"Sweetheart, don't move. There's an 8-foot python on you." Those were the words Australian woman Rachel Bloor heard from her husband after waking in her bed at night while a massive python snake coiled across her upper body, having slithered into the second-floor bedroom of her home in Brisbane, Queensland.
Rachel Bloor told the British BBC network that she initially believed the heavy weight on her stomach and chest was one of her dogs who had decided to cuddle with her, but when she reached her hand under the blanket, she felt a slippery texture. "To my horror, I realized it wasn't my dog," Bloor told BBC.
The 8.2-foot (2.5-meter) snake managed to enter her bedroom on Monday night, according to the report.
Bloor recounted that she woke her husband and asked him to turn on the light, and in response, he told her, "Sweetheart, don't move. There's an 8-foot python on you," she recalled. Her first thought was to get the family dogs out of the room before the situation worsened. "I thought to myself that if my Dalmatian realizes there's a snake here, there will be a massacre," she added. After her husband removed the dogs, Bloor carefully climbed out from under the blanket. "I exited in a kind of side shuffle," she said.
Instead of calling a snake catcher, Bloor recounted that she kept her cool and grabbed the large reptile herself from the bedroom through the window. "I grabbed it," she said, adding that the python "didn't seem particularly concerned." She added, "It just coiled around my hand," she said.
Bloor suspects the snake entered through the plantation shutters – wide, large wooden shutters – that adorn her bedroom windows, and crawled onto the bed while she was sleeping. "It was so big that even though it was on me, part of its tail was still outside through the shutter," she said.
The snake was identified as a carpet python, a non-venomous snake most commonly found in coastal areas of Australia. Despite the frightening encounter, Bloor noted she felt relief when she realized it wasn't another animal. "Toads scare me," she said.
Snake catcher Curtis Wyatt told the Australian ABC News network that snake activity has increased with the start of the breeding season and the hatching eggs beginning to emerge. "With the warm weather, we're seeing a lot of them coming out and spending time in the sun," Wyatt said, adding that while there hasn't necessarily been an increase in the snake population, encounters with the large reptiles are becoming more common as human dwellings spread into Australia's forests. "They need to find places to live, and our yards offer them the perfect home," he said.
