Snake in Stomach

There are many strange stories from my home town but none is stranger than the girl with a snake in her stomach. Neighbors and doctors alike testify to seeing writhing and slithering movement in the stomach and a living reptilian object in the mouth of a young woman from Rutherford County, Tennessee.

There are a variety of explanations of this strange occurrence. The most common one says that one day this young woman quenched her thirst while drinking from a stream near her home and unknowingly swallowed a snake.She is reported to have said, “It was like a string going down.” The snake lived and grew in her stomach and could even be seen in her mouth at times.

Now Greg Tucker, a native of Murfreesboro, has moved back home in his retirement and is investigating local legends such as this one. He has discovered some amazing facts. First, the girl and the year have been verified. The girl was Thankful Taylor, a simple, hard working farm girl and the year was 1869. Not only has the stream been located (it is still flowing outside Murfreesboro), but in a wax-sealed 150-year old apothecary jar is the well-preserved body of the infamous, 2 feet long, common water snake. The story has been documented in affidavits, medical reports and professional literature.

Apparently this isn’t the only occasion where something of this nature happened. A number of medical cases in the 16th, 17th and 18th century tell of various reptiles and amphibians living in a human stomach. These cases have been documented and no doubt, embellished.

A number of doctors worked on Thankful, observing the movement in her stomach, her painful convulsions and her agonizing seizures. All sorts of remedies were tried. First they tried to induce vomiting, next they tried starving the snake. Once a combination of coal oil, turpentine and carbolic acid was administered in very large doses. Both Thankful and the snake survived. Many prominent physicians were called in. Nothing worked.

Finally one day in 1874 one of the doctors, a Dr. Burger, received a call that the snake was in Thankful’s mouth and her mother had grabbed hold of it. Upon arrival Dr.Burger “at once took hold and pulled out a living snake, 23 inches long and ¾ inches in diameter in a light and dark brown strips with a white abdomen.” After intense vomiting, Thankful felt relief and was later declared restored to perfect health.

Mr. Taylor’s research found that there is a real affliction given the name “Pica,” which is an eating disorder where a person has a persistent craving for a substance that is not commonly considered to be food: insects and other live creatures are in their diet. Some think this was Thanksful’s condition and that in reality she had eaten a number of snakes over the years—snakes that had eventually died in her stomach.

Thankful lived until 1925 and died of natural causes.