Slither whither?

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This article was published 03/08/2019 (2436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You expect scary stories about snakes to involve a few twists and turns.

That’s exactly what happened after a 1.2-metre python was discovered poking out of a sewer grate near a gas station in the east end of Toronto just after midnight last Tuesday.

Alerted by a passerby, fire and police officials captured the wayward serpent and turned it over to Toronto Animal Services, where it was returned to its owners.

According to news reports, the Sannella family were delighted to be reunited with Monty, an 11-month-old ball python that escaped June 13, the night the Toronto Raptors won their first NBA championship.

But Samantha Sannella said, sadly, it was a case of mis-snaken identity — when they returned home, they discovered the snake wasn’t Monty at all, but a different ball python.

Sannella said her 18-year-old son became suspicious, examined some old photos of Monty and realized the unique patterns on the head of the snake in their terrarium didn’t match those on Monty.

Which means Monty is still missing, and someone else must be missing a pet python, too. “How many pythons are loose in the sewers of Toronto?” she mused. “There’s a lot, obviously.”

Toronto’s sewer snake is a quirky story but not unheard of as we see from today’s spine-tingling list of Five Super Strange Sites Scary Snakes have Surfaced:

5) The strange site: Assorted toilets

The serpentine story: Our favourite humour columnist, the legendary Dave Barry, has written more than a few columns about the worldwide epidemic of snakes in toilets. “As a result,” he quipped in 1993, “I have received many letters from people who have had personal toilet-snake encounters, to the point where I now consider it newsworthy when somebody reports not finding a snake in a toilet.” Which is why toilet snakes are only No. 5 on our list. Still, imagine the terror of sitting on a toilet in a relative’s home, feeling a sharp pain, and discovering a two-metre carpet python has bitten your bottom. That’s what happened this January to 59-year-old Helen Richards of Australia. “I jumped up with my pants down and turned around to see what looked like a longneck turtle receding back into the bowl,” said Richards, who sustained minor puncture wounds. Snake expert Jasmine Zeleny, who retrieved the reptile, said it’s common to find snakes seeking water in toilets during hot weather. “Unfortunately, the snake’s preferred exit point was blocked after being spooked by Helen sitting down, and it lashed out in fear,” Zeleny told the BBC. An even more alarming story happened in 2017 in Abilene, Texas, when little Isac Mcfadden woke up, wandered into the bathroom, opened the lid — and found an adult rattlesnake slithering up the bowl. Fortunately, Isac did the right thing — he got his mom, Cassie, who enlisted another son to fetch a shovel, which she used to wallop the intruder. “I was just like, what do you do with this? What do you do with this? I don’t know!” Cassie told local station KXVA. Big Country Snake Removal later discovered 24 western diamondback rattlers — 13 in the cellar, five adults and five babies under the house, plus the intruder in the toilet, which had apparently made its way in through a relief pipe. Isac and his brothers offered a wise tip to TV reporters: “If you find a snake, always get an adult.”

 

4) The strange site(s): A football helmet, a firefighter’s helmet

The serpentine story: There are a lot of health hazards involved in the hard-hitting sport of football, but snakes typically aren’t one of them. Unfortunately, in August 2018, a high school running back in Arkansas failed to observe the standard safety precaution of checking your helmet before putting it on just in case a snake has slithered inside. According to an alarming news item in the Benton County Daily Record, Gravette High School senior Darrick Strzelecki was practising with his teammates when he felt something “odd” in his helmet, which he naturally assumed was a tangled lock of hair or sweat beading up. “I kept hitting and it just kept bothering me,” Strzelecki is quoted as telling the Daily Record. The story states that during a break about 15 minutes into practice, the unsuspecting teenager took off his helmet, looked inside — and dropped dead of a heart attack. Sorry, that’s just what we would have done. What Strzelecki did was reach inside his helmet and grab what he assumed was a rubber snake put there as a prank. “When I grabbed it by the tail, that’s when it jerked, and I dropped the helmet,” he told the Daily Record. The snake was about a foot long and the story states it has now gone to the Big Football Stadium in the Sky. As for Strzelecki, he said it took him about five minutes to build up the courage to put his helmet back on. He chirped: “When you have it crawling on your head, it freaks you out. It creeped me out. Even through the rest of practice, it felt like the snake was still crawling on me.” Like football players, firefighters don’t need any additional hazards to get their blood pumping. In 2018, however, a firefighter at Rutherford Fire Station in New South Wales, Australia, spotted a slithery snake inside his helmet just before putting it on. A pro was called to remove the serpent, which turned out to be a venomous red-bellied black snake.

