She screamed her ‘lungs out’ after finding python in washing machine
Emily Visnic’s neighbor had been complaining about a mysterious hissing coming from her West Palm Beach apartment for at least a day, when on Friday the student nurse found a frightening surprise in her washing machine.
That afternoon, Visnic came home from her daily run to find an agitated python coiled up on top of her wet clothes.
“I screamed my lungs out and ran out,” she said Tuesday. “It was hissing very loudly.”
The 26-year-old — who just moved from Connecticut this January to attend Barry University’s graduate anesthesiology program — had noticed a dark, intricate pattern in the machine as she opened the lid, but said it didn’t occur to her that it could be a live animal until she reached inside.
“I thought to myself,
‘Did I put something in there that’s snakeskin?’ ” she said. “And then I felt it, and it was slimy and moving. It was so crazy.”
Thankfully, some nearby maintenance workers helped, she said. The workers used a grabber to remove the snake.
Visnic said they were as shocked as she was to see a python in the building.
“They have never seen a snake on the premises in the 10 years they’ve worked here,” she said.
Visnic contacted animal control to find out how the snake had gotten into the building and if there could be others nearby.
She said a sergeant at the agency suggested that the snake might have been a pet that escaped, reached her apartment through the building’s vents and found its ideal moist environment in the machine.