Jessica Perry says her Mercer County family moved into a Salvisa house and quickly learned it was already home to dozens of rat snakes. Days before she spoke out, she found another snake about six feet long in the basement, even after crews had already tried to cut off the problem.
Perry found the property on Zillow and made an offer the same day. The first few weeks felt perfect, she said, but then the family found two adult snakes and several juveniles in the basement during the first week after spotting the first one. In the months that followed, she said, dozens more appeared throughout the property, turning what looked like a fresh start into a fight to keep the house livable.
That fight has not been cheap. Perry said the family has already spent a couple thousand dollars on the problem, including work to tear down the home's porch so a contractor could figure out how the snakes were getting inside. She said the contractor found snake sheds leading into the foundation and multiple eggs in what appeared to be a den that had been there for several years. An exterminator placed traps in the basement and around the exterior, and after cleaning out the affected area, the family sealed openings around the house.
Even then, the snakes kept coming back. Perry said a neighbor remembered seeing snakes in the basement as a child, and she said the former owner had referred to the place as “the snake house.” She also said the previous owner never disclosed any snake infestation before the sale. Whether that should have been disclosed is where the legal question starts: Kentucky's seller-disclosure statute, KRS 324.360, requires a form for certain single-family residential sales and purchases involving a licensed person receiving compensation, but the statute text does not itself show whether any particular seller in this case broke the law or what liability would follow.
Rat snakes are nonvenomous constrictors that eat rodents, birds and eggs, and a Kentucky homeowner guide on snake exclusion says foundation cracks or gaps as small as a quarter-inch can be enough for entry. That helps explain how a hidden problem can linger behind walls and under floors for years. For Perry, the immediate question is not whether the snakes can survive around the house. It is how much more the family will have to spend to find and seal every opening before another one turns up in the basement.
