Serpents and Spirits: Inside America’s Enduring Snake-Handling Churches
Updated: Oct 6
In a handful of small churches scattered through the Appalachian Mountains, Christians still lift live rattlesnakes out of wooden boxes during Sunday services and pass them from hand to hand. They believe God will protect them. Not everyone makes it home.
For decades the most famous of these congregations met in Jolo, a former coal camp in McDowell County, West Virginia, a place so small it barely registers on a map. The Church of the Lord Jesus there became a byword for the practice, drawing reporters, photographers and curious outsiders who couldn't quite believe it was real. It was. Across the region, a few thousand believers still follow a tradition that has killed close to a hundred people in a little over a century, and most of them would tell you they'd do it again tomorrow.
This isn't performance, and it isn't theatre. To the people in those rooms, picking up a rattlesnake mid-sermon is the most sincere expression of faith they can offer.
Quick Answers
● Why do they handle snakes? Because Mark 16:17-18 says believers "shall take up serpents" and won't be harmed. Handlers read it as a command, not a metaphor.
● Who started it? Modern snake handling is usually traced to George Went Hensley, a Tennessee preacher who began handling snakes in the early 1900s.
● How many people have died? Religion scholar Ralph Hood has documented at least 92 deaths from snakebites in services, plus nine from drinking poison.
● Is it legal? It's banned or restricted in most states where it's practised. West Virginia is the only state that has never passed a law against it.
● How many handlers are there? Estimates suggest a few thousand people in somewhere between 50 and 125 churches, mostly in Appalachia.
The Scripture Behind the Serpents
To most people, handling deadly snakes, let alone drinking poison, sounds like something out of a lurid Hollywood film about backwoods cults. To the people who do it, it's an act of obedience rooted in a strict, literal reading of the Bible. It all comes down to two verses in the Gospel of Mark, 16:17-18. In the King James Version, Jesus tells his followers that signs will follow those who believe: they'll cast out devils, speak in new tongues and heal the sick. Then come the lines that matter here. "They shall take up serpents," and "if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them."
Most Christians read that passage as metaphor, or as something that applied to the first apostles and nobody since. Plenty of biblical scholars point out that it doesn't even appear in the oldest surviving manuscripts of Mark. Snake handlers don't care. For them it's a direct command that has never expired, and it's where the movement gets its name: churches "with signs following".
They believe that someone truly anointed by the Holy Spirit can pick up a venomous snake without being hurt. If a handler is bitten and suffers, the fault lies with the handler's faith in that moment or with God's will, never with the doctrine. Some congregations also drink strychnine mixed with water, usually from a Mason jar, and some hold their hands or faces in the flame of a burning torch or bottle wick. These aren't stunts. They're what believers call following the signs.
What a Snake-Handling Service Actually Looks Like
Walking into one of these services is nothing like a conventional Sunday morning. The music starts early and loud: not the measured hymns of a traditional church but something rawer, with electric guitars, drums, tambourines and stamping feet. People clap, sway, dance, shout and speak in tongues. The energy builds for a long time before any snakes appear, and on some nights they never come out at all.
When the moment arrives, the wooden boxes near the pulpit are opened. Timber rattlesnakes and copperheads are the most common, with the odd cottonmouth and, in some churches, exotic species bought online. Handlers lift them out, raise them above their heads, drape them over their shoulders or hold them close to their faces. Others step back. Nobody is supposed to handle unless they feel the anointing, and handlers often describe a state in which the world falls away and they lose all sense of time.
The snakes are never forced on anyone, and children aren't meant to handle them, though they're often in the room. Services can run for hours. The churches' strict moral codes run through all of it: no alcohol or tobacco, long hair and long skirts for women, no make-up and no jewellery.
The best record of what these services looked like in their heyday is Peter Adair's 1967 documentary Holy Ghost People, filmed at the Scrabble Creek Holiness Church in West Virginia. The anthropologist Margaret Mead called it "one of the best ethnographic films ever made", according to its listing on the Internet Archive, where it's free to watch.
