Jan. 20, 2026, 11:30 a.m. ET
A sleeping woman in Australia thought her dog had curled up atop her when suddenly feeling weight, but her husband gave the shocking news with a warning, “Don’t move.”
“He goes, ‘Oh baby. Don’t move. There’s like a 2.5-meter [8-foot] python on you,” Rachel Bloor explained to BBC.
Her reaction was not what one might expect during a frightening encounter such as this. It was actually a bit unusual. Bloor didn’t immediately freak out, instead remaining calm and slowly wriggling out from under the covers.
“I was just trying to shimmy out from under the covers, thinking, ‘Is this really happening?’” she told BBC. “This is so bizarre.”
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Bloor, who lives in Brisbane, said she was half-asleep when she felt the weight, and reached out for her dog. Instead, she felt a smooth, slithering object, sending her deeper under the covers. Her husband switched on the bedside lamp and made the startling discovery.
“It was that big that even though it had been curled up on me, part of its tail was still out the shutter [and out the window],” she told BBC. “I grabbed him, [and] even then he didn’t seem overly freaked out. He sort of just wobbled in my hand.”
She casually began feeding it back out the way it came in.
While Bloor was hardly fazed, the same could not be said about her husband.
“I think if you’re calm, they’re calm,” Bloor told BBC.
She told BBC that her first thought was to evacuate the dogs.
“I thought if my Dalmatian realizes that there’s a snake there…it’s gonna be carnage,” she told BBC.
Bloor had grown up around snakes and obviously knows how to handle them. She identified the slithering creature as a carpet python.
The Queensland Government Department of Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation, describes the carpet python as non-venomous. They catch their prey and suffocate it by constricting it and then swallowing it whole. They live almost everywhere in Australia except Tasmania.