DO NOT BRING PLANTS IN THE HOUSE DURING COLD WEATHER!!!
Never bring outdoor plants into the house.
Garden Grass Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can be dangerous. Yes, grass
snakes, not rattlesnakes.
Here's why.........
A couple in Sweetwater , Texas , had a lot of potted plants. 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 behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and
fell over on the floor.
His wife thought he had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an
ambulance..
The attendants rushed in, wouldn't listen to his protests and loaded him on the stretcher and
started carrying him out.
About that time the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician 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 while 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.
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.
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 that he had been bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen and got 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 women tried to explain
how it all happened
over a little green snake.
The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.
The little snake again crawled out from under the sofa. One of the policemen drew his gun and
fired at it.
He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. 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 out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into
the parked police car.
Meanwhile, the burning drapes, were seen by the neighbors who called the fire department.
The firemen had started raising the fire truck ladder when they were halfway down the street.
The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires and put out the electricity and disconnected the
telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out).
Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came
home, the police acquired a new car, and all was right with their world.
A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The
wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night.
That's when he shot her.
