Green garden grass snakes can be dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not
just rattlesnakes. Here’s a tale for a cold winter’s night.
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, who 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, came looking for her husband and saw his 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 called the fire department and the
arriving fire truck 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.