Callie says the farmhouse she lives in with her family in rural Montana is not just old — it is a snake den. The 27-year-old says snakes have been showing up in the house for years, and this spring she says they were appearing at a pace of up to eight a day.
The family first noticed a snake around 2020, when her mother-in-law was staying with them and found one coming from the entryway. Callie said she saw her first one with her own eyes in December 2020, when she turned around to go get her daughter, then about 6 months old, and saw a small snake on the living-room floor. She said that caught her off guard because it was December.
What began as what the family hoped was an occasional problem became something else last summer, when Callie said they realized the snakes were not just slipping in now and then through an old farmhouse. She said the snakes were dropping out of the foundation of the house, and that the family once saw around four snakes in the living space at the same time. This spring, she said, they saw eight snakes dropping outside at one point.
Callie is now raising $75,000 to move to a new house, but she said the family plans to stay for now because her husband loves his ranchhand job. She said they have their front door sealed and completely shut. The snakes are garter snakes, and Callie said they are harmless and mostly eat bugs, but that has not eased her fear of them in the house. “I would never touch them. I don’t want them in my house,” she said.
The family lives three miles from a water source, and Callie said snakes are not unusual in their part of rural Montana. Still, the scale of what she is dealing with has startled people when she shares it online. “People are usually pretty horrified,” she said. “A lot of people kind of overlook that it's the reality of rural living.” For Callie, the answer to whether this is an inconvenience or a real danger has already been settled: she wants out, even if not right away.