 

3) The strange site: Boxes of cereal

The serpentine story: When most baby boomers were kids, the first thing they did after jumping out of bed in the morning was stuff their hands into a box of breakfast cereal and root around in search of a cheesy prize. We suspect they might have exercised a little bit more caution if the prize in question happened to a slithery snake with pointy teeth. Tragically, based on recent news reports, finding snakes tucked into cereal boxes seems to be something of a trend. For starters, consider the case of a British man who got a little more than he bargained for in May 2018 when a snake slithered out of his cereal box and fled into his dishwasher. After the metre-long white snake popped out of the box, according to news reports, the “terrified” man called the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for backup. “I think he was expecting to have Cornflakes for breakfast — not Cornsnakes!” RSPCA animal collection officer Katie Hetherington said in a statement. “The poor chap was absolutely terrified.” The cereal stowaway was identified as a corn snake, a species native to North America but common in Britain as an exotic pet. The RSPCA said the snake was suspected to be a runaway. According to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, the same thing happened in 2015 to Jarred Smith, 22, of Australia, who was making lunch when he saw a two-metre diamond python poke its head out of a cornflakes package. Naturally, Smith dropped his food and fled in terror. A wildlife rescue worker later said: “The python was over two metres long and I couldn’t believe it was jammed into this small cereal box. When I got there, I actually had to tear the box to get it out, that’s how tightly squeezed in it was.” And then there was the five-year-old British boy who thought he’d found a toy in 2005, but it turned out to be a metre-long snake in his box of Golden Puffs. The list goes on, but you get the s-s-s-s-ense of it.

 

2) The strange site: Dave Barry’s writing desk

The serpentine story: Dave Barry is arguably the funniest human being in the history of newspapers. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 while at the Miami Herald. For many of us, he is best known for writing hilarious columns about the epidemic of giant toilet snakes. But it was his own close encounter with a slithering serpent that inspired one of our favourite Barry columns. In that column, he described sitting at his desk, trying desperately to come up with a column topic, then reaching to pick up a can of Diet Coke, and “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE­EEE! That is the screaming sound my brain made when it realized that my hand was, at most, two inches from a LIVE SNAKE. Really,” he wrote. “As a South Florida resident, I’m used to having ants on my desk, but they are friendly, harmless and easy to smush. Whereas this was a full-blown snake, coiled for attack, with its head reared up and its tongue flicking out toward me, which is how snakes communicate the message: ‘Hah! Perhaps you wish to die for your Diet Coke, Mister No-Topic Writer Man!’” In a 2013 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Barry chatted about that column and the frequent appearance of snakes in his work. “The biggest snake I’ve ever seen on our property was actually on my desk, about six or seven years ago. I work in an office right off our pool, and somehow the snake got in. I reached over to get my Diet Coke, and there was this snake, definitely looking not happy about me being there. I was home alone, but I admit emitting a very loud, very non-manly noise. I ran out and got some barbecue tongs off the patio and grabbed the snake with them. Now, if you find yourself in that situation, the most important thing is to get the tongs near the snake’s head. I had the snake near the tail, so it had a lot of room to sort of wave its head around toward me. Finally I dropped it into the pool, and it later got away. I want to say it was a 38-foot-long snake, but really it was closer to, like, two feet.” The snake encounter left him exhausted, because, and this makes sense, “YOU try sleeping with barbecue tongs.”

 

1) The strange site(s): A Winnipeg dumpster and a Brandon driveway

The serpentine stories: When you open the lid of a garbage bin to deposit your trash, you brace for a foul smell, but not the sight of a large, squirming snake. But that’s the creepy reality that greeted a local man in May 2013, when he found a 1.2-metre ball python slithering inside a large garbage bin near apartments in the 200 block of Wellington Crescent. According to a report in this newspaper at the time, a police dog team secured the snake inside a recycling bin until animal services officials arrived to take custody. Officials believe the snake was purposely dumped in the trash because broken pieces of a large aquarium were also found in the bin. Animal services’ chief operating officer, Leland Gordon, said the python would likely not have survived for long, considering Winnipeg nights were still cold at the time. “When someone gets a pet, that’s a lifelong commitment to that animal. You don’t put snakes in dumpsters. You find a home for that animal,” Gordon told a news conference. “It’s not very often we see a stray snake like this,” he said. “We’re glad it didn’t get out and a child didn’t encounter it on the street. There’s a portion of our community that’s terrified of snakes.” Meanwhile, in July 2017, Brandon resident Ren Bouchard found a rather unusual obstacle blocking his driveway — a 1.2-metre ball python. According to a report, his fiancée was pulling their vehicle into the driveway when, from the passenger seat, Bouchard said he spotted the snake blocking their path. Initially assuming it was a garter snake, he got out to move it. “I’m glad that I found it and not my kids,” said Bouchard, who used a pool skimmer to lift the snake into a plastic tote bin. It’s believed the snake, which was later retrieved by police, had been slithering about the neighbourhood for days, causing dogs to bark. So before you do anything, check for rogue snakes, because s-s-s-s-s-s-afety always comes firs-s-s-s-s-s-t.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca