A Texas woman was in for quite a surprise when she discovered an opossum had taken up residence in her Christmas tree after she heard it sneezing while she was working nearby.
“I’m literally freaking out right now. I have no idea how this opossum ended up in my house, in my tree. I try to take him out, but he won’t let me. I don’t know what to do,” the woman stressed in a video on TikTok, shared by “The Mirror”, which had reached more than 6.5 million views on Tuesday.
It was towards the end of November that the woman was quietly working in her living room, when she reportedly heard two sneezes coming from her freshly decorated Christmas tree.
With none of her three dogs and cat in sight, she reportedly began investigating near the Christmas tree, when she spotted a long, fat rat’s tail protruding from the branches.
“That’s when I saw this giant gray ball of fur breathing. I stopped because I was in shock. I didn’t know what it was. I was a little panicked,” she continued in a second video.
Taking her courage – and her oven mitts – in both hands, she then tried to grab the small mammal to free it from the tree.
“They have hands, and he was hanging on for dear life after the tree. (…). After trying to lure him with food, I ended up giving everything I had, detaching his fingers from the branches one by one. It was a struggle,” she said.
She eventually managed to get out and corner the opossum, which was released after a call to an animal control agency.
This is not the first time a possum has made headlines this year, with one allegedly breaking into an Airbnb in the middle of the night and defecating in the bed where an Australian woman was staying, according to what she had related on TikTok, according to “The Mirror”.
In Quebec, opossums are present on the South Shore of Montreal and in Montérégie, and even near Trois-Rivières since 2017, according to an article from the Montreal Science Center.
