Garden Snakes Can Be Dangerous

[alvino]

Green garden grass snakes can be dangerous. Yes, grass

snakes, not rattlesnakes.

A couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants,

and during a cold snap, 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 warmed up, it slithered out and

the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very loud

scream. Her husband, who getting dressed after a shower, ran

out into the living room in his boxer shorts 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 leg. 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 a stretcher and

started carrying him out. About that time, the snake came

out from under the sofa. The emergency medical technician

saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the

man broke his leg and why he wound up 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 around under the sofa. 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 cushions, where

she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and

fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa, and 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. An ambulance was again

called, and 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 into 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 brawl 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. They called an ambulance, which

took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.

Just then the snake crawled out from under the sofa. One of

the policemen drew his revolver and fired at it. He missed

the snake and hit the leg of an 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. 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 up and raced out into the street,

where an oncoming car swerved to avoid hitting the dog and

smashed into the parked police car, setting it on fire.

Meanwhile, the burning drapes had spread to the walls and

the entire house was ablaze.

Neighbors had called the fire department, and the arriving

fire truck had started raising its ladder as they were

halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the

overhead wires and caused the electricity to go out, and

also disconnected the 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

police car, and all was right with the world once again.

About a year later, the couple was 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.