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Nine-year-old Luke Hamilton greeted Post photographer Joey Benton and me with his candy-cane corn snake in his hands when we drove out to his home in northern Rowan County.
While we were there, the snake, which Luke named Bull Red but calls Bull, was around his neck, up his T-shirt and out his shirt sleeve, right in front of his face, on his head.
In fact, during the 20 minutes we visited with Luke, Bull was just about everywhere. Joey held him out right in front of his camera for a close-up shot.
AndLuke set him on the ground for Joey to photograph. The Hamiltons are careful not to let Bull loose when their dog and cat are outside. “They might eat him or try to attack him or something,” Luke’s mother, Diane said, “especially the cat.”
But they made an exception for us, and as I watched anxiously, the other family pets, a Dalmatian and a blonde, long-haired cat, didn’t seem too interested in Bull while we were there, but it may have been a ploy to catch us off guard.
They also have to watch Bull, Diane said, or he’ll slip into a hole in the ground, “and we probably wouldn’t find him again.”
Her husband, Stan, had him outside one day when he darted for a hole in a tree, she said, and he just barely caught him in time.
Bull was a gift from Luke’s uncle for his sixth birthday.He’s 3 years old now and about 3 feet long. “They generally grow about a foot a year until they get to 6 feet,” she said. “I think he maxes out at about 6 feet long.”
The Hamiltons keep Bull in an aquarium along with a bowl of drinking water. They drop a mouse in every two weeks for him to eat and take him out every once in a while to clean the aquarium.
“They’re hardly any trouble as pets,” Diane said. “It’s one of the few pets you can have and leave your house for two weeks and not worry about it.”
They buy the mice at a pet store, usually a couple of dozen at a time, and freeze them. “We just thaw them out and give them to him,” she said. “He would prefer them live because he’s a constrictor, but he eats the thawed ones, too.”
Luke, a student at Woodleaf Elementary School, said he has always been interested in snakes and likes to read about them.“I like to be around other animals, too,” he said.
Diane said she didn’t realize what a big market there was for snakes and other reptiles until Luke got Bull.
“If we were to breed him, they would be quite expensive,” she said. So far, though, they haven’t been able to find another one without any black pigment in it. “That’s what makes him unusual.”
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Petie Palmer of Salisbury called with her encounter with a cobra.
It happened when she and her family were returning from Guam, where they had lived for two years while her father, a career Marine, was stationed there. They had sailed from Guam to the Philippines to Singapore to India, where they went ashore and stopped to watch the snake charmers in their turbans and long, white robes with their cobras.
“My brother, Ted, dared me to take one of those snakes and put it around my neck,” she said, “and hold it or whatever.”
Well, Petie, who was 16 at the time, said she couldn’t stand not to take a dare from her brother, who was 19 months older. And the snakes’ fangs had been removed, she said, so they weren’t dangerous.
“I took a snake, and it was a big one, too,” she said, “and Iput him around the back of my neck.”
The charmer showed her how to hold its head by the back, she said, so it wouldn’t swing around in front of her face. “The snake turned around and looked at me,” Petie said, “and I looked at him.”
About that time, the snake slid off her neck and down her arm and touched her brother standing beside her. “He let out a yell and jumped away,” she said. “The (charmer) picked it up and handed it back to me.”
Though she was scared to death, Petie said she started teasing Ted with it and daring him to take it.
“Although my brother was a big guy, 6’3”, he didn’t like snakes,” she said. “So Igave the snake back, and from then on, I was superior over my brother, but that didn’t last long.”
Her parents, Marti and Ralph Culpepper, watched the whole thing, according to Petie.
“They thought at first I was crazy,” she said, “and then they were proud of me. My mother just about had a hissy when I took the snake. She was like, ‘Oh Louise, don’t do that. Don’t do that.’ But anyway, I did.”
The whole encounter took place in about three or four minutes, but Petie said it became one of the memorable experiences of her youth.
The journey home was full of adventures, she said, as they continued sailing up the Red Sea to Egypt, where they spent a couple of days in Cairo, riding camels to see the pyramids, and then across the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean Sea and finally, across the Atlantic and back to New York.
