Remembering Bill Haast: The Florida snake handler who lived to 100 after surviving over 170 bites

Known as the Snake Man, Bill Haast lived up to his moniker. It is said that he handled over 3 million snakes during his lifetime. At least 172 of those times they managed to sink their fangs into him. Around 20 of those occasions almost ended his life.

However, he survived thanks to his blood, and it did the same for others. He donated his blood immunized to venom to 21 people saving their lives as well as many others through his research into snake venom. He credited his daily injections of small doses of venom for his long life, finally succumbing to natural causes at age 100 in 2011.

Bill Haast: the Snake Man

Haast developed a passion for slithering serpents from an early age, reportedly catching his first garter snake at age 7 in a canal near his home in Paterson, New Jersey, where he was born in 1910. Soon he was catching copperheads and rattlers in the woods near his home and at summer camp.

While at Boy Scout Camp when he was 12, he suffered his first serious bite from a venomous timber rattler. That same year, he was laid up in hospital for a week after a copperhead bit him. That didn’t stop him from handling snakes though, and he began keeping them, including venomous species, in a box in his family’s apartment.

When his mother found out, she fled the house and wouldn’t come back for three days, according to his obituary in The New York Times. Finally she allowed him to keep some snakes, but only if they were in a safer enclosure.

His first exotic snake was a diamondback rattler, which he bought from a catalogue. When he saw that it came from Florida, he knew that was where he had to go. At age 16 he dropped out of school and soon after joined a travelling snake show. While it did get him to Florida, the Great Depression hit and the show had to pack up shop.

He did some odd jobs, including bootlegging, before he got a job as an airplane mechanic with Pan Am, whose headquarters were in Miami. This had the benefit of being close to the snake-filled Everglades.

Building a business based on snakes and their venom

He and his co-workers were hired by the U.S. military to help with supply flights to bases around the world during World War II. This gave him the opportunity to expand his collection of exotic snakes, and build “a de facto snake-smuggling cartel,” notes the Science History Institute.

After the war, he turned his passion for snakes and his sizeable collection into what would become his career until he died. In 1946, he started building the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories with his family’s savings and proceeds from selling their house. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and prompted his first wife Ann to finally leave him.

He and his teenage son, Bill Jr., along with help from neighbors and business partner Clarita, who would become his second wife, managed to open the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories in January 1948.

The main goal of the serpentarium was to raise snakes in a controlled environment to harvest their venom for research into its use for potential medical treatments and the creation of antivenoms. However, to pay the bills initially, he offered daily tours and shows where he would show off his extraordinary snake handling skills, capturing them without any protective gear. He explained that he didn’t wear gloves to avoid injuring the fragile snakes.

His enterprise became a popular tourist destination for over thirty years, attracting some 50,000 visitors per year. He also revolutionized the study of snake venom during this time, and for many in the fields of venom research and venomous herpetology he is “like the pope is to the Catholic Church.”

While his research into using snake venom to cure polio showed promise, it failed to gain funding as the Salk vaccine was seen as the better bet and so it was dropped. Haast believed that snake venom could be used to treat a whole host of ailments including dandruff and ingrown toenails.

His supporters say that he drove pharmacological innovations despite flaws in his research methods. But other prominent venom researchers doubt that his proposed treatments and research “will be remembered in a positive way.”

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