Cobra Invasion: The Springfield Snake Scare of 1953
In 1953, as many as 11 Indian Cobras were discovered in the most unlikely of locales: Springfield, Missouri! They were discovered over the course of several months in the fall of that year and it wasn’t until decades later that this mystery was solved. In this episode, we talk about the “Springfield Cobra Scare,” the pandemonium it caused and then examine the confession that solved the mystery in the 1980s. Then we play the quiz game with Comedian Glen Tickle!

The Indian Cobra is a highly venomous snake. The bite from this snake delivers between 150 and 250 milligrams of venom. For reference, it only takes about 20 milligrams to kill a human. It causes paralysis, respiratory failure and death if not quickly treated. And when our story takes place – in the 1950s – the concept of providing healthcare facilities with anti-venom was a brand new idea. And that’s considering hospitals are carrying anti-venom to treat snakebites from species that naturally occur in an area. There’s nowhere in the United States where Indian Cobras are native.
With all of that said, getting bit by a Cobra is a very rare thing. They’re not aggressive toward humans and would rather shy away from a person than attack. It would take them getting stepped on or handled to be bitten.
There are more than 30 species of Cobra. The most famous one – the King Cobra – isn’t actually a Cobra at all, but gets lumped in because it has the same look and a hood that can flare out like a Cobra. The Indian Cobra is slightly smaller and is typically found in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Just like other Cobras, when it’s threatened, it stands upright, hisses and flares its hood thanks to special ribs. It’s front fangs contain the neurotoxin and you don’t want to be anywhere near them.
Today, many states outlaw the ownership of Cobras and many others require a special permit. One of these is the state of Missouri, where the Missouri Department of Conservation requires a permit in addition to permission from local law enforcement. As far as the city of Springfield, the ownership of venomous snakes is outlawed unless you’re something like a zoo or research facility. But back in 1953, these regulations didn’t exist. Through almost all of America, the laws on owning exotic animals including venomous snakes were very lax. Some larger cities had laws against exotic animals or venomous snakes, but Springfield, Missouri did not.
Even so, it was bizarre that Roland Parrish discovered an Indian Cobra in his lawn on August 15, 1953. The snake rose upright, flared its hood and struck out at Parrish. It missed and Roland, who was equipped with a garden hoe, killed the snake. It was one of what would amount to at least 11 Springfield, Missouri encounters with Cobras in the coming months.
After Roland Parrish killed an Indian Cobra in his lawn in 1953, he reported it to the Springfield, Missouri police. It was a strange encounter for sure, but at the time, they proabably just thought someone’s pet had gotten loose.
But one week later, Roland’s neighbor across the street, Wesley Rose, found another one. This time it was his pet bulldog who alerted him by barking. When he looked out the window, the dog was wrestling with the four-and-a-half foot cobra. He ran out of the house and killed the snake with a garden hoe – apparently this was the designated tool to kill cobras. Now I was wondering the same thing you were and no – there’s no record of the dog dying. I think the bulldog was fine. But the cobra wasn’t. He paralyzed it with the first strike and killed it with the second. Now that we were talking about two Indian Cobras, people became concerned. Rose brought this second snake to the police office and that’s where they brought together a group to examine it. It included Springfield Police Officers Raymond Sanders and Gabe Newman, a Zoo Director Bill Swinea, a college science instructor J.M Parson and a high school science teacher Herbert Condray. They confirmed the snake was indeed an Indian Cobra. Not native to the Americas and incredibly deadly to humans.
Now that there was a clear pattern, the people in the neighborhood had one culprit in mind. Less than a block away was the Mowrer Pet Shop, owned by a man named Leo Mowrer. When police confronted him, he told them there was no way the snakes came from him. All of his snakes were accounted for. That said, the pet shop did carry exotic animals including water moccasins, rare birds and even an orangutan. His statement to the local paper wasn’t, “We’ve never lost any of our snakes.” It was – and this is a direct quote, “We haven’t had a cobra loose in months…We have them on hand all the time, but we haven’t had any get away.” Apparently this wasn’t enough of a denial for panicked residents of Springfield. After the reports of these snake encounters hit the newspapers, Mowrer started receiving death threats. Cops started investigating him, but by the point they really started looking into his snake handling practices, he had secretly moved the rest of his snakes out of the city to a barn.