The Man Who Started It All
The modern movement is almost always traced to one man: George Went Hensley. Even his beginnings are murky. His birthday is usually given as 2 May 1881, but no birth record has ever been found and historians disagree about whether he was born in Virginia, West Virginia or Tennessee, according to Appalachian Historian. He grew up poor, could barely read, and spent part of his early life making moonshine, a trade that was booming across the mountains and would soon feed a whole illegal industry during Prohibition.
The traditional story is that Hensley, wrestling with Mark 16, climbed White Oak Mountain near Ooltewah, Tennessee, found a rattlesnake at a spot called Rainbow Rock, picked it up unharmed and carried it back to church, where others followed his lead. Appalachian Historian dates the first documented handling to a Church of God revival in Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1914. Either way, it caught on fast. Hensley was ordained by A.J. Tomlinson, the head of the Church of God, according to Christian History, and took the practice with him as he preached across Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and beyond.
His personal life was chaotic. He married four times, according to Christian History, with a string of separations along the way, and he left the Church of God in 1922 or 1923 over what Appalachian Historian describes as "trouble at home". He was arrested in Chattanooga for snake handling in 1945 and again in 1947 after Tennessee banned the practice. He once declared he'd handle snakes even if they put him back on the road gang, a nod to time he'd already served. By the end of his life he claimed to have been bitten more than 400 times.
On 24 July 1955 Hensley was bitten on the wrist during a service in an abandoned blacksmith's shop near Altha, in the Florida Panhandle. He refused treatment and died the next morning, aged 74. The coroner recorded his death as suicide, on the grounds that he'd handled the snake voluntarily and turned down help. His followers saw it very differently.
Hensley's version of the practice wasn't the only one. The movement split early along theological lines. Some churches are Trinitarian, like Hensley's own Church of God with Signs Following. Others belong to the "Jesus Name" or Oneness tradition, which baptises in the name of Jesus alone, according to religion scholar Ralph Hood's entry for World Religions and Spirituality. The church at Jolo, the Church of the Lord Jesus, was one of the best known of the Jesus Name congregations. Both strands survive.
The Jolo Church
The Jolo church was formally established in 1956, but its roots go back further. According to Hood, its founder, Barbara Elkins, started handling snakes after watching Hensley himself preach in 1935. Five years after the church opened, her own daughter, Columbia Gaye Chafin Hagerman, was bitten by a rattlesnake, refused treatment and died. She was in her early twenties.
Over the following decades Jolo became a place of pilgrimage for believers and a magnet for journalists. Its Labor Day homecomings drew families from across the coalfields and neighbouring states, according to West Virginia Explorer. But as the mines closed and McDowell County emptied out, so did the pews. Photojournalist Lauren Pond, who spent more than a year documenting West Virginia's handlers, described a church that had "fallen on hard times" as older members died and younger ones moved away, as Northwestern Magazine reported. West Virginia Explorer reports that the old building is now home to a different congregation and that snake handling there has been discontinued.
Why Don't They All Die?
It's the obvious question, and the honest answer isn't all that reassuring.
The first thing to know is that most venomous snakebites in the US don't kill, even when people are slow to get help. The CDC estimates that 7,000 to 8,000 people are bitten by venomous snakes in the US every year and that about five of them die. Many bites are dry bites, where the snake injects little or no venom. A 2021 study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found 101 fatal snakebites in the US between 1989 and 2018 and noted that many involved people deliberately handling snakes, including at religious services.
The second thing is the condition of the snakes. According to National Geographic, the snakes used in services are often weak from poor treatment, and weak snakes can't deliver a lethal dose of venom. Snakes confiscated from churches sometimes end up at the Kentucky Reptile Zoo, which has described them as weak and dehydrated. A snake that's been kept in a box for weeks, handled over and over and barely fed is a lot less dangerous than one freshly caught in the woods.
That doesn't make it safe. Handlers who've been at it for years are often covered in scars, missing fingers or living with withered hands and arms from bites that didn't kill them. Jamie Coots, one of the best-known modern handlers, lost the end of his middle finger to a bite and kept it in a jar, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
For those who are bitten, the traditional rule has been that medical treatment is refused and the church prays instead. If the person recovers, it confirms their faith. If they die, it was God's will. To believers that isn't a contradiction; it's the whole point.