“It was really great,” she said, “and I was at a perfect age to enjoy it.”
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Peggy W. Shuping of Safrit Road mailed us this snake story.
It happened at Rushco Food Stores, of which her husband, Steve, is vice president of sales. They were on a trip to the mountains, she wrote, when he received a call from one of the cashiers saying that a snake had fallen out of a vent in the ceiling on a customer and scared her half to death.
“The snake did not bite her, and someone had killed it,” she wrote, “but she wanted to know how to handle the situation. Steve told her to apologize to the lady and make sure the lady was all right before she left the store and also to explain to her that snakes have a way of getting in strange places in the summertime.”
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Catherine Miller had several snake encounters to share when she called from her home on Highway 150 in Linwood.
They had been building an A-frame house in Elizabethton, Tenn., she said, working on it for about seven years off and on when they had enough money.
When they finally moved in in the mid ’80s, Catherine said they hadn’t been there long when she was in the basement doing laundry and spotted a blacksnake lying across the double window over the washer and dryer.
“He had a great, long tail,” she said. “I had been gathering clothes up, and I had my arms full of clothes and I threw those clothes straight up in the air and ran into the front room of the house with my arms up in the air, crying and shaking my dress tail.”
Her husband, Calvin, killed the 3-foot-long snake, Catherine said, and threw it out in the yard. “I think I cried about four hours before I got straightened out,” she said, “and Ihad to go to another little town to my niece’s house and stay with them about three or four nights.”
It wasn’t too long after that, she said, when they found another snake on the second floor. Catherine said she noticed the dog kept running back and forth through the house, barking, but she thought it was thirsty and kept going to the bathroom to get a drink.
When the dog stopped in front of a bookcase, barking excitedly, she said her husband moved the bookcase and found another blacksnake, this one 4 feet long. Calvin killed that one, too.
They found yet another snake, a small one, in the corner of the bathroom in the basement before the summer was over. “The house was at the foot of a mountain,” she said, “and it had been empty for about four years after we got it under roof and everything.”
Some boys had broken in one of the windows during that time, Catherine said, and stolen some fence posts and the snakes had apparently gotten in through that hole. “They could have been there a long time,” she said.
When they moved to Florida not long after that, Catherine had yet another encounter with a snake. “The doctor had told me to get out and walk,” she said, “and I was trying to walk around the house when I stepped on an old coral snake right up close to the house.”
She had shoes on, she said, so it didn’t bite her, and her husband killed it.
They saw several more snakes around their home in Florida, she said, crawling onto the concrete stoop at their back steps, trying to catch the little, green frogs to eat.
So far, and they’ve been in their present home for six years, Catherine said she hasn’t seen any snakes, but she’s always on the lookout for them.
“I guess just finding them in the house, you know, made me afraid,” she said. “To this day now, I have to sleep with the light on.”
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Lonnie C. Holmes, who now lives in Trinity Oaks, also found a snake in the basement of her former home.
It happened in 1995, she wrote, when she was getting new carpet for the living room of her home in Linwood. The men who brought the carpet removed the old, rolled it up and put it out on the front porch.
Before leaving, they offered to carry the carpet to the basement, sparing Lonnie and Glenda, the lady who was helping her around the house, the heavy lifting.
The next morning, Lonnie wrote, when Glenda came back to work, she was in the basement checking on the laundry when she saw a big, black snake hanging from the furnace pipe.
When Lonnie went down to see it, the snake was gone. She went back upstairs to get a flashlight, she said, and they looked all around the pipes, spotting the snake on top of the furnace.
“He was so big,” she wrote, “and Ididn’t know how to get it out. Glenda says, ‘Let’s turn on the furnace and maybe the heat will make him move.’”
Well, it worked, but Lonnie said they still didn’t know how to get the snake out of the basement.
“I called 911, but they couldn’t help,” she wrote. Lonnie and Glenda called the sheriff’s department, which offered to send a deputy if they couldn’t find anyone else.
