Yes, grass snakes, not
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 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 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. 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 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
re-built. 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.
