Garden Snakes are DANGEROUS!
Green garden grass snakes can be dangerous. Yes,
grass snakes, not just rattlesnakes.
A couple in Sweetwater, Texas had
a lot of potted plants, and 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 rear. He thought the snake had
bitten him and he fainted.
His wife thought he had a heart attack, so
she called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in and loaded him on the
stretcher and started carrying him out. About that time the snake came out
from under the sofa and one of the Emergency Medical Technicians 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 in relaxing, her hand dangled in between
the cushion where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and
fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa, and the neighbor man, seeing
her laying 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 on 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. An ambulance was again called when it was
determined that the injury required hospitalization.
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 he had been bitten by the snake. She
went to the kitchen, brought back 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 two women tried to
explain how it all happened over a little green snake.
The ambulance
arrived and took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.
Just then the
little snake crawled out from under the couch. One of the
policemen drew
his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table
that was on one side of the sofa. The table fell over and the lamp on it
shattered and as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.
Another policeman tried to beat out the flames and fell through the
window into the yard on top of the family dog. The startled dog jumped up and
raced out into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and
smashed into the parked police car and set it on fire.
Meanwhile, the
burning drapes had spread to the walls and the entire house was blazing.
Neighbors had called the fire department and the arriving fire truck had
started raising his ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising
ladder tore out the overhead wires and pulled out the electricity and
disconnected telephones in a ten-square city block area.
Time
passed...
Both men were discharged from the hospital. The house was
rebuilt. The police acquired a new car, and all was right with the world.
About a year later the original couple 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.
She shot him.