There were some men working at a dairy nearby, she said, so Glenda ran to get someone to help while she stayed to watch the snake. A man from the dairy came back with Glenda and used a frog gig to hook its head and throw it to the floor.
Glenda ran back out after a hoe, Lonnie wrote, and by the time she got back, she and the man from the dairy had flipped the snake out of the basement. He then took the hoe and killed it.
“I know snakes are useful,” she said, “but not in my basement. He had invaded my space.”
They were talking about the snake later, Lonnie wrote, trying to figure out how it got in the basement with the door locked, when they remembered the carpet. “The porch was low to the ground,” she said, “and the snake had crawled up in it and was carried down by the men that evening.”
Lonnie said she called the snake a “he” in her story because it was so big. “I couldn’t tell the sex,” she wrote, “and Ididn’t care. No offense to the men.”
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Diane Reavis of Westway Lane e-mailed this story of a snake encounter on Lake Norman.
It happened this past spring, she wrote, when she and her husband, Bill, and their Pomeranian named Bear were bass fishing in their boat. “We were having a good day,” she said. “I was catching more fish than him.”
They went into a cove and were going down the middle, fishing on both sides, when her husband cast his lure and hit a tree limb. “He gave it a tug and it fell into the water,” she wrote, “and a snake followed it into the water.”
Rather than following the lure to the front of the boat, where her husband was, Diane said the snake swam to the back, where she was. “When it got to the side,” she wrote, “I yelled, ‘The snake is coming in the boat.’ ”
Her husband told her to take her fishing rod and hit it. All that did was make it mad, she said.
“He swam to the very back of the boat and crawled in the boat near the motor,” Diane wrote. “Well, needless to say, I screamed, ‘It’s in the boat,’ and I dropped my rod and took off for the front of the boat and jumped on the pedestal seat.”
Her husband went to the back and got his rod to try to hook the snake. “The snake was a lot smarter than us,” she wrote. “He tried to crawl up the transom, but he slid back down. My husband could not find where the snake went. He told me to keep a watch out for it while he started the boat, and we idled out of the cove.”
Diane wanted to know where he was going. When he responded, “Back to our pier,” she told him to pick any pier.
While we idled through, “the snake was washed out of the transom,” she said. “It just swam off. We didn’t feel much like fishing anymore that day.
“For the next three days, we went out, I saw a snake. We laugh about it now, but at the time it didn’t seem funny.”
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The snake story submitted by Gladys Beaumont of Colony Road also happened while fishing.
She was with her husband, Warren, and a guide, Elmer Merrill, at Currituck Sound when, after an hour and no fish, their guide said he knew of a place where they could really catch some bass. But it was way back in the woods, he warned.
“Sure, I was glad to go along as a threesome,” she said, “until after one-eighth of a mlle, I began to think we were in snake country. I had put my high boots on and suddenly realized we were walking surrounded by cottonmouths.”
Gladys trudged along, scared stiff, she wrote, until they came to an open area with a “big, beautiful pool of bass swimming merrily along.”
“But there were snakes in the pool of bass,” she said. “In order to catch a fish, you had to throw your lure where the myriad of snakes nestled.”
Needless to say, with the guide’s help, they caught their limit by noon.
“I wanted to try a different exit,” Gladys said, “but there was no other way. Iprayed all the way back and when the guide turned to my husband after we were safe and sound and said, ‘Boy, your wife must be a tough woman after that experience,’ I just smiled sweetly while my knees were still knocking in my boots.”
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Bob Dick of Maupin Avenue sent in two snake stories.
The first happened when he was a child visiting his grandfather’s farm. He and his brother were headed down a path to the woods and creek to fish, he said, when they heard a crackling in a field of wild blueberries and saw a “strange, but vigorous movement of the bushes.”
They stopped, afraid to go any further. “Just ahead of us,” Bob wrote, “the bushes parted and a blacksnake of tremendous girth and length came out of the brush, seemingly unending as the large body stretched the total width of the farm lane, then disappearing into the brush on the opposite side.”
