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 was 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 policeman 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.
(from F. R.)
