A man visited a supermarket to buy groceries and unexpectedly ended up bringing home a snake. He only realized this when the snake started getting comfortable with his food. Neville Linton, a 63-year-old man, purchased a bag of broccoli from an Aldi store in Stourbridge, England. He stored it in his refrigerator and discovered the snake when he took it out to cook a meal three days later,

However, as soon as he removed the wrapping from the broccoli, the man was surprised to find an unexpected visitor. Keep reading to find out what happened and don’t forget to check out our conversation with Dr. Steven J R Allain, also known as The pop-punk Herpetologist. A snake from southwestern Europe was discovered in a broccoli field and later transported to a supermarket in Britain.

Neville Linton, 63, unknowingly grabbed it along with a bag of vegetables and brought the reptile back home. Neville, who works in industrial cleaning, couldn’t believe his eyes. “It was pretty frightening. I’m not good with snakes,” he said. “It’s lucky I didn’t just leave the broccoli out in the kitchen, or it would have been loose in the house.” “That would have been a huge risk for us because we have two vulnerable people living here.” After discovering the creature was not a caterpillar, he contacted his sister Ann-Marie Tenkanemin for assistance. She correctly identified it as a snake. They placed it in a container and returned to the Aldi store on Dudley Road where Neville bought it. “I thought she was joking at first, but I backed off when I saw it start moving. The guy in the shop was pretty frightened too,” he said. The snake was brought to a nearby zoo where experts identified it as a juvenile ladder snake. Dr. Steven J R Allain, a herpetologist, has a suspicion that it could possibly be a viperine water snake.