Pleassssed to meet you. Snake slithers out of car's air vent as woman drives

The snake in Lora Goff's car. Photo / Washington Post

Lora Goff drove down Main St in downtown Warrenton, Virginia, on her lunch break when she heard a rattling sound.

The law firm office manager looked down next to the steering wheel of her Cadillac SRX and saw a snake slithering out of the air vent. Trying to stay calm, she pulled off the road, jumped out of the car and dialled emergency services.

And like anyone these days who has a unique event unfold before them, she snapped a picture: "I thought, 'Nobody's going to believe this'."

When animal control arrived, the officer confessed that he, too, was scared of snakes.

"I said, 'I'm in trouble now'," Goff recalled of Tuesday's fright.

The snake, which she later estimated to be a 1m long garter snake, had become tangled in her phone cord charger.

"The thing that caught my attention is it made a noise. That's when I saw it coming out," she said.

Goff said the animal control officer tried to use a long pole-type tool to catch the snake but couldn't. Then the snake came further out of the air vent and started to move around the car. It then fell under the front seat.

"He looked and looked and looked," Goff said of the animal control officer, "and he couldn't find it."

By then, she said, her lunch break was over and she needed to get back to work, so she drove back to her office with the snake still in her SUV. When she got back to the office, her colleagues suggested a variety of techniques to scare out the snake: turn the air conditioning on cold so it would come out on the seat and sun itself. Turn the air on hot so it would come out.

Goff searched the internet and found a tip to use sticky glue traps for rodents. She borrowed a friend's car, got some traps from a hardware store and put them under her seat. As she drove home after work, she kept moving her feet and making noise in the hope of stopping the snake from coming out.

She checked the traps and found no sign of it. Although she said she was scared the snake was still in her car, she drove - nervously - the 10 minutes to her home in Rappahannock County.

The next morning, she and her husband found the snake stuck to the glue pad, still alive.

Her husband threw it in the back of his truck, Goff said. She doesn't want to know what he did with it.

"I don't want to see that thing anymore," she said.

Officials with the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office said garter snakes are fairly common in the area.

Sergeant James Hartman said recent heavy rains meant the snake was probably looking for a dry spot for refuge and a "nice warm car was a good place to go". He said it probably crawled under the car's hood overnight, as an engine often stays warms for a while.