For years, a landlord battled with a stubborn tenant who refused him access to his property.
The tenant used the pandemic as an excuse to put off visits.
When Phil Tewkesley was finally able to enter the house in Kendal, Cumbria, he was shocked at what he found.
The property had been transformed into a swamp of rubbish.
Phil was forced to wade through mountains of litter and traverse mould that had spread over the carpet.
But the real shock came when he noticed a ‘gigantic’ boa constrictor lurking in the corner of the room.
The snake lay curled within a tank, with three other snakes also discovered in the property.
Two of the reptiles were dead.
Phil, 47, said: ‘I saw this huge tank and it was dirty. I looked a bit closer into the tank and got the shock of my life – there was this gigantic snake curled up.
‘I was terrified, I screamed and ran out of the house because the shock of seeing something like that was unbelievable.’
Everything from dead plants, bottles of Irn Bru, Covid tests and copies of the local paper the West Moorland Gazette littered the floor.
While cleaning, Phil and his partner Lisa had to run out the bungalow ‘heaving and retching’ multiple times as the smell of urine became too much.
He added: ‘It was unbelievable, the sheer volume of not just belongings but actual rubbish and food.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life – it was like a rubbish dump with a roof on it.
‘The neighbours said they were hoarders – they got deliveries every day and never threw anything out.
‘There was also evidence in a number of spots of rodent damage and a bit of an infestation with holes gnawed through places around the house.’
The tenant of the house had not paid Phil rent in six months.
It was only after a tip-off from a neighbour that he found out they had moved.
As well as his snakes, the tenant had also left behind fish, a tarantula and scorpions.
Various creepy crawlies also had made themselves at home amid the piles of rubbish.
Phil’s ‘tenant from hell’ is believed to be a self-professed animal lover who had spoken out against abandoning snakes.
He had previously rescued a boa constrictor and stated it would be ‘well looked after’.
Phil issued a formal notice for the tenants to vacate the house upon his return to the UK from Australia in late 2020, after living and working abroad for six years.
But the couple, who lived in the property with their teen daughter, refused to leave for another year.
The landlord was only able to regain access to his property in December.
Phil, an HR manager, phoned the RSPCA and left a spare key with neighbours, allowing them to come and collect the ‘gigantic’ snake on New Year’s Eve.
It then took him around 54 stomach-churning hours to clear all the rubbish and rip the soiled carpets out of the house.
Phil added: ‘It cost about £1,200 just to get rid of their stuff and the stuff they’d wrecked and it’s going to cost tens of thousands to get it back to how it should have been.
‘It’s been a really stressful period, trying to get him to leave and then to find what I found.’
The heartbroken landlord now vows never to rent the property out again.
He hopes to return the bungalow to its former state to visit as a holiday home.
After he was rejected for any compensation by his insurance company, he also hopes to raise awareness of how he feels there needs to be more support for landlords against ‘rogue tenants’.
The tenant acknowledged the house was ‘a state’ but blamed not having his boiler serviced, a family member’s illness, issues with his shower and central heating for the mess.
He claimed the landlord was ‘rude’ to him and said the animals were only left because the locks had been changed.
When quizzed on the number of dead animals in the property, the tenant said they were ‘a lapse’ and he was ‘still grieving’ for them.
A spokesperson for the RSPCA said the live snakes were rehomed at a specialist boarding facility.
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