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Garden Grass Snakes (also
known as Garter Snakes...Thamnophissirtalis) can be Dangerous... Yes,
grass snakes, not rattlesnakes.
Here's why... A
couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent
cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them
from a possible freeze. It turned out that a little green garden grass
snake was hidden in one of the plants And when it had warmed up, it
slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa.
She let out a very loud scream.
The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out
into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there
was a snake under the sofa.
He got down on the floor on his hands and
knees to look for it. About that time the Family dog came and cold-nosed
him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, So he screamed and
fell over on the floor.
His wife thought he had a heart attack, so she
covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance.
The attendants rushed in, wouldn't listen to
his protests and loaded him on the stretcher and started carrying him out.
About that time the snake came out from under
the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end
of the stretcher.
That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.
"The wife still had the problem of the snake
in the house, so she called on a neighbor man. He volunteered to capture
the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking
under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat
down on the Sofa in relief.
But while relaxing, her hand dangled in
between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She
screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa.
The neighbor man, seeing her lying there
passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.
The neighbor's wife, who had just returned
from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's
mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned
goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed
stitches. The noise
woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the
floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that he had been
bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of
whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.
By now the police had arrived.
They saw the unconscious man, smelled the
whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to
arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over
a little green snake.
The police called an ambulance, which took
away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.
The little snake again crawled out from under
the sofa. One of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the
snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over and the lamp
on it shattered and as the bulb broke it started a fire in the drapes.
The other policeman tried to beat out the
flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog
who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car
swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.
Meanwhile, burning drapes, were seen by the
neighbors who called the fire department.
The firemen had started raising the fire truck
ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out
the overhead wires and put out the electricity and disconnected the
telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house
fire out). Time
passed. Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was
repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car, and all was
right with their world.
A while later they were watching TV and the
weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The husband asked his
wife if she thought they should bring in their plants for the night.
That's when she shot him!
Thanks to Jeanie Francis for sending in this
story :-) |
