There’s 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? Well, recently a family living in Montana, USA, discovered almost a den of snakes in their farmhouse and this is what happened next. Read on to find out…The unknown residentsCallie, 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 shares her experience with the PEOPLE that 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 DenShe says that while it’s not uncommon to see snakes in their remote area, especially with a water source three miles down the road, you typically wouldn’t 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’s 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 dropThe 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’s 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, upward 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 fearWhile she knows they “are harmless,” she still doesn’t want them around.They’re just garter snakes, and they eat lots of bugs. People tell me all the time, ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re harmless,’ but there’s still my irrational fear,” she shares. “I would never touch them. I don’t want them in my house.”Going Viral and Finding SolidaryCallie 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’s the reality of rural living. From sharing her story on social media, however, she’s also received messages from people who have gone through something similar. “It’s just wild because I never knew. We’ve definitely heard of people having snakes in their house in Montana before, because there are so many areas where it’s just so remote, but I’ve never heard of so many people having true infestations like this, and I’ve got tons of DMs from people who have,” she says.Future Plans for the FarmhouseCallie’s husband is a Ranchhand, and their house is included in his pay package, she explains. This makes their housing situation deeply tied to their employment. It’s never been about neglect, in terms of the owners of the house,” she says. “We don’t 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.“
