Hey, Is This Your Cobra? 

Do you live in the Rice lofts in downtown Houston, Texas? Are you missing a cobra? If so, you should probably call animal control, because they’ve got your missing cobra, who was found wandering the hallways of your apartment building.

KHOU has the terrifying tale:

It was sort of just hanging out in the middle of the hallway,” said Ethan Shear, a resident of the Rice lofts. “It had raised its head a little bit like you would see in Indiana Jones or something. Enough to know ‘I should not go near that.’”

A quick walk to his car turned into a heart-stopping encounter Saturday evening for Shear.

“I turn the corner I hear a guy scream ‘watch out,’ and there’s a cobra, and I just back up,” said Shear. “I may have let out an expletive or two.”

He immediately snapped a picture because nobody would believe he’d seen a cobra roaming the halls of a luxury high-rise without photographic evidence. But he wasn’t the only person who encountered the reptile. Somebody came running to Colby Lewis, telling him to call the cops because there was a fucking cobra on the loose, and he went to investigate. Why wouldn’t you investigate rumors of a cobra on the loose in your apartment building?

Lewis said at first he thought they were joking, but when he went upstairs to the third floor, he saw a white king cobra sitting in the middle of the hallway.

“Somebody said something along the lines of ‘Well, have you ever heard of a spitting cobra before?’” said Lewis. “And then we all kind of walked away.”

Animal control is currently checking out the creature. “I’ve had several experts look at it, and they all do believe it is a cobra,” said the division manager. Specifically, they are also investigating reports that somebody recently bounced from the building owned a cobra—because what’s the point of owning a cobra if you can’t deploy the cobra due to a grudge?