A 5-foot-long snake was trying to get inside an Upper West Side apartment on Wednesday morning, but no one is sure where it came from, according to police and the man who found it.
Sam Sullivan, a resident, saw the boa constrictor slithering on an exterior gate near his basement apartment around 8 a.m. and called 911. The NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit came and carefully placed the snake in a polka-dot-colored pillowcase before handing it over to the Animal Care Centers of NYC.
It’s unclear who owned the snake and where it came from. Sullivan called the discovery an “urban legend” and said, “It’s like literally someone had a pet that got loose and ended up on my fence.”
The find was unsettling for other locals, including Alex Noschese, who said, “It’s all super unsettling because I have a cat and a little daughter, and it was a boa constrictor apparently.”
Boa constrictors are illegal to own in New York City. The snake was placed with a foster guardian outside of the city.
This incident followed another recent snake encounter in New York City, where a man crashed a U-Haul van after finding a live 3.5-foot white snake under his seat while transporting a couch. He had picked up the snake, thinking it was a toy, but then realized it was real and crashed into a car in Soho.