Hide and Snake : Is Bubba the Long-Lost Python Really Back or Merely a Myth?

What termite man Harvey Donohoe found as he crawled under a Compton home looking for bugs Thursday undoubtedly spooked him. The last thing he wanted to see in the darkness of the crawl space was evidence of a large snake.

As he scrambled toward daylight, scraping his head and mashing his finger along the way, bones of a wayward cat quickened his haste.

Now his account of about 2 1/2 feet of what appeared to be shed snakeskin has the residents of Bliss Street alarmed.

Despite gossip to the contrary, Donohoe confirmed that he never saw a snake, let alone the six-inch-wide python that neighbors are worried about.

But homeowner Willie Mae Kennedy says she can hardly sleep since Donohoe’s sighting. She is convinced--and has convinced many of her neighbors--that the skin belonged to Bubba, a onetime pet python that slithered off the front porch 15 years ago.

County workers are trying to figure out the best way to confirm the snake’s existence. They are considering whether to bait a trap for the snake after two attempts to explore the crawl space for it.

County animal control worker Carlos Rocha said there is no evidence that Bubba is down there. Still, he said he has come face to face with various snakes in his line of work. Encountering a large one in the confines of the crawl space could present a danger, he said.

“You’d really have to put up a fight,” Rocha said, “and we don’t know how hungry this thing is.”

Kennedy refuses to give up the search. But, she acknowledged, “even if they get [the snake] out, I don’t want no part of it. I don’t even want to see it.” Kennedy added that she now believes she knows what happened to two cats that never came home.

Kennedy said she was almost as leery 15 years ago when her son Stearling, then 10, brought home the foot-long baby python and named it Bubba. About six months later, he took Bubba out for some sunlight. Bubba slipped away.

Now nearly everyone on Bliss Street is on the lookout for Bubba.

“We were worried about it for two to three months [after Bubba’s escape] and then everybody forgot about it,” said longtime neighbor Veretta Petitt. “Who would have thought it would have lived so long?”

Who indeed. If the snake is in fact Bubba, his survival under the house could set a record, said Robert Bezy, curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.

“On one level it’s kind of unbelievable,” Bezy said. “This [would be] probably the only case of a python . . . having survived anywhere near this long in the wild of the United States.”

Bezy said the snake--presumably a common Burmese python--could have grown to more than six feet long if it were able to keep warm and survive on rats and cats. Such a snake would make a formidable specimen, he warned. “It’s an exciting-sounding case, but it’s not sufficiently exciting that I’ll go out there and crawl around and deal with it,” Bezy said.

Harvey Fischer, curator of reptiles and birds for the Los Angeles Zoo, all but dismissed the possibility that the snake--if it exists--is Bubba. Pythons are tropical animals that must stay warm, he said. Even if it made a home near cozy plumbing, Fischer said, someone should have seen it by now.

That’s no assurance to the residents on Bliss Street. Neighbors shared stories of inexplicable bumps in the night as they recently gathered around Kennedy’s home. No one reported having seen the snake, which for them makes it all the more mysterious.

Maria Gomez fears for her two young children. She lives next door to Kennedy and described sounds in the walls. “They say it eats cats and dogs,” Gomez said. “It scares us because we have small kids and it’s a big snake.”

The legend of Bubba presents a problem for the county workers, said Bob Ballenger, executive assistant for the county Department of Animal Care and Control.

“It’s extremely unusual,” he said. “Occasionally we do get calls for animals underneath houses.”

Some of those calls are for snakes, Ballenger said, but they are usually rattlesnakes, in which case workers wait for the snake to leave on its own before attempting to catch it. He added that although pythons are not poisonous, large ones certainly warrant caution.

“I think we’d have to ask for a volunteer,” he said.