This species can often be found in churchyards, cemeteries, parks and around the edges of council estates, being collected from its webs located on gravestones, in the corners of structures, metal railings and beaten from bushes and hedges. The males can also be occasionally collected as aeronauts. A particular good place to look for females (occasionally males are in attendance) is the underside of stone cross gravestones arms (a feature of Victorian cemeteries) where the female makes a tangled web in the middle of which is a retreat made from leaves and other debris, with the easiest way to collect the spider is to bring one’s cupped hand up from beneath the retreat in the web and the specimen will drop into it. Parasteatoda lunata can also be found in and collected from similar situations and ways but P. simulans seems to be more common on man made structures.
In Cheshire this species was first recorded on the 31/05/2025 when a male was beaten from conifers in Queens Park, Crewe (SJ687654). An hour or so later two males and seven females P. simulans were collected from webs on cross gravestones in the grounds of the Crewe crematorium and cemetery (SJ704564), along with two female P. lunata in the same situations and a female Cryptachaea blattea from the crematorium walls. This species has proved to be present, in small numbers, in half of the subsequent churchyards and cemeteries visited.
On the 02/08/25 I visited Ince parish churchyard (St James the Great, SJ449763) and collected a single female P. simulans from a cross gravestone, also from a corner of the church wall I found a female Parasteatoda tepidariorum in its web (I presume introduced on cut flowers or a wreath, I have seen P. tepidaroirum in florists windows in Leicester decades ago). The size difference was interesting, with the P. simulans being the size of a dried pea and the P. tepidaroirum being almost the size of a marble. The P. tepidaroirum’s web was also five times larger than P. simulans, and both were collected by bringing one’s hand upwards from the underside of the web.
