'I don't believe in St. Patrick anymore': Resident of Leitrim town shocked to find snake in home
Bernie Phelan, from Cortober, arrived home to find a snake in her house last weekend.
“It was a bit scary,” said Bernie Phelan, a Carrick-on-Shannon resident who got a shock last weekend when she arrived home to find a snake in her house.
But this wasn’t the first time she had met this slithering visitor.
She encountered the serpent on her garden path in December. “I just went out the door for something I can't even remember at the time, and just with the corner of my eye, I saw it on the path outside at the back of the house.”
At the beginning, she didn’t recognise it as a snake but maybe a rope or a bundy cord of some kind. “I thought, oh my God, what's that bungee cord doing there? Then it started moving.”
“It can move quite quickly. It went quickly underneath next to his fence.”
Given Ireland’s traditional lack of snakes, she had a hard time convincing people that she had seen the reptile. “I think nobody really believed me that I had seen a snake in my garden,” she says.
Pic: Gerry Faughnan
She was shocked to see the animal in her house, but managed to keep her head and began making phone calls, careful not to take her eyes off the snake in case it pulled another disappearing act.
“If I got up in the night or something like that, or if I had encountered it somewhere else, I would have got a terrible fright like when my eyes saw it first, and it was like a few feet away from it, I had time to think, and get my phone and call somebody.”
She called the local pet shop, Leitrim Animal Welfare Centre, and a vet, but had no luck.
In the end, she got hold of a neighbour,, and with the help of a litter picker and a plastic bag, they managed to get it out of the house and secured it in a garage.
Since then, they have found out that it was not the venomous variety, though its origins and where it was since December.
“I don't know, maybe it got in and made itself comfortable in my house,” said Bernie.
The red and black milk snake is now securely in the local pet shop, waiting for a new owner. “Hopefully, it gets a nice home now and stays away from mine,“ she adds.