There is no denying that snakes and creepy crawlers are a nightmare for most of us. But can you imagine living your life with a bunch of snakes? Recently, a family living in Montana, USA, discovered almost a den of snakes in their farmhouse. Here is what happened next.
The Unknown Residents
Callie, a 27-year-old resident living in rural Montana, knew there would be at least a few snakes here and there. However, she never expected her house to be full of them. Callie, also known online as callieoverseas, shared her experience with PEOPLE. The first time someone in her family noticed one of the reptiles was around 2020. At the time, her mother-in-law was staying with them. 'She came across it,' Callie, who asked for her last name to be omitted, recalls. 'It came from the entryway in our house. We had that one in 2020, and then in the fall of 2020, we had another one, and it was my mom who found it.' However, she first saw one with her own eyes in December 2020. 'I was going to go get my daughter out of her pack and play. She was about 6 months old at the time, and I turned around, and it was really small, but it was right on the floor in the living room, which totally caught me off guard with it being December,' she explains.
Farmhouse or Den
She says that while it is not uncommon to see snakes in their remote area, especially with a water source three miles down the road, you typically would not see them coming out 'like this.' Everything changed when the scale of the issue finally became clear. 'Things were really bad last summer when we realized this is not just a scenario of a snake getting in the house on random because it is an old farmhouse,' Callie says. 'The house is a den.' One time, they saw around four snakes in the living space of the house at the same time.
Watching Them Drop
The structure of the home's basement has made it incredibly easy for the pests to find their way inside. 'The foundation for the house is cinder block, so we have an entryway that goes down into our basement and everything, and that is lined with the cinder blocks of the foundation,' she explains. 'Right now, we have our front door sealed and completely shut.' However, from 'the door that goes down into that entryway,' they can 'watch them drop out of the foundation of the house, upwards of five, six or even more snakes a day. At one point, we saw eight this spring, dropping outside,' Callie shares.
Living with an Irrational Fear
While she knows they 'are harmless,' she still does not want them around. 'They are just garter snakes, and they eat lots of bugs. People tell me all the time, Don't worry about them, they are harmless, but there is still my irrational fear,' she shares. 'I would never touch them. I do not want them in my house.'
Going Viral and Finding Solace
Callie has been sharing her experience online to raise $75,000 to move to a new house. She says that her audience is very engaged with her snake journey, and the most frequent comment she gets is to 'burn it down, and move out.' 'We get a lot of people who are like, Why don't you just move? or How do you sleep at night?' she shares. 'People are usually pretty horrified. A lot of people kind of overlook that it is the reality of rural living.' From sharing her story on social media, however, she has also received messages from people who have gone through something similar. 'It is just wild because I never knew. We have definitely heard of people having snakes in their house in Montana before, because there are so many areas where it is just so remote, but I have never heard of so many people having true infestations like this, and I have got tons of DMs from people who have,' she says.
Future Plans for the Farmhouse
Callie's husband is a ranch hand, and their house is included in his pay package, she explains. This makes their housing situation deeply tied to his employment. 'It has never been about neglect, in terms of the owners of the house,' she says. 'We do not have amenities in this area, and so we actually just found a contractor who has been out to our house two or three times in the last week, and we are going to be doing major renovations to the house.'
