Friends had a skid loader, so they picked up an old shed. Horror slithered beneath
You don’t want to be caught hanging around this Texas Christmassss party for too long.
Bobby Cowan of Stephenville, interrupted a raging rattlesnake party Tuesday underneath a shed on his family land in Gorman, just 30 miles west of town — and got the scare of a lifetime, video shows.
The 37-year-old father of two sent the video of the thing his friends persuaded him to do on that trip, to his wife, Jessica, and she immediately put it on Facebook, he told McClatchy. Jessica, 38, captioned the post: “Welp, look what Bobby just found at our place in Gorman! #jesusforrealtakethewheel #nope.”
By late Friday morning, the video had been viewed more than 1.3 million times and has been shared more than 27,000 times.
It shows what happened when, after they were done getting all the parts for the old windmill that Jessica sent Bobby to get, Bobby and his two friends, Matt Stanley and Levi Kirkland, found a little shed with no roof that had been sitting on the property for “at least 20 years,” Bobby told McClatchy.
“Levi had seen a snake earlier, and thrown a rock at it, and it slithered over toward that little broken-down building,” Bobby said. “I had a skid loader, and he said, ‘Let’s lift it up, see if we can see that one snake.’”
Spoiler alert: They lifted the building, and “that one snake” was not what they saw.
About 50 large rattlesnakes were taking shelter under there, and judging by the noises they made in the video, lifting their house from on top of them was an agitating experience. Most of them, Bobby said, were between 4 and 6 feet long.
“Completely surprised,” is how Bobby describes his and his friends’ reactions.
“They couldn’t believe it,” he said. “We were all hollering and laughing.”
The Facebook commenters are not laughing, though. They are terrified, and friends are telling the Cowans they’re suddenly unavailable for get-togethers at the ranch.
“Where are you moving?” one family member asked.
“Clearly, y’all win,” said one friend who thought he had a good snake story before seeing the Cowans’. “That’s a whole lotta NOPE.”
Bobby said he and his buddies relocated 36 of the snakes away from his cow pastures, but “several,” including one that he says was about 7 feet long, got away.
This story was originally published December 21, 2018 at 11:27 AM.
