Garden Snakes, also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis), can be  dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why. A  couple in Sweetwater, Texas, had a lot of potted plants. During a recent  cold spell, the wife was bringing some of them indoors to protect them  from a possible freeze. It turned out that a little, green garden  snake was hidden in one of the plants. When it had warmed up, it  slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa. She let out a very loud scream. The  husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room, naked,  to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the  sofa. He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it.  About that time the family dog came in and cold-nosed him on the behind.  He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on  the floor. His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out. About  that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency  Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's  when the man broke his leg.  The wife still had the problem of  the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor who volunteered to  capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began  poking under the couch. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman,  who sat down on the sofa in relief. But while relaxing, her hand  dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling  around.. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa. The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her. The  neighbor's wife, who had just returned from the grocery store, looked  in the window and saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth. She  marched in and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of  canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where  it needed stitches. The noise woke the woman from her dead faint  and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over  him, so she assumed that the snake had bitten him. She went to the  kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the  man's throat. By now, the police had arrived. (BREATH HERE) They  saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a  drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the  women tried to explain how it all happened over a little green snake. The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife. Now,  the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the  policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the  leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and,  as the bulb exploded, it started a fire in the drapes. The other  policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window  into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and  raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and  smashed into the parked police car. Meanwhile, neighbors saw the  burning drapes and called in the fire department. The firemen had  started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street.  The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and  disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they  did get the house fire out). Time passed. Both men were  discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home,  the police acquired a new car and all was right with their world. A  while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold  snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they  should bring in their plants for the night. And that's when he shot her.