He went to the bathroom without knowing what was waiting for him — and what followed was something straight out of a homeowner’s nightmare. A North Carolina man found himself in an unexpected tug-of-war with a snake after discovering the reptile coiled inside his toilet.

Mike Green, a resident of the Lattermore neighborhood, says this wasn’t an isolated encounter. According to Green, snakes in the area have been slipping into homes by traveling through the ventilation pipes on rooftops. “He came out of a tree that was hanging over the pipe,” Green told Inside Edition, explaining how easily the snake found its way inside.

Startlingly, this incident wasn’t even the first. “This was the sixth snake to come out of the toilet in four years,” Green said — a statistic that has left both neighbors and viewers stunned, and has turned his bathroom into an unlikely battleground.