12-Foot Snake Found Minus Head

By Margaret Lyons in News on May 5, 2008 10:54PM

Yay, a weird animal story! Our favorite! Today's tale: The mysterious 12-foot headless snake! (We're saying that in a spooky haunted-house voice, of course.)

Richard Tylkowski was just paddling around Nippersink Lake, about 55 miles from Chicago, when he saw a giganto snake carcass. Which he pushed onto some rocks and left for a week. As you do.

On Sunday, it was time to haul the corpse ashore and take a measurement. Pulled from the dark water and reeking like an uncleaned aquarium, the snake proved to be headless, with only a long ragged strip of skin where its business end would be.

Tylkowski says he measured the snake and that it's 12 feet, 10 inches long, which is fucking enormous. We tried using What's That Snake? to figure out what kind of snake the headless wonder is, but no luck. No one knows where the snake came from, but reptiles that big aren't native to the region, so if you're missing a 13-foot snake...well, we have some bad news. [Lake County News-Sun]