Years later, while among 1,800 men aboard a troopship in the Pacific Ocean, headed for Okinawa, he said various rumors circulated on a daily basis.
“The one that seemed to unnerve us the most,” he wrote,“was not that the Japanese were still resisting, but that poisonous snakes were crawling all over the island. We all feared we would be soon sleeping on the ground.”
The soldiers disembarked in the darkness, under fire, Bob wrote, and were then driven without lights to a campsite, where they slept fitfully on the ground.
“Later on, we did see a number of snakes, mostly dead,” he wrote, “and several Mongeese which the Japanese had imported to control the snakes. They seemed quite friendly, and I was tempted to touch them, but realized as quick as they were, I’d better stay away!”
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Jana Annas brought a written account of her snake stories by the LifeStyle department.
“I probably have been afraid of snakes all of my life,” she wrote, “even to the point that a picture of a snake gave me the chills.”
When her son was in elementary school, Jana said he was always trying to scare her with small, rubber fishing snakes.
“One place he liked to put them was on the oven door handle,” she wrote. “Then when I went to open the door, Iwould scream or drop whatever I had in my hands.”
One of her worst snake encounters, however, happened during her first year of teaching at East Rowan High School. “In 1963-64, Ihad a student by the name of James ‘Butch’Pierce,” she wrote, “who scared me one morning before homeroom started with a very small snake.”
She was getting ready for the day, Jana said, when Butch showed her his “pretty, little snake,” which she thought was one of the fake fishing snakes. She told him to put it up.
“Evidently, he put it in my desk drawer,” she wrote, “for when I opened the drawer, there was that pretty little ‘rubber’ snake — I thought. But suddenly it moved, and I went ballistic.”
Jana said she ran out of her classroom into the hallway and told one of the male teachers to “make them” get that snake out or she wouldn’t be able to go back in there.
“About that time, Butch came out and placed his hand on my shoulder,” she wrote. “And then the snake stuck its head out of his cupped-up hand and seemed to be looking at me — then Ireally lost it.
“You would have thought I was in a marathon the way Iran up the hall to the main office for help.”
Derwood Huneycutt, principal at the time, wanted to expel the ones responsible, but Jana said she pleaded with him not to because they had no way of knowing she was petrified of snakes.
“I knew they really meant no harm,” she wrote, “but I was so shaken by the event, I was unable to return to the classroom until after lunch. Even today, I still remember the blue dress I had on that day, which was wet with perspiration. I don’t think I ever wore that dress again.”
Her yearbook from that year is filled with wonderful stories “and now memories” written by her students, Jana said, “and Butch wrote one of the sweetest, which I shall treasure always.”
It was only when she left Rowan County in 1966 to live in Waynesville, Knoxville, Tenn., Memphis, Tenn., and then back to Asheville in 1987, Jana wrote, that she was finally able to overcome some of her fear of snakes.
They were living on the side of a mountain in Ballentree with a small stream separating their house from their neighbors, she said, when she encountered yet another snake. She was on her way to the mailbox one day when she spotted it, she wrote, “coiled and sunning in one of the bushes.”
Panicked, Jana said she ran to get a man working on a neighbor’s house to come look at it. “He bent over laughing,” she wrote, “and told me that that little snake would not harm me. He said it was just a harmless snake from the creek sunning in the bushes.”
Every day that summer, when she was not in school, Jana said she looked for the snake when she went to the mailbox. “And he would be there,” she wrote. “Finally, I got nerve enough to stop and talk to him. I even gave him the name of ‘Petie.’
“I would tell him if he stayed in the bushes, he could live, but if he decided to come up to the house, he would be one dead snake.”
She’s not sure if it was the same snake, Jana said, but one that looked like Petie stayed in the shrubbery every summer until they moved. “And that is how I overcame my fear of snakes,” she said.
When they moved back to Salisbury in 1993, into C.C. Erwin’s old house, Jana said she returned to East Rowan to teach, “never thinking I would have the opportunity to see Butch again.”