That has started to change. Since Coots died in 2014, some handlers have been more willing to call for help. Hood, who has studied the movement at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for decades, told National Geographic that among some congregations "refusing to call 911 is considered by some to be old school, and pragmatism rules."
Notable Deaths
Nobody knows exactly how many people have died, because many deaths in remote mountain communities were never reported. Hood's research has documented at least 92 deaths from snakebites and nine from drinking poison. Here are some of the best documented:
● 1945: Lewis Ford. A truck driver in his thirties, bitten at the Dolley Pond Church of God with Signs Following in Hamilton County, Tennessee. He refused treatment and died about 70 minutes later, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
● 1955: George Went Hensley. The movement's founder, bitten near Altha, Florida. He refused treatment and died the next morning, aged 74.
● 1961: Columbia Gaye Chafin Hagerman. Daughter of the Jolo church's founder, Barbara Elkins, bitten by a rattlesnake at the Jolo church. She refused treatment and died.
● 1983: Mack Ray Wolford. Aged 48, bitten by a yellow timber rattlesnake at around 2pm during a service at the Lord Jesus Temple in Mile Branch, near Iaeger in McDowell County, West Virginia. An ambulance wasn't called until 10:30pm and he was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, according to a 1983 report republished by the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
● 1995: Melinda Brown. Bitten by a rattlesnake at a revival in Kentucky in August 1995. She left five children.
● 1998: John Wayne "Punkin" Brown. Melinda's husband, bitten on the left middle finger at the Old Rock House Holiness Church on Sand Mountain in north-east Alabama in October 1998. It was his 22nd bite in 18 years of handling. Their five orphaned children became the subject of a custody battle between the two sets of grandparents, according to an AP report in the Seattle Times.
● 2004: Dwayne Long. A 45-year-old pastor who handled a rattlesnake during an Easter service at Arthur's Chapel in Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia. He declined treatment and died at home the next day, reported Laurence Hammack for the Roanoke Times.
● 2006: Linda Long. Aged 48, bitten on the cheek by a large timber rattlesnake at East London Holiness Church in Laurel County, Kentucky, on 5 November 2006. Unusually, she was taken to hospital and airlifted to the University of Kentucky Medical Center, but died that night, according to the Sentinel-Echo.
● 2012: Mark "Mack" Wolford. Mack Ray Wolford's son, aged 44, bitten by a timber rattlesnake while leading an outdoor service at Panther Wildlife Management Area in West Virginia, according to the Spokesman-Review. He'd watched his father die from a snakebite 29 years earlier. Days before, he'd posted on Facebook inviting people to a service for "Holy Ghost-filled speaking-in-tongues sign believers".
● 2014: Jamie Coots. The star of National Geographic's Snake Salvation, bitten by a timber rattlesnake at his own church, the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in Middlesboro, Kentucky, in February 2014. It was his tenth bite in over 20 years. His family turned away the paramedics' treatment and he died about two hours later, according to NPR.
● 2015: John David Brock. Aged 60, bitten on the arm during a Sunday service at a Pentecostal church in Jenson, Bell County, Kentucky. He declined treatment and died at his brother's home, according to CBS News.
The pattern of families losing members across generations, the Wolfords and the Browns among them, gives these records a weight that statistics alone can't.
When Snake Handling Turned Criminal: The Summerford Case
Not every controversy in the movement's history is about faith. In 1991 Glenn Summerford, a snake-handling preacher in Scottsboro, Alabama, accused his wife Darlene of cheating on him and forced her to put her hand into a box of rattlesnakes. She was bitten twice. He was convicted of attempted murder in February 1992 and, because he had two previous felony convictions, sentenced to 99 years in prison, according to the Jackson County Sentinel. He was still being turned down for parole nearly 30 years later.
The Law, the States and the Snakes
The legal picture is a patchwork, and it's mostly been shaped by deaths.
