevolent Dr. Frankenstein, fashions pint-sized spider-like creatures. Once his arachnids take form, Johanni begins spinning his web. Tongue in cheek, he says his spiders tell him where they need to be, often leading him to individuals in need of an emotional lift or those caught performing random acts of kindness.

“When you look at the spider, and they look back at you, it’s their eyes that thank you for what you do for other people and the joy you bring them,” he says. “I have met the nicest people through my kindness spiders, and many have shared stories with me of how these spiders have been doing their jobs.”

At Westlake’s Community Services Center, where the art room serves as his primary workshop, staff and peers fondly call him “Spider-Man.”

Alice Yoder, who offers Reiki therapy sessions at the center, was recently gifted a spider after Johanni noticed how her clients’ pained faces were transformed into happy ones as they left their sessions.

“I’d heard about Spider-Man but hadn’t met Paul until he approached me about giving one of his spiders a home,” she says. “I think what Paul’s doing is fantastic because I’ve seen how happy the little spiders he creates make people feel when they get one. His goal is to recognize people for their random acts of kindness, but at the same time, Paul is performing his own random act of kindness, which really completes the whole circle. It creates so much positive energy, and we really need more of that.”

A little about this suburban Spider-Man. A Cleveland native, Johanni is a St. Edward High School grad and a product of The Ohio State University, where he earned an education degree in 1962 with a focus on comprehensive social sciences.

After college, Johanni returned to his hometown and, at 22, began substitute teaching at John Marshall High School. This led to a full-time role teaching social studies and coaching the boys’ tennis team. During his tenure at John Marshall, Johanni mentored delinquent students serving in-school detentions.

“They weren’t in class, but they were in school,” he says of these at-risk teens. “It was my job to teach these students how to learn. They may have been dealing with issues in school or at home, but in that [classroom] all they had to focus on was their school work.”

In total, Johanni spent 30 years teaching at John Marshall, retiring in 1992 to care full-time for his wife, Donna, paralyzed by multiple sclerosis. Donna passed in 1999, after which Johanni says he “wandered” for the next five years until reacquainting with Sandy, an old friend and a widow. They soon married and remained happily together until her death in 2019.

“There I was, lonely again,” he says of his life after Sandy’s passing. It was Sandy, though, who provided some “buggy” inspiration after receiving a piece of spider-shaped jewelry from Johanni as a gift. “She used to call us ‘two old spiders,’” Johanni recalls.

It was the COVID-19 pandemic, though, that brought the spiders to life and gave Johanni a new life’s mission. Years prior, while touring the Fenton Glass Factory in Williamstown, West Virginia, just across the Ohio River from Marietta, Johanni had purchased two buckets of colorful glass castoffs convinced he’d find a creative use for them one day. Using those bits alongside recycled beads, wire and glue, each spider took on a unique appearance.

What saddened him most was the impact the pandemic had on social connection. While the mandate to mask up was meant as a means of protection, it created physical and emotional barriers in society.

“Everyone feared everyone else,” he says. “Everyone wore masks, and no one would look at you. No one could see you smile. And that really bothered me.”

Johanni wanted to reward people, even just a little bit, for being nice to one another. He also wanted to lift people out of their sadness. So, he set his spiders to work.

He remembers a “significant emotional event” at the onset of his mission in January 2021. While walking at Bay Village’s Huntington Beach, he observed a father and his 5-year-old daughter laughing and enjoying the sun and unseasonably warm day while the mother stood alone at the top of the stairs leading to the beach.

“The love and kindness I saw between [the father and daughter] really made my day,” he says. “I knew I had to give them a spider.”

And as the little girl chose her spider from a tray of Johanni’s creations, she told him she was going to gift it to her sister. Johanni encouraged her to keep her first choice and pick another for her sibling.

“The girl’s eyes went wide, then she asked if she could choose some for her brothers, too,” he says. “Then the father said to me, ‘There’s eight!’”

At that moment, the mother returned to her family, and Johanni shared the story of his spiders. 

“She told me she needed a spider, too,” he says. “And with tears in her eyes, she explained she was having such a bad day.”

Driving home, Johanni felt a profound sense of happiness from the encounter.

“I knew then and there that for the rest of my life, I’d need to make spiders,” he says. “And that’s why I do it to this day. At the time, I was just being me, but little did I know the positive effect my spiders could have on someone like that family or that mother. And I began to realize the effect I could have on other people just by being a little nice.”

Stackable cardboard produce boxes house Johanni’s spiders as they await, in neat rows,  their adoption. To date, Johanni has deployed more than 4,000 of his spiders. While most set up their webs in the Greater Cleveland community, many have found homes throughout the US and in nearly a dozen countries worldwide. 

To make it official, Johanni meticulously logs each adoption’s details in a notebook and sends each spider to its new home with detailed care-and-feeding instructions. “Please keep your spiders healthy and happy,” the document reads. “The only thing they will eat is smiles. Feed them often, any size or shape. They can not be overfed and will accept smiles from everyone.”

While his spiders continue to do their work, Johanni has recently fathered a new creation from discarded bits of PC circuit boards, resistors and capacitors: computer bugs.

“If you’re someone who works on a computer all day, you put one of these computer bugs nearby,” he says. “It may not fix the problem with your computer, but it’ll definitely look over you and keep you in a positive mood throughout the day.”