Woman Awakens to Find 8-Foot Python Coiled on Her Chest
An Australian woman who thought one of her dogs was sleeping on her woke up in the middle of the night to find something completely different was napping on her chest.
Rachel Bloor was half asleep as she grabbed the dog and found herself petting something very soft. Her husband lit a lamp on the side table.
“Oh baby. Don’t move,” he said. “There’s like a 2.5 meter python on you.”
The snake had apparently arrived through an open window in the couple’s second-floor bedroom in Brisbane, Queensland, located on Australia’s east coast, about 600 miles north of Sydney.
The approximately 8-foot reptile, typically found in coastal areas of the continent, does not administer venom but deactivates its prey through constriction, according to BBC coverage of the incident.
Bloor said his first concern, after uttering several expletives, was to get the family dogs out of the room.
“I thought if my Dalmatian realized there was a snake there, it would be carnage,” she told the outlet.
After making sure her dogs were out of the room, Bloor carefully slipped under the covers.
“I kind of drifted away,” she said.
Bloor decided not to call a professional snake wrangler and instead got the large reptile out of the bedroom through a window herself. She remained calm, saying that actually “toads freak me out” more than snakes.
Bloor suspects the python entered through the plantation shutters of her window next to her bed, snuck up on her and wasn’t even fully inside.
“He was so big that even though he was curled up on me, part of his tail was still out of the flap,” she said.
A Queensland snake hunter from Ipswich said reptile activity had increased in the area as the breeding season ended and eggs began to hatch.
“Obviously with this warm weather we’re seeing a lot of them come out and bask in that sunshine,” Kurt Whyte told Australian media.
Whyte also said that while snake populations have not necessarily increased, they are being seen more often as housing estates expand into the Australian bush.
“They need to find a place to live, and our yards provide the perfect habitat,” he said.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the bestselling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the line and nine other mystery novels and non-fiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com to find out more.
