Bill Haast, 1910–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

In 1954, snake lover Bill Haast was bitten by a blue krait, one of the world’s most poisonous snakes. “I felt like the skin had been stripped from my body, like every nerve in my teeth was exposed, like my hair was being ripped out of my head,” he later said. He had hallucinatory visions of lambs’ heads and purple curtains before he recovered and went back to work. It was the snake that died.

Born in Paterson, N.J., Haast was only 7 when he caught his first snake, and with it a lifelong passion for serpents. He quit school to travel with a carnival as a snake handler, eventually landing a job working for a moonshiner in the Florida Everglades, where he caught more snakes than ever. But by the 1940s, “he sought to transcend the inherently creepy nature of reptiles and be taken seriously as a visionary man of science and healing,” said The Washington Post. He set up a roadside attraction called the Miami Serpentarium, put on a white lab coat, and captivated tourists by milking the venom of the some 10,000 poisonous snakes he owned. By the 1990s he was supplying 36,000 samples of venom, from as many as 200 species, every year to labs that formulate antivenin for snakebite victims.

In the course of his work, he was bitten 172 times. But in 1948 he had begun immunizing himself with injections of snake venom; his blood developed antibodies that saved not only himself but 20 other snakebite victims who were given transfusions over the years. Haast retained a remarkably youthful appearance well into his 90s. “I could be a poster boy for the benefits of venom,” he told The Miami Herald in 2006. “If I live to be 100, I’ll really make the point.”