Becoming the Snake Lady
Like most young mothers, Jane didn’t like snakes. As a child, she was terrified of them. “I was scared out of my mind of snakes. Everything was a copperhead, and I was gonna die. That’s the way I felt.”
One day in August 1968, Jane’s children found a 9-inch-long snake in the basement of the Mechanicsburg, PA home and ran yelling to their mother. Jane thought she would find a large snake in her house and wondered how to handle it. Instead, she discovered a small black snake, a racer, curled up in a frightened position.
Jane sent the kids to get a shovel because she didn’t want to touch the snake. Jane placed the shovel under the snake’s body and put him into a potato chip can.
The Serpentarium
When Elmer arrived home, Jane handed the little creature to her husband and said, “Here is your anniversary gift.” Jane expected him to open the box and release the snake into the wild. Instead, the little visitor became a permanent resident and was given the name Speedy.
The small black snake was just the first to live with the Crones. Within a few months, five other snakes were given to the family. At one point, there were sixty snakes in the house, including copperheads, reticulated pythons, and boa constrictors with names like Slicker, Bandit, and Flame. The walls of the living room and dining room were lined with homemade cages to hold the reptiles, and the family’s menagerie was called Eagle’s Nest Serpentarium.
The family kept a journal that scientifically recorded information on each snake, including what they ate and when.
People often visited to watch baby snakes being born. Jane would teach her visitors everything she knew about snakes.
Snakes Are Not Nasty
At one point, Jane wrote a handwritten children’s book called “Oh, For Heaven’s Snakes” that shared much of what she had learned from reading, research, and living with a house full of snakes.
Jane says, “Snakes are not nasty unless they are in danger.”
Many people think snakes are slimy because of their smooth and shiny skin. Snake skin, while producing light oils to help the snake crawl, is made of the same dry material, keratin, as human fingernails.
Jane’s five children and foster children had no trouble living in a house full of snakes. “My children were all involved with it.” When the younger babies were born, Jane would sit in a recliner, rock, hold, and feed her child with a snake around her neck. People would say, “You’re nuts having a snake that close to your baby.”
But the children loved the snakes. They bragged to their friends about the family pets. Many children visited the house, and Jane taught them to understand and love the creatures. Jane told a Patriot News Reporter (August 19, 1979), “Snakes are like children and every human being. They thrive on affection. When you treat them with kindness, you couldn’t ask for a better pet.”
Jane tried to teach people that snakes are not dangerous as long as they do not sense any threat. “It’s the same as if you were sitting here talking to me, and you don’t feel uncomfortable at all. But if I were to put you in a situation where there were people who made you uncomfortable, your behavior would be a lot different, right? Everybody’s that way. Even snakes.”
“You can’t help some of that stuff.
I didn’t do it on purpose.”
-Jane Crone
Snakes Alive!
Life with snakes wasn’t always peaceful. “A lot of accidents happened.” Usually, the Crone house snakes ate mice, goldfish, steak, and worms. One day, the family got a box with about fifty chameleons—snake food. The chameleons escaped and were all over the house. The kids and their mother worked together to catch the creatures and put them back in the box. “It was crazy at our house.”
Once, Jane was driving with a couple of black snakes in her car when some of them escaped their cage. Jane realized she could cause a highway accident if drivers looked over and saw a snake crawling across the car window. She pulled over and gathered the escapees back into their containers.
Jane once had a small Indian python named Chandi. He was so tiny that she would put him on her hand like a bracelet, and sometimes forget she was “wearing” him when she went out in public. When Jane stopped to talk to a woman at the store, the woman looked down and saw Chandi on Jane’s wrist. “Oh, oh, they moved!”
Jane calmly replied, “Oh, that’s my snake.” Jane thought she had caused the woman to have a heart attack. By the end of the conversation, the woman was holding the snake.
“My advice now is to tell people that if you step on a branch in the woods and it swings up and hits you in the leg, you’re likely to have a heart attack if you think it’s a snake. And that can kill you faster than a snake bite.”
Bitten!
The snakes never bit Jane or the children, but they did bite Elmer. Most people called him Sonny, but his motorcycle friends called him Brother Snakes.
One day, Elmer was getting ready for a Hershey TV show. Cameramen were taking pictures of the copperheads outside the Crone’s house. One of the snakes went to the bathroom before curling up in the corner of the cage to sleep. Elmer wanted a clean cage for the photo shoot, so he was gently cleaning the cage when he bumped it and startled the sleeping snake. Like most creatures jarred from sleep, the creature lashed out and bit Elmer.
Jane’s husband was rushed to the emergency room, where a nurse asked, “What kind of snake bit you?”
Jane said, “A copperhead.”
“How do you know it was a copperhead?”
Jane replied, “It was in my living room.”
The nurse was somewhat shaken and ran down the hall to fetch the doctor. When he looked at the ice-packed wound, the doctor told the nurse, “You’d better get the book.” He told the Crones he had never treated a poisonous snake bite before.
Jane was thinking, You’re in Pennsylvania—snake country. And you don’t know how to treat a snake bite. You know, that’s funny. The doctor pulled a book from his shelves to find the proper way to handle this emergency.
Jane says the only real danger to her husband was when the nurse entered the room with a tray holding the antivenom serum used to treat his wound. When her husband saw the needle, Elmer’s blood pressure went through the roof.
No Longer the Snake Lady
When Jane and her husband divorced years later, Elmer took the snakes to live with him and his new girlfriend. However, the girlfriend’s house was full of birds, and the birds and snakes didn’t get along. Jane never learned what happened to the snakes. Even Jane’s birthday boas, Happy and Surprise, were gone.
In her grief and anger, Jane burned her handwritten snake lore book, something she still regrets today.
More Stories about the Snake Lady:
Stories from Jane, the Snake Lady
Coming soon – Jane and Her Snakes Get Famous
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