He’s your friendly neighbourhood Spider-man, and he lives in the Collettville area.

The 25-year-old you may have seen wandering the streets of Merritt goes by the moniker SpiderBuchan – his last name mixed into the famed wall crawler’s.

Don’t let the costume fool you though. His alter ego isn’t that of a nerdy freelance photographer. Buchan’s day job is at one of the local mills, and he’s lived in Merritt for the past 15 years.

That’s as close as he’d get to revealing his secret identity.

The experience of dressing up as Spiderman is one Buchan describes as surreal.

“I’m used to being so invisible; you know you just live your life like everybody else. People that don’t know you don’t notice you. All of a sudden everyone’s got their eyes on me, and everybody’s excited to see me,” Buchan said.

Given the fact the wall crawler was his childhood hero, Buchan always wanted to own a Spider-man suit.

He finally bought one earlier this month.

“Going to conventions and stuff always seemed like an awesome idea,” he said of his initial plans for the costume.

Friends advised he use the suit for party appearances, but Buchan didn’t think many people would care.

But when he wore the suit out in public for the first time, a few people took a double take at what appeared to be the famed web slinger walking down the streets of Merritt and asked to take pictures with him.

“It just kind of blew up from there,” Buchan said.

“It was a lot more popular than I expected it to be.”

Buchan has worn the suit out in public just a handful of times now, but talk of the Merritt Spider-man has been spreading.

“People were noticing me everywhere and talking about me on Facebook. People [who] I have no idea who they are, and it was just really exciting,” Buchan said.

Buchan never thought the costume would elicit the reaction it has of people asking and waiting to see him as Spider-man.

Merritt’s web-head has set up a Facebook page titled the Slightly Below Average SpiderBuchan that shows him doing run-of-the-mill superhero duties.

He is also in the process of scheduling parties and events with the costume and plans to donate money to the food bank and other charities if people rent his time.

Buchan said children will ask him questions thinking he really is Spider-man.

“Even skeptical ones are like, ‘Oh, wait, he actually sounds like Peter Parker. He’s real,” Buchan said.

The 10-year-old son of one RCMP member asked if he was helping the RCMP, Const. Tracy Dunsmore said.

“I haven’t seen him, but we keep getting calls, not that he’s doing anything wrong, people are just amazed that there’s a Spider-man hanging around downtown,” she said with a laugh.

Out and about the downtown with the Herald for a photo shoot on Tuesday, the Slightly Below Average SpiderBuchan was surely an amazing sight.

Many people at Spirit Square could be heard calling to him for a picture, and a group of youngsters turning the corner at Voght Street and Granite Avenue looked excited to see the web slinger, giving him high fives and posing for pictures.

One elderly woman passing by remarked at how “great” the SpiderBuchan looked.

Even a couple people in their cars stopped briefly to snap a picture of him from their window.

“I had no idea I would bring as much happiness to the people of Merritt that I have,” he told the Herald.

Buchan said he’s noticed kids looking up to him as their hero, and answering questions about why he’s not slinging his web, he will say he’s left his web shooters in New York or that Merritt’s buildings are too short to swing from.

Though Buchan doesn’t have the superpowers the suit would suggest, the suit itself seems to lend him a different type of super-human ability.

“Being a generally shy and awkward kind of guy to all of a sudden, I’m Spider-man,” he said. “I’ve got to be quick-witted and funny and stuff like that [but] nobody knows who I am, so sometimes I forget that I don’t have to be shy because I’m behind the mask.”