Snake number three was found 8 days later by Ralph Moore, who shot it. Just kidding, he used a garden hoe. That same night, a 17 year old kid found one in the road. He – apparently thinking out of the box, killed it with a car jack.
In September, a 6 year old little girl told her parents she had seen a snake slither into their garage. They were sure she was just scared from the reports of snakes in town. But sure enough, they looked in the garage and found a cobra. That’s where Howard McCoy killed it with a garden hoe.
It’s safe to say by this part -after 5 deadly Indian Cobras in just a few weeks – people in Springfield were freaking out. The hospital got its hands on anti-venom just in case someone got bit. The fact that no one had been bitten yet is a testament to how unlikely it is to be bitten by these snakes. Like I said earlier, they would much rather flee from humans than strike out unless they absolutely need to.
The next snake was found by Reo Mowrer himself, who found one in the bushes outside of his shop and took it inside before police arrived.
The next encounter is probably the scariest. I’m going to read this verbatim from a source that I found called “UndergroundOzarks.com.” This is nuts.
This is Cobra Encounter #7: “Later that day, across the street from Mowrer’s shop, L.H. Stockton saw a snake coming out of his garden. Stockton threw a rock at it but missed his target and he watched in horror as the 4-foot long snake crawled through an opening in the foundation of his house and disappeared. The police were called, and Chief Frank Pike tried to use a 10-foot pole with a rope noose underneath the house to snare the snake but failed. Stockton and his landlord gave the police permission to bombard the crawlspace with tear gas. A gas grenade was set off underneath the house and the cobra came out. Officer Jack Strope aimed a shotgun at the snake but the weapon jammed. Strope grabbed the pistol from his holster and shot the snake five times; however, the snake still managed to raise its hooded head. Chief Pike used his “snake catcher” pole to capture the snake with the rope, and the snake was killed with another hoe. By now, the entire town of Springfield was in an uproar.”
So once again that was from UndergroundOzarks.com and I won’t go into detail on each one of these, but it added up to 11 snakes in all – that’s the ones they found anyway. At one point, the City Health Director Del Caywood commandeered a truck equipped with a public address system and drove around the neighborhood playing a record of “Indian snake-charming music” and blasting it from the truck’s roof-mounted loudspeakers. Absolutely crazy.
In October, one of the snakes was actually captured alive. One of the snakes is still around. You can see it, preserved in a jar of formaldehyde at Drury University. The snake scare lasted from August 15th to October 25th.
After October, no other snakes were found. They couldn’t find a culprit and couldn’t prove that Mowrer had anything to do with it – even though he was the guy that sold exotic snakes to carnivals. He always denied it. Denied it to the grave. The police figured out the barn where he was storing his snakes on the outskirts of town and forced him to move them out of the county. In December, the city enacted an ordinance banning the ownership of dangerous snakes.
Springfield’s Cobra Scare of 1953 was so surprising and unusual that Life Magazine and Newsweek both ran stories about it. It became such an interesting story that was associated with the city that they put a Cobra on their official city seal. Well, the truth of that one is that the seal already had a snake and they changed the head on the snake to make it look like a Cobra.
The origin of the snakes remained a mystery for 35 years. It took 35 years for the real culprit to come forward. This was 11 years after the death of Reo Mowrer. It was an exclusive interview that the Springfield News-Leader ran in the June 26th, 1988 edition of the paper where a man named Carl Barnett finally admitted the truth. His exact words were “I’m the one that done it.” At this point, Carl was 49 years old, making him just 14 in 1953. He told the whole story to the paper. He had bought a fish from a pet store. It was an exotic fish and the fish died. He went back to return it and get his money back and the store owner wouldn’t give him a refund. So as he was leaving out the back door of the pet shop, he noticed a crate full of snakes and opened it up before running away. He didn’t know they were cobras. He said if he had known that they were deadly, he wouldn’t have done it. He was just trying to get back at the pet shop owner. Any guesses as to who that was? That’s right, it was Reo Mowrer. Mowrer’s pet shop was the source of the cobras after-all and he never knew how the snakes got out. But now thanks to the guilty conscious of a man who held it in for more than 3 decades – we know the truth.
The Internet says it’s true.

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