part0020

In my continuing crusade to promote truth and debunk error—at least insofar as error is masked as urban legend—I considered the story told in the following letter from Mrs. B.G. of Raleigh, North Carolina.

I am sending you a tale I heard at the beauty shop. This supposedly happened to a friend of a friend, etc., but nobody could tell who the people involved were. It sounds totally fantastic. Please research this for me, as I have a bet on that this didn’t happen .

A woman fed her small baby some milk and then took the child with her to a nearby field to pick strawberries. The child was asleep, so she pulled the car very close to the area in which she was picking. It was a fairly cool day, and she left the windows open, both for ventilation and in order to hear .

A snake crawled into the car and down the child’s throat after the milk and strangled the child. Snakes are known to do this, so the story goes. What do you think?

I think you win your bet; this account has several hallmarks of an old rural snake legend gone suburban, if not literally urban. Besides, I heard the story a couple of other times this past summer [1987] from your region, as well as picking up echoes of it elsewhere .

There is a connection here to an old legend called the “bosom serpent. ” In this legend, a snake enters the body, usually in the form of unhatched eggs, and injures the person. Typically, the smell of milk is said to be used to lure the hatched snake out of the body. In the updated version you heard, the lure of milk is what attracts the snake into the baby’s mouth to begin with .

A few of the old “bosom serpent” stories found in Europe describe a field worker falling asleep during a lunch break. A snake creeps into the person’s open mouth, taking up residence in the stomach until lured forth .

As for recent parallels to Mrs. B.G. ’s story, in June, 1987, William A. Dennis, Managing Editor of the Henderson, North Carolina , Daily Dispatch reported the same strawberry-patch legend to me. He wrote: “A friend of mind who operates a pick-your-own strawberry farm was quite disturbed because someone had started a rumor about an incident at her farm. ”

It turned out to be the snake and baby story —said to have happened just thirty miles or so up Interstate 85 from the Raleigh-Durham area, in the town of Henderson. The only variations were that the child was said to be left in an infant seat, instead of a car, at the end of the strawberry row, and that the snake had either entered its mouth or strangled it from the outside .

Dennis found no evidence that such a thing had happened and advised his friend “that she shouldn’t worry about it. ” He wrote to me expressing strong disbelief in the incident, though he hadn’t gone so far as to bet on it .

About a month later I got a call from a journalist a little further up the pike (still Interstate 85, actually) in Richmond, Virginia. She was taken aback when I finished her strawberry-patch story for her after hearing her tell just a few opening details. I told her to call Bill Dennis down in Henderson to learn more about the snake story, and to say hello for me .

Whether she called Henderson or not, this reporter —Eileen Barrett of the Richmond News Leader—did contact a snake expert at the University of Richmond who told her, “Snakes don’t drink milk. They’re carnivorous. Snakes wouldn’t even be attracted to milk, so that tale is crazy and totally beyond the known biology of snakes. ”

Meanwhile in mid-July I got an interesting letter from E.S. of Torrance, California. She remembered a frightening story from her high school days in the early 1970s about a young couple leaving their sleeping baby in its crib. A large snake they kept for a pet crept into the nursery and devoured the baby. A really large snake, I suppose .

But, E.S. added, just a couple of weeks ago she heard virtually the same snake/baby story told by a checker in a supermarket, except that in this instance the couple arrived back home just in time to rescue the baby .

The latest non-news of this event —as lam sure it is —appeared in a United Press International story, datelined Moscow, that ran in my local newspaper on August 20, 1987. Paraphrasing from the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, UPI described an eleven-year-old girl “known only by her first name, Matanet,” who fell asleep in a tomato patch where she was working one hot day and suffered a two-foot-long snake creeping down her throat and choking her .

Doctors, the story concluded, in the Soviet Caucasian republic of Azerbaijan, where the event allegedly occurred, were able to remove the snake. I’ll bet I know how they did it .

Speaking of bets, I’d also be willing to put money on my belief that this is nothing more than a Russian village version of the old “bosom serpent” legend that somehow came to a Moscow reporter’s ear and thence crept into print during a slow news week in the summer of’87 .