A 27-year-old Montana ranch wife named Callie has turned one of the most alarming living situations in rural America into one of the most watched stories on TikTok, and it is not hard to understand why.
She lives in a farmhouse that is built on top of a garter snake den. Not near one. On top of one.
The snakes live inside the cinder block foundation of the house, they emerge every spring in numbers that have climbed from two a year to eight in a single day, and she has watched four of them in her living room at the same time.
The People magazine interview Callie gave this week, combined with TikTok videos that have accumulated millions of views, made her situation one of the most shared stories on social media this week.
The trending term is Montana farmhouse snake infestation. The reality behind the trend is a young family that cannot easily leave, a house that was built on a natural snake habitat, and a woman who was doing her best to stay optimistic about renovations while watching reptiles fall out of her foundation.
She is not in danger. The snakes are garter snakes, non-venomous, harmless to humans and actually useful in controlling insects and rodents. That is approximately the only part of this story that qualifies as good news.
How Did They Find Out About The Snakes?
Callie and her husband Chase, a ranch hand whose job package includes the farmhouse they live in, moved into the remote central Montana property years before the snakes became a real problem.
The first one appeared in 2020. Her mother-in-law was visiting when a snake came in from the entryway. Then in the fall of the same year, her mother found another one.
A snake every few months in an old Montana farmhouse in remote ranch country is not particularly alarming. It is the kind of thing people who live in rural areas accept as part of the deal.
What happened over the next several years was not that kind of thing.
“Things were really bad last summer when we realized this is just not a scenario of a snake getting in the house on random because it’s an old farmhouse,” Callie told People in an exclusive interview. “The house is a den.”
The specific architecture of the problem is the farmhouse’s foundation. The structure rests on cinder block, a porous, gap-filled material that is perfectly suited to serve as year-round shelter for snakes seeking warmth, moisture and protection from predators.
Garter snakes den communally in the wild, they gather in large groups in sheltered, below-ground locations to survive the winter and emerge in spring when temperatures rise.
The farmhouse’s cinder block foundation had been providing exactly that environment for an unknown number of years before the family moved in and began noticing the results.
By last spring, the situation had reached a level that is difficult to describe to someone who has not lived through it. The front door of the house is completely sealed.
Callie and her family use a different entrance. From a door that leads down to the entryway and basement, lined with those cinder blocks, they can watch snakes emerge from the foundation and drop.
Up to five or six on a given day. Eight on one occasion this spring. “At one point, we saw eight this spring, dropping outside,” she told People.
At another point during the worst period, they saw approximately four snakes in the living space of the house simultaneously.
What Is It Like Living In A Snake House?
The numbers are striking. The lived experience is harder to convey. Callie said the worst part of the infestation is not any particular snake sighting.
It is the constant state of alertness, the inability to move through your own home without wondering what you might encounter in the next room.
“You’re really just on edge. I didn’t even want to go in the kitchen to make lunch during the day and things like that. It was just so unnerving,” she said. Snakes are among her biggest fears.
She described the infestation as destroying the fundamental sense of safety and comfort that a home is supposed to provide.
That psychological dimension, the loss of the home as a refuge, is what has connected Callie’s story to so many people who watch her TikToks from the safety of their snake-free living rooms.
The videos showing snakes dropping from the foundation have accumulated millions of views.
The comment sections have been filled with everything from genuine sympathy to horror-movie comparisons to practical advice from people who have dealt with similar situations.
She has received direct messages from other Montana residents who are dealing with their own infestations. “I’ve definitely heard of people having snakes in their house in Montana before, because there are so many areas where it’s just so remote,” she said, “but I’ve never heard of so many people having true infestations like this, and I’ve got tons of DMs from people who have.”
Why The Family Can’t Leave
The most frequently asked question in the comments of Callie’s videos is a version of “why don’t you just move.” The answer has two parts, and both of them are real constraints rather than excuses.
Chase Phillips works as a ranch hand. The farmhouse is part of his employment package, tied to the job rather than being a separate financial commitment the family carries independently.
