‘Like a demon from hell.’ Video shows NC woman’s terrifying encounter with a snake.
A Lake Norman woman is sounding the alarm to fellow home gardeners after a snake rose from a bush, bit her and lunged at her again before she fell off a ladder onto the ground — a terrifying six seconds captured on her home surveillance video.
Heatherly Noble had no idea at first what bit her about noon Saturday. She was trimming hedges outside her front door in Mooresville at the lake.
“I felt a really sharp pain in my left hand,” she told The Charlotte Observer. “That’s when it rose out of the bush, like a demon right out of the depths of hell.”
Then she toppled off her six-foot ladder to avoid the snake’s second strike. Her right foot stayed on the ladder as the rest of her sprawled onto the ground, she said. Noble believes she tore an ACL in her leg during the fall.
A neighbor heard her cry out after the bite and called 911, Noble said.
The non-venomous black racer was four or five feet long, she said.
‘Stinging pain’
The bite produced a “stinging pain for a few minutes, but he only grazed me, thank God,” Noble said.
EMS arrived and took her to Lake Norman Regional Medical Center in Mooresville. Doctors were incredulous, she said, that a non-venomous black snake had attacked her like that.
Noble, a corporate payroll director, moved to southern Iredell County a couple of years ago after years in Texas. She loves landscaping and was surprised how plants grow so quickly here compared with more arid Houston and Dallas.
But a snake in a bush on her well-manicured lawn?
It was the last thing she expected, she said, especially since she had trimmed other sides of the 6- to 7-foot-tall bush that morning and elsewhere in her yard.
She said she hopes her encounter will remind home gardeners and landscapers to always wear gloves, long sleeves and other protective clothing. She had no gloves on that day, she said.
‘It’s frightening’
Snakes, both venomous and non-venomous, “pose little threat to pets and children — if left alone,” Jeff Hall, a wildlife diversity biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, says on the commission website.
Snakes are more likely to flee a person, Hall says on the site. They will bite or lunge “toward their perceived aggressor to defend themselves” if they have no way of escaping, he adds.
“It’s frightening,” Noble told the Observer in her front yard on Wednesday. She has been outside her front door only once since the attack, she said.
“My flowers are dying because I haven’t watered them,” she said.
Noble said the snake could still be in the bush, which she has decided to remove.
While she’d normally do it herself, Noble said, she’s calling in a landscaping company for this one.
This story was originally published May 20, 2021 at 4:00 AM with the headline "‘Like a demon from hell.’ Video shows NC woman’s terrifying encounter with a snake.."