A young Kentucky couple thought they’d found their dream home — only to discover they’d moved into a slithering house of horrors crawling with dozens of snakes, some a staggering six feet long.
And the worst part — the army of scaly squatters may have been there for decades.
Jessica and Johnathan Perry had done everything by the book, including getting their new Mercer County home inspected before moving in, the couple told WKYT.
But just three weeks after unpacking, their American dream turned into a reptilian nightmare.
“I was actually taking out the trash,” Jessica said. “My son and I were home alone, and I walked out the door, and there was a snake on the porch.”
“I immediately called my husband and then my dad to come out here to get it. Then a few days later, we found another. And a few days later, another.”
Before long, the rat snakes were turning up everywhere, Jessica told FOX 56 News.
“Then one night, about a week after finding the first one, [Johnathan] and his friends came down in the basement and found two adults and several juveniles in the basement … that’s an infestation.”
Hoping to get to the bottom of their creepy home invasion, the couple hired a contractor to rip up the concrete floor of their front porch.
What they found was enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.
“When they busted through the middle, there were dozens and dozens of snake eggs, new and what looked like several years old.”
Apparently, the house’s reputation had been slinking around the neighborhood for years.
Jessica tracked down a former owner, who revealed that when he was a child, the property had a nickname: “The Snake House.”
Although the rat snakes aren’t venomous, the couple isn’t taking chances with their 5-year-old son.
“Not necessarily that we’d be scared they’d bite him,” Johnathan told WKYT. “Snakes like warmth. So, if they were to get in the upper level and get in the bed or whatever, they could curl up around his neck, per se.”
Now, instead of kicking back and enjoying their new home, the couple spends evenings on snake patrol.
“We ask each other, ‘Have you gone to the basement yet to check for snakes?'” Johnathan added.
A friend of the family has launched a GoFundMe to help cover the thousands of dollars the Perrys are shelling out to evict their unwanted reptilian roommates.
But the truly terrifying possibility isn’t how much dough it’s going to take to get rid of the home invaders — it’s that the infestation may be impossible to eliminate without demolishing the house.
“Now that we have found that it’s a decades-old problem, what worries us now is that there are multiple dens within the foundation of the home,” said Jessica.
“And in order to eradicate and mitigate that, you essentially bust down the entire home.”
