BANGKOK — A 64-year-old woman was preparing to wash the dishes in the evening at her home outside Bangkok when she felt a sharp pain in her thigh and looked down to see a huge python grabbing her.
“I was about to scoop some water and when I sat down it immediately bit me,” Arom Arunroj told Thailand’s Thairath newspaper. “When I looked, I saw the snake coiling around me.”
The four to five meter (13 to 16 foot long) python coiled around her torso and pinned her to the floor of her kitchen.
“I grabbed my head, but it wouldn’t let go,” she said. “It just tightened.”
Pythons are non-venomous constrictors, which kill their prey by gradually squeezing the breath out of it.
Leaning against her kitchen door, she screamed for help but it wasn’t until a neighbor happened to pass by about an hour and a half later and heard her screams that the authorities were called.
Responding officer Anusorn Wongmalee told The Associated Press on Thursday that when he arrived, the woman was still leaning against her door, looking exhausted and pale with the snake wrapped around her.
Police and animal control officers used a crowbar to hit the snake in the head until it released its grip and slithered away before it could be captured.
In all, Arom spent about two hours on Tuesday night in the python’s clutches before being freed.
She was treated for multiple bites but appeared to be otherwise unharmed in videos of her speaking to Thai media shortly after the incident.
Encounters with snakes are not uncommon in Thailand, and last year 26 people were killed by venomous snakebites, according to government statistics. A total of 12,000 people were treated for venomous bites from snakes and other animals in 2023.
The reticulated python is the largest snake found in Thailand and typically ranges in size from 1.5 meters to 6.5 meters (5 to 21 ft), weighing up to about 75 kg (165 lb). They have been found as large as 10 meters (33 ft) long and 130 kilograms (287 lb).
Smaller pythons feed on small mammals such as rats, but larger snakes switch to prey such as pigs, deer and even domestic dogs and cats. Attacks on people are not common, but they do happen sometimes.