Family Of Four Flees Snake-Infested New Home, Once Had To Kill 42 Snakes In One Day
Posted by Justin on June 15th, 2011
A man’s home is his castle. The sense of satisfaction derived from looking out his bedroom window at night and knowing “these walls protect my pregnant wife and family” can provide the strength to carry him through the day. It is the American dream.
Unless.
Unless when you look out your window you see the ground move. You’d inch closer to get a better look at why this strange phenomenon is happening if you didn’t already know the answer. It seems the idyllic $180,000 home you purchased in rural Idaho is infested by thousands of snakes. Sliding through the grass, contaminating your well water supply and slithering inside the walls.
Your castle has been besieged by dragons.
Each day, before his pregnant wife and two small boys got out of bed, Sessions said he would do a “morning sweep” through the house to make sure none of the snakes had made it inside. That didn’t always work. One day, he heard his wife scream from the laundry room, where she had almost stepped on a snake. He rushed into the room to find that she’d jumped onto a counter.
“I was terrified she was going to miscarry,” he said…
At the height of the infestation, Sessions said he killed 42 snakes in one day before he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. He had waged war against the snakes and “they won.”
The Sessions family fled the home and now JP Morgan Chase who owns the property has delisted it for future sale.
Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes.
[MSNBC]
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June 15th, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Justin. If this doesn’t make it into a future podcast it would be a crime! We’ve had snakes under beds, in christmas wreaths and on top of mafia cocaine, but never have we had a snakepocalypse!
June 19th, 2011 at 4:08 am
The picture, if it is not directly resulting from the story is definitely a good choice as it seems to depict a mating mass (not the technical term, but it should be) of garter snakes. For some reason, in certain rare places, they will gather in the mating season to infest some small area in huge numbers. I grew up on an island that had one of these cluster fracks and I was fortunate not to know about it since, as a kid, I had what was one of the worst phobias about snakes that I could possibly imagine anyone having (with some well-timed counseling and desensitization work, I was able to convert it into a fascination with only traces of phobia response left over – hard to describe in writing).
Anyway, there is a slightly more famous mating conflagration of garters in… Alberta, Canada where it is a sort of tourist attraction for the town, a very specific niche market in the tourist industry to be sure.
I don’t know if the Sessions family had their ordeal during the mating season but I would suspect that was the case. And the local population could be very high near one of these sites. It also make me wonder if garter snakes living far from one of these sites just do the regular hooking up kind of mating or if they only live near enough to one of these yearly orgy sites to be able to make the scene each year.
Well, thanks for posting this article; it was great. Remember, serpents are beautiful organisms if you’re not phobic of them and you aren’t sharing a house or a sleeping bag with masses of them.
June 19th, 2011 at 5:30 am
Frightened of harmless garter snakes? HAD TO kill them? Why? Because they were there?
These people are pathetic.