Snakes alive! Couple finds second python hiding in their washing machine

STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR

Dan Robson Staff Reporter

When Janet Wilkinson opened her washing machine, she expected to find some laundry. Instead, she found a python.

She shrieked, “Another snake!”

Finding a python living in your home, without your consent, is a lot to handle. But finding more than one? Well, that’s terrifying.

The Royal Python Wilkinson found coiled in her washing machine on Friday night was the second snake she and her husband, Chris Forde, have found in their home in two weeks.

“Lightning only strikes in the same place once,” Wilkinson told the Toronto Star at the couple’s home near Coxwell and Danforth Aves. on Saturday. “But last night it struck again — and it is probably going to strike three or four more times.”

One snake is an anomaly. Two snakes are a family. And a local pet store informed the couple that they’ll likely meet some reptilian siblings in the near future.

The snake saga began about a month ago, when Forde ripped the toilet out the main-floor washroom for some renovations.

“This head just popped out,” he said, of the python peaking through a gap in the floorboards.

Forde, a documentary filmmaker, took a quick video of the trespasser, before it slipped back under the floor. He has documented much of the snake situation on YouTube.

Despite ripping up his basement ceiling and setting traps with dead mice and hot water bottles, the snake didn’t return.

They had lived in the home for two decades, but were planning to sell. But of course, their new tenant hindered their plans.

“It would be unethical,” Forde said, of selling a house with a python living in the walls.

They asked neighbours if they had lost a snake.

No one had.

They even put a sign on their lawn: “Lost your snake? Call us.”

No one did.

Finally, after a month with Wilkinson suffering from snake-filled nightmares, the snake reappeared. The 75-centimetre-long python sat in front of a fridge in the basement. Wilkinson saw it, and screamed. Forde came running.

“This is my time,” he thought to himself, snapping on work gloves.

Docile and resigned, the snake willingly slipped into a pillow case and then into a plastic storage bin.

Naturally, they named him Monty.

Monty went to a local pet store, where an employee promised to take care of him.

The Royal Python hails from West Africa, and is one of the most popular snakes in the pet trade. Tom Mason, a snake expert at the Toronto Zoo, says they are harmless to humans, as long as they are less than four metres long.

They can get into the same cracks and crevices a mouse can. And they can survive for more than a year on a single meal.

Mason says a python can travel “quite a ways” when it escapes from an owner, which apparently happens more than you’d like to know.

“Snakes are escape artists,” Mason said. Asked how many might be slithering, undetected, through Toronto homes, Mason refused to answer.

“I’m not even going to go there.”

Last week a metre-long California king snake slithered out of a sink overflow drain in bathroom of an apartment at 100 Wellesley St. E. The snake, named Marilyn, had escaped from its owner on a different floor. As the time of this article, it has yet to be found.

In 2007, a venomous Egyptian Cobra that was kept illegally by a man in his Church St. home got loose. The incident forced the evacuation of five tenants from an adjoining house. After an intensive five-month search, the snake was believed to be dead, but its remains were never found.

While Wilkinson barely slept Friday night, she was in a much better mood the following afternoon. She actually held the newest python intruder in her hands.

It had been through a lot, after all — apparently surviving a spin-cycle. They named it Montegue, and it will join Monty at Tails pet store in the Beaches.

No one is quite sure how the snakes got in. Regardless, there are pythons in the walls. And more are likely to come.

“There’s three or four in the family,” Wilkinson said. “I’m sure of it.”