Five years later, however, while reading the obituary page in the Post, she said she saw that a James Pierce had died and that there was a survivor named James “Butch” Pierce. She decided to take a chance on it being her former student and went to the family visitation at Powles Funeral Home in Rockwell.
“I was kind of nervous because it had been over 30 years since the snake incident,” Jana wrote, “and I wasn’t sure he would recognize or remember me. But when I got to him, not only did he recognize me, he hugged me and introduced me to his lovely wife and grown children.
“And yes, they had all heard of the snake story, over and over again,” she said. “It was truly a memorable reunion.”
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Eleven-year-old Hollie Raney, a sixth grader at Rockwell Christian School, called with her snake story.
She was with her parents, Faye and William Raney, on their lot on Buck Mountain in Wilkes County, she said, when she and her best friend, Mary Bracewell, who also goes to Rockwell Christian School, and her cousin, Nikki Austin, both 11, were playing down at the creek below the house they’re building.
Hollie was in the water, she said, when she saw a big, black snake in front of her. “They took off running and left me,” she said of Mary and Nikki, “and I was screaming and hollering because I couldn’t get out of the water. I thought it was going to bite me. It was shaking after me.”
Her mother later told her the snake probably had a heart attack the way they were hollering. “It was so scary,” she said.
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Teresa Adcock of East Campbell Avenue in Granite Quarry, wrote about a snake encounter that happened when she was 9 years old.
Her sister, Sharon DeRhodes, was 11 when it happened. They were at home by themselves while their parents were working, Teresa wrote, when they decided to go out on the patio and shoot basketball. Several times, the basketball bounced off the patio and into a nearby bush.
“My sister and I would take turns getting the ball out from under the bush,” she said. “We neither one liked putting our hands under the bush.”
As they were getting ready to go inside, Teresa said her sister decided to shoot one last basket. “You can guess where the ball landed,” she wrote. “It was my turn to get the ball.”
As she reached under the bush to pick it up, she said, she saw a 2-foot snake curled up beside it. They started screaming and ran inside to call their mother, Dot Lowdermilk, at work.
She told them to get a shovel and kill the snake. By the time her sister got the shovel, Teresa said the snake was crawling toward the porch.
“My sister lifted up the shovel and dropped it down on the snake,” she wrote, “and cut it in half. Well, I thought the snake would be killed instantly. Instead, both parts of the snake continued to move.”
Teresa said she felt so sorry for the snake that she started to cry and ran inside to call her mother again. “I told my mother that Ifelt like a murderer and asked her what I could do to help the snake get better,” she wrote. “She told me the snake would die.”
It did, and Teresa and her sister picked it up with the shovel and threw it into the woods.
Today, Teresa wrote that she is still afraid of snakes and even though she has seen many more through the years, she chooses to leave them alone and hopes they will leave her alone as well. “I don’t think Icould ever kill one or watch one be killed again,” she said.
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Speaking of killing snakes, Ramona Humphrey of Catawba Road, whose snake encounters were included in last week’s article, said she was disturbed by all the stories of people killing snakes.
She had addressed the unnecessary killing of snakes in her submission, she pointed out on the phone, and indeed she had, but I had omitted it and other parts when I cut it for length. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to use all of the stories we received due to space limitations, and the ones we did, in most cases, were cut.
But in fairness to Ramona, and to all the snakes of the world, I went back and added a few of her points.
For one, Ramona said she learned from the naturalist at Hanging Rock State Park north of Winston-Salem, where she and her husband at one time were regular campers, that no one should ever kill a snake unless they know or believe it to be poisonous — that the land can only support so many snakes.
“Therefore, if you kill a good one,” she wrote, “a poisonous one could come along to take its place.”
Ramona said that she regrets panicking and killing a king snake one time only to find out on closer examination that it was not poisonous.
“This snake is a friend to farmers and gardeners, as it eats a variety of pests like voles,” she wrote. “I guess if in doubt, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
“However, God put snakes here for a purpose in the ecological balance of the world,” she said. “I don’t go along with the saying, ‘The only good snake is a dead snake.’ ”
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