Arrom Arunroj was cleaning the dishes at her home in Thailand when she was bitten by what she first assumed was a cockroach. But as she looked down, she realized that she had been attacked not by an insect but a python, which rapidly began constricting her.
She would spend almost two hours trapped with the snake coiled around her, despite her cries for help.
Video footage released by police of the incident Tuesday night shows rescue workers arriving to help free the 64-year-old.
“Is the snake underneath you?” a rescuer worker asks her as he arrives at the scene in Samut Prakan, south of Bangkok. “Yes,” she replies. The rescuer advises Arrom not to move. “The more you move, the tighter the snake will constrict,” he says.
It took emergency responders 30 minutes to free Arrom from the snake’s clutches, according to the Bangkok Post, which reported that the python was 13 feet long and weighed at least 44 pounds. According to the paper, the woman suffered several bite wounds.
“I fought with it for quite a while,” Arrom told rescuers in the video after she was led to safety. “Since around half past 8.”
“How many hours has it been? It’s 10 p.m. now,” a man can be heard saying.
The Bangkok Post reported that the house is next to a reed forest and that Arrom had been living there alone since her husband died last year. She was around the back of the house cleaning when the incident occurred.
“At first I grabbed its head, trying to make it let go, but it wouldn’t. It just kept squeezing tighter,” she said. “When I saw it start to slither, I let go of its head, and it slithered away, then came back, and finally went down below.”
An official with the Police Station Phra Samut Ched, Anusorn Wongmali, said a man had alerted officers to the woman calling for help.
Police kicked the door open and found Arrom being squeezed by the python. “It must have been for quite some time because her body had already started to turn pale,” he said.
Steve Allain, a trustee of the British Herpetological Society, said snakes do not attack or bite people “for the sake of it” and that usually some provocation is involved. “This could have been as simple as accidentally cornering the animal so that it didn’t feel safe due to its exit route being blocked, or involved accidental or intentional physical harm to the python,” he said Thursday.
Allain said that the kind of behavior seen in the incident in Thailand “is rare in pythons and other snakes, and given the snake’s size, it is likely to have been defensive in nature.”
After reviewing the footage, Allain believes the python in the footage is a reticulated python, based on its scale pattern.
The reticulated python is the longest snake in the world, regularly reaching over 20 feet in length. Reticulated pythons live in southeast Asia and are typically found in rainforests, woodland and grasslands.
The longest reticulated python ever recorded was found in 1912, measuring more than 32 feet in length, according to Britain’s Natural History Museum.
Despite Arrom’s close call this week, Allain said humans are not typically on the menu for pythons.
“We’re too much hassle for the snakes and generally fight back,” he said. “Pythons use their immense size to overpower prey, and as such, are vulnerable to being wounded during feeding by anything with sharp claws, horns, or that can wield bladed weapons.”
Allain said that while “it wouldn’t have been comfortable,” for Arrom to have been restrained by the python around her midsection, “it is unlikely to have been fatal.”