National
By Mitchell Willetts
ORDER REPRINT→A Texas woman dialed 911 after finding a python on top of her toilet in the middle of the night, photos show.
According to Patty Tidwell, who lives in the town of Andrews, a 3:30 a.m. bathroom break sent her into “heart attack mode” when she switched on the lights and saw the large snake stretched across the back of her toilet.
“That can’t be real,” Tidwell thought, she recalled in a Sept. 3 Facebook post. “Then its little forked tongue flickered out at me and (I) slammed the door.”
Tidwell called animal control, she said. An Andrews police officer arrived and wrangled the serpent.
Authorities believe the snake is someone’s escaped pet, she added. As for how it got into her bathroom, Tidwell theorizes that it crawled up through the plumbing.
“The only place it could have come from is the toilet,” she said.
Though the immediate threat is gone, Tidwell doesn’t feel completely comfortable, and she’s started stacking bricks to keep the lid closed, she told KWES.
“That’s the only way it could have come in. Now I’m scared to sit on (the toilet),” she said in her Facebook post. “How does that even happen?”
While snakes crawling up toilets is uncommon, and the odds of a snake picking your specific toilet is even slimmer, it does happen, an Australian wildlife expert told BBC News in 2016.
“There’s only a small amount of water in the bottom of your toilet bowl. They come up through a dry pipe and there’s a small bit of water in the S-bend — he’s only got to go down an inch-and-a-half or two inches and straight back up,” the expert said. “So it’s quite easy once they learn how to do it.”