Leaving the house means leaving the job, and that is not a trade-off the family is in a position to make on short notice regardless of how many snakes are in the foundation.
The other part is that Chase loves his work. He loves the people he works for. They like the area, the ranch life and the community they have built in remote Montana. “It’s an unfortunate scenario because he really loves his job, and he really loves the people that he works for, and we like where we live,” Callie said.
There is also a geographic reality that complicates solutions that might seem obvious from a distance. The farmhouse is in a remote part of Montana where pest control companies do not operate.
No exterminators are readily available to assess or treat the problem professionally.
The family has been managing the infestation themselves, using grabber tools to remove individual snakes, spray foam to seal entry points they can identify, and sticky traps to catch snakes that make it inside.
The Renovation Plan
Callie has been documenting the snake situation online under a content series titled “Using social media to make 75K to move out of our snake-infested house.”
The goal is to earn enough from her TikTok and Instagram presence to eventually purchase a home of their own, one not attached to an employment package and not built on top of a garter snake communal den.
She has not abandoned that goal. “I’ve made a goal of making $75,000 on social media, and I still want to, as the title of that series was,” she said. “I still want to keep the goal. Eventually, I would like to own our own home.”
Alongside the long-term goal, the family is pursuing a shorter-term solution. A contractor has visited the property two or three times in recent weeks and major renovations are underway, specifically targeting the cinder block foundation that has been providing the snakes with their habitat.
The renovations cannot remove the snakes that are already established in the foundation.
What they can do is close off the gaps and entry points that allow the animals to move between the outside environment, the foundation interior and the living space of the house.
Callie is optimistic. “I think the renovations will help. I’m really optimistic about that,” she said. The results so far are cautiously encouraging. Since the first renovations were completed, the snake count inside the living space has dropped significantly, from the peak of four simultaneously in the living room to approximately two in the living space overall. The entryway has still had around seven. The kitchen has had a couple. Better than before, but not resolved.
She is trying to find the angle that makes the situation bearable. “It’s an excuse to make significant improvements on our old farmhouse,” she said.
The house that was attracting snakes has become, through the pressure of the infestation, a house that is being renovated and improved in ways it would not have been otherwise. That is the silver lining she is working with.
What Is A Garter Snake?
The snakes that have been colonizing Callie’s farmhouse are garter snakes, members of the genus Thamnophis, a colubrid family species native to North and Central America. They are not venomous.
They do not bite in any medically significant way. They eat insects, rodents and small amphibians. In the ecological context of rural Montana, they are arguably beneficial, keeping the rodent and insect population around the ranch in check.
None of that changes the experience of finding them in your kitchen.
Garter snakes are communal denners, one of the few North American snake species that gather in large numbers in shared underground sites during winter.
A single den can contain hundreds or thousands of individuals. They emerge in spring when temperatures warm, spread out across the surrounding landscape to feed and breed during the warmer months, and return to the den in fall.
A cinder block farmhouse foundation sitting directly above or adjacent to an established den site is, from the snakes’ perspective, part of the den.
There is also a water factor. Callie mentioned that there is a water source a few miles from the property, a detail that wildlife biologists would recognize as significant. Garter snakes are strongly associated with water sources, often called garden snakes or water snakes in casual identification.
The combination of an established den site, a nearby water source and an aging cinder block foundation with abundant gaps and sheltered spaces has created conditions that are as close to ideal for garter snake colonization as anything in the natural Montana landscape.
Garter snakes can give birth to up to 40 live young at a time. One commenter on Callie’s TikTok, after learning this fact, responded with two words: “Good luck.”
The renovation project the family is undertaking with their new contractor is aimed at the right problem, sealing the foundation to eliminate the connectivity between the outside den environment and the interior of the house.
Whether that approach can fully resolve an infestation this established, without relocating the den population itself, will determine whether the $75,000 goal stays a dream or becomes unnecessary.
For now, Callie is watching the contractor work and watching the snake count trend downward, one sealed gap at a time.
