When you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, how often do you actually check what’s in your toilet bowl? Maybe it’s time to start.
At 3:30 a.m. on Friday morning, a woman in Texas went to use the bathroom only to find a snake peeking out from her toilet bowl.
“It made me laugh,” Brooke Bonilla told Newsweek. “I know some would be terrified, but I take life as it’s given.”
However, the next morning the snake was still there.
Brooke Bonilla/Facebook
“I tried to wait him out, but we only have one bathroom, so he needed to be coaxed out,” Bonilla said. “Flushing doesn’t accomplish anything, they just spread themselves out inside the ceramic pipes of the toilet.”
The snake in question was a rat snake, a non-venomous species that can be found throughout the central and southeastern United States.
“My impatience led me to consider plunging,” Bonilla said. “I was careful because I really didn’t want to harm him. My first idea was to try to trap him between the plunger and walls of the toilet, but he was incredibly fast. Last, I plunged a few times and he shot out of the bowl of the toilet in his haste to avoid any more water.
“He was completely unharmed, then left via a gap in the floor of the house.”
Bonilla, who runs a rescue shelter for horses in Cozumel, Mexico, said that this was not the first time she had found a snake in her bathroom. “We’ve seen them inside more than once,” she said. “I’ve gone to the bathroom to have one coiled up on the bowl behind the lid and just kind of hurried him along so I could sit.
“This is central Texas and snakes are commonplace. If you’re outside, you’re likely to encounter them almost daily. We are in a rural area.”
Bonilla shared photos from the incident to the Facebook page Ratsnakes in Predicaments, in a post that has received hundreds of likes and comments.
“OMG. I have checked every toilet since I was a kid before going bc I am so utterly terrified of this happening,” commented one user.
“Peekaboo! I’d probably have a heart attack, even though I’m growing past my fear of snakes thanks to this and other identification pages that are now just striking interest instead of fear,” said another.
If you ever find a snake on your property and are unsure if it is venomous, the safest thing to do is to call in your local snake catcher as most bites occur when snakes feel harassed or handled.
