When Amber Hall finally stepped into the four-bedroom, two-bathroom house she’d bought in Centennial, Colorado, she could hardly contain her excitement. After weeks of hunting, she’d pictured her two young children and beloved dogs romping through that spacious backyard. The location was perfect, the layout just right—her dream first home.
But as she began unpacking, one of her dogs froze in a corner, lowering into a crouch and inching forward with unnatural caution. Assuming it was a spider or mouse, Amber knelt to investigate—and froze herself when she saw two small holes in the drywall. Suddenly, a large garter snake slithered up the wall beside the door that led from the garage to the yard. Warmth radiated from the wall above, confirming her worst fear: there were more snakes hidden inside.
“Shockingly big,” Amber recalls, describing the creatures. “After talking to experts, they all said they’d never seen garter snakes this large.”
In the week that followed, she discovered ten snakes in total—coiled in wall cavities, lurking under boxes, even lurking beneath freshly made bedsheets. Unpacking became a nerve-wracking ordeal: every box might conceal a slithering intruder, every rustle of a blanket could be a serpent brushing her foot.
Desperate, Amber called a professional snake wrangler, who gently removed the reptiles one by one. He estimated that some had lived unseen in her walls for up to two years. The cost of these removals has already reached around $1,000, and Amber fears the only surefire solution will be tearing up sections of concrete to access their hiding places.
“This is my literal nightmare,” Amber says. At 42, she’s poured her life’s savings into this home—but it has become a source of fear rather than joy. “My kids deserve to love this house. I’m just terrified.”
As the community watches Amber’s ordeal, she’s left weighing her options: invest in major renovations to exterminate the remaining snakes, or walk away from the home she worked so hard to own. Meanwhile, she’s urging others to be vigilant when moving into older houses—because no one wants surprise roommates as slippery as these.