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.
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