The Gator in the Living Room

Annie Boelte poses with the alligator that arrived at her house along with the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina. (Family photo)

PEARLINGTON, Miss. -- We hear a lot of incredible hurricane survival stories every day in Bay St. Louis and Waveland, where nearly three months later people still greet each other with reports of how many feet of water they had in their house.

But when we heard the story of the alligator in the living room we had to check it out, even though it took us a bit outside our usual area of interest to Pearlington, a town 20 miles west of Waveland that was decimated by Katrina.

To get to the bottom of the story, we dropped in on a meeting of the Pearlington Residents Committee.

The purpose of the meeting at the home of Lena Macillus was to discuss an effort to get Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to investigate a plan for sewer service that the committee believes would be cost-prohibitive for the 52 percent of residents who live on fixed income, include one-third who live below the poverty line.

But the talk quickly turned to horror stories from the storm. Ms. Macillus, 67, rode out the storm at home with her disabled 61-year-old sister and several friends. They all survived, but there were some terrible moments when the water rose so quickly that her sister and a friend were swept away and had to swim for their lives.

They had not heard about the alligator in the living room, but they didn't find it all that surprising that a reptile might come a calling. Wild and domestic animals are common in the wild country of Pearlington. Ms Macillus herself found a water moccasin in a cedar closet after the storm. A neighbor lost the majority of her flock of about 30 peacocks.

To verify the alligator story, we reached Annie Boelte, 26, a New Orleans schoolteacher who spent the hurricane with her parents and 87-year-old grandmother in an elevated house on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River.

When the water rose into the lower level of the house, the family grabbed what food they could and scrambled into the top level, where they spent more than 24 hours before they were rescued with the help of a floatplane pilot, Boelte said by telephone.

A living room full of animals

Looking down during the day, they saw a number of animals in the living room, including snakes, a deer and a bat.

“It was just a zoo,” Boelte said by phone.

In the middle of the night the family was awakened by the screaming of a deer, which they assumed had fallen through the weakened floor to its death.

But the next day, when Boelte and her father gingerly walked down the decrepit staircase to see if they could rescue any keepsakes, they came face to tail with an alligator “with the biggest belly I ever saw.”

“I screamed and said a few curse words and ran upstairs,” she said. “Because the tail was facing me and I didn’t make eye contact directly, it didn’t evince as much fear as if the little critter had been facing me.”

Her father dispatched the beast with a gunshot. She did not see the animal again until about a week later, when she returned with a team of people to dispose of it and snapped a picture.

Now relocated to Baton Rouge, she hopes to return to New Orleans eventually to resume her teaching career.