A South Carolina hiker saw a ‘huge snake’ in 2021, but it wasn’t the one pictured in this post

An image of a snake as tall as an ottoman and longer than a bus, its head the size of a child, casually lying — or slithering? — between about a half dozen people is drawing attention on social media for an unexpected reason. 

Apparently, a May 13 Threads post said, this "huge snake was found by a hiker near South Carolina creek." 

"‘What a beast!’" reads a quote included in the post.

It was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The post included a link for "more photo/video," and it leads to an undated blog post with this title: "Hiker finds massive ‘beast’ hiding along banks of South Carolina creek." 

The post recounts how a South Carolina woman named Meredith Langley saw "a giant brown snake — several feet long and thicker than the root of a tree used to rest his head" along the edge of a creek in a park in Florence, South Carolina. 

Featured Fact-check

Instagram posts

stated on October 23, 2024 in a photo

Kamala Harris "proclaimed she would not accept the outcome of the election and has a team of lawyers ready to overturn them"

The blog post included several photos of different snakes, though not the huge one in the Threads post. 

Only one of the pictures was actually of the snake that Langley saw. The State published it and Langley’s story on March 11, 2021, noting that one person who commented on the photos Langley originally posted on Facebook said: "What a beast!"

It was a harmless watersnake, the article said, and not the snake pictured in the Threads post. 

That snake in the Threads post, incidentally, appears significantly bigger than the world’s largest snake that was killed in the Amazon in March. 

That 440-pound northern green anaconda was 26 feet long, as thick as a car tire and with a head "the size of a human’s," the U.S. Sun reported.

We rate claims that the image of a snake in the Threads post is the snake discovered by a South Carolina hiker in 2021 Pants on Fire!