Idaho snake house of horrors drives out family
The five-bedroom house sits on pastoral acreage in the rural Idaho countryside. At a price less than $180,000, it seemed a steal.
But a bargain it wasn’t. Ben and Amber Sessions soon realised the dream home they’d purchased for their growing family in 2009 was infested with hundreds upon hundreds of garter snakes. The ground surrounding the home appeared to move at times, it was so thick with snakes. Throngs of snakes crawled beneath the home’s siding. At night, the young couple said they would lie awake and listen to slithering inside the walls. “It was like living in one of those horror movies,” said Ben Sessions, 31.
The family would frequently eat out because their well water carried the foul smelling musk that the snakes release as a warning to predators.
Each day, before his pregnant wife and two small boys got out of bed, Sessions said he would do a “morning sweep” through the house to make sure none of the snakes had made it inside. That didn’t always work. One day, he heard his wife scream from the laundry room, where she had almost stepped on a snake. He rushed into the room to find that she’d jumped onto a counter. “I was terrified she was going to miscarry,” he said.
They invited family as witnesses and snapped pictures. At the height of the infestation, Sessions said he killed 42 snakes in one day before he decided he couldn’t do it anymore. He had waged war against the snakes and “they won.” He and his wife had little recourse, though, when they decided to flee the home. They had signed a document that noted the snake infestation. They said they had been assured by their real estate agent that the snakes were was just a story invented by the previous owners to leave their mortgage behind.
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