'Don't leave your windows down:' Snake sneaked in car, then slithered from vent, SC man says

A South Carolina man got a surprise during a recent car ride — a snake slithered out of one of the vents on his dashboard as he was motoring down the road.

To Chris Karam's credit, he didn't overreact.

Many people, even if they aren't afraid of snakes, might have driven off the road in shock when something crawled into their car.

But Karam played it cool, stopped the car, wrangled the snake and released it — all while filming a video of the incident on his cellphone, which he posted to Facebook.

"This little Garter snake popped out of my vent," Karam wrote on his Facebook post, the only fear he revealed being how people would react to the cleanliness of his car.

"You’ll have to excuse my dirty floor and my rusty snake wrangling skills. #snakesinacar#snake#howdiditgetinthere"

In his Facebook post, Karam said he was leaving the GE plant on Garlington Road when the nonvenomous green garter snake made its appearance.

"It didn’t really scare me as much as surprise me. Had I recognized it as poisonous, the interaction would have been much different," Karam said, according to wcnc.com.

Karam said he showed the snake to his nephews before letting it go, wpde.com reported.

Although he initially asked on Facebook how the snake got into his car, Karam had some ideas. In response to a comment, he told an acquaintance not to worry about a snake in her car, as long as she doesn't leave the windows rolled down all day while parked beneath a tree.

Karam later theorized that the snake was in the car for three days.

He tried to calm other people posting memes and emoji advocating blowing up the car, among other drastic measures.

"Come on now! We’re country folk, ain’t no little snake gonna scare us!" Karam wrote. "Even though it pops out of an air vent in front of your hand while driving and making a call! lol."

He did admit the situation might have been different if it was another creepy critter crawling out of the vent.

"I’m not afraid of snakes. Spiders are a different subject," Karam said, according to 13newsnow.com.

This is not the first reported instance of a snake nesting in a car so far this year.

On June 7, a Virginia woman was driving her Cadillac SRX and saw a snake slithering out of the air vent, The Associated Press reported. She pulled over and called animal control, but the 2 1/2-foot-long garter snake temporarily escaped because the responding officer had a snake phobia, according to the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office.

A day later, the woman and her husband discovered the snake stuck to a trap she had set.

Another incident occurred in Manchester, Ky., on June 11. A man checked under his hood and found a snake coiled on his battery, wymt.com reported.

The nonvenomous black snake lunged at the man, who acted quickly by closing the hood and driving to a mechanic who, wymt.com said, had no interest in finding the snake. Animal control was called and found and released the serpent after a 10-minute search.

"Most of them are in houses, but we've had a handful in cars," said Tony Craft of the Clay County Animal Control office.

This story was originally published June 14, 2018 at 5:27 PM with the headline "'Don't leave your windows down:' Snake sneaked in car, then slithered from vent, SC man says."