PRINCETON, Ky. — A Kentucky woman who heard her daughter screaming outside their home found out why -- in a hurry.
When Mara Jo Thomas opened her front door, a snake coiled on the family’s front door hanger bit her in the face, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
“There is seriously never a dull moment in my life,” Thomas, of Princeton, wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.
According to photos that Thomas posted on Facebook, the reptile struck just above her eye, leaving two splotches of blood along her brow and eye socket, the Herald-Leader reported. She opened her door after hearing her daughter, Kenley, “screaming bloody murder.”
“So of course I open the door and boom -- it got me!” Thomas wrote on Facebook.
Thomas found the snake hanging in a wreath on the door hanger. Because her door opened inward, she came face to face with it in a hurry, WPSD-TV reported.
“It bit me before I ever saw it, but I knew instantly that it did bite me,” Thomas told the television station.
Sgt. Daniel Richardson, with Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, said the probability of getting bitten by a venomous snake in western Kentucky is rare.
“It’s not a lot like what people think, especially for as many people access the public areas that we have, like Land Between the Lakes and the rivers,” Richardson told WPSD.
Thomas told the television station that the snake was probably just trying to avoid the heat.
“The heat, and the landscaping, just a combination, it was probably just trying to find somewhere cool to hide out,” Thomas told WPSD.
Thomas went to an area hospital, but no anti-venom or treatment was needed, the Herald-Leader reported.
“Thankfully it wasn’t venomous and it didn’t get my actual eye,” Thomas wrote on Facebook. “I’ll never have another door hanger,” she said.