● West Virginia is the only state that has never passed a law against religious snake handling. There was an attempt in 1963, according to Hood, but it failed.
● Tennessee banned the practice in 1947, two years after Lewis Ford's death, and Hensley was among the first arrested under the new law. Tennessee also has strict wildlife laws that ban keeping venomous snakes without a permit.
● Kentucky makes handling reptiles in religious services a misdemeanour punishable by a small fine. Enforcement has always been rare.
● Virginia makes it a misdemeanour to handle venomous snakes in a way that endangers anyone, with a maximum fine of $250 and no jail time, according to Hammack's reporting.
● Georgia went furthest of all. In 1941, after a six-year-old girl was bitten during a service near Adel in Cook County, the state made snake handling a felony, punishable by 20 years in prison if someone was hurt and by death if someone was killed, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Juries proved unwilling to convict under such a harsh law and it was repealed in the late 1960s. Today it's allowed only by permit.
● North Carolina saw its own showdown. In October 1948 a three-day snake-handling convention at Zion Tabernacle in Durham, hosted by Colonel Hartman Bunn, ended with arrests and snakes being seized. Bunn argued before the state Supreme Court that snake handling was an important part of his religion, and in 1949 the General Assembly declared the handling of poisonous reptiles a public nuisance and a crime, according to NCpedia.
Tennessee's courts went further still. In April 1973 two members of the Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name, near Newport, died after drinking strychnine during services. The local district attorney, Henry Swann, took the church to court, and in 1975 the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld a permanent injunction banning its pastor, Liston Pack, and its elders from handling snakes or drinking poison anywhere in the state, according to the published opinion. The judges summed up the principle that still governs the debate: "The right to believe is absolute; the right to act is subject to reasonable regulation."
The authorities haven't given up. In 2008 a Kentucky undercover operation led to the arrest of ten people and the seizure of more than 100 snakes and an alligator, according to NBC News. Jamie Coots, then 36 and using his full name of Gregory James Coots, had around 60 snakes at his home in Middlesboro, including copperheads, timber rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, a western diamondback, two cobras and a puff adder. In Tennessee, a Campbell County grand jury declined to indict pastor Andrew Hamblin in 2014 after wildlife officers seized 53 venomous snakes from his church, the Times Free Press reported. "Taking away our snakes is like taking away the Baptists' Bibles," Hamblin said. He later served time in jail for reckless endangerment, according to The Ringer, and was still handling snakes in 2017.
A Disappearing Practice, but Not Gone
At its peak, snake handling drew thousands of worshippers to outdoor revivals across Appalachia. It spread fastest in the hard years of the 1930s and 1940s, when travelling preachers offered something mainstream churches couldn't: immediacy, spectacle and a God you could put to the test.
Mainstream Pentecostal denominations, including the Church of God that Hensley once belonged to, have long rejected the practice. Today there are thought to be somewhere between 50 and 125 snake-handling churches in the US, with perhaps a few thousand members, mostly in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia and National Geographic.
The movement has also become more private. Getting into a service as an outsider isn't easy, and filming one is harder still. National Geographic's Snake Salvation, which followed Coots and Hamblin in 2013, gave the churches their biggest audience in years. Coots died a few months after it aired. Hamblin told National Geographic afterwards: "Since Jamie died, I've offered a rattler to no one."
But it isn't simply fading away. Social media has let handlers announce services and find each other in ways that weren't possible before, and some younger preachers are more open to getting medical help after a bite. The theology hasn't changed. The world around it has.
Nobody shows that better than Jamie Coots's son, Cody. He took over his father's church at the age of 21, a week after Jamie died, according to The Ringer. A few months later, in June 2014, a rattlesnake bit him on the head, near his eye and ear, in the middle of a sermon. This time church members persuaded him to go to hospital, and he spent ten days there. What came next was worse than the bite. He suffered paranoia, rage and sleepless nights, quit as pastor, started drinking and began to wonder whether God existed at all. Eventually he got psychiatric help and went back to the pulpit. He still handles snakes. "It's completely peaceful. I'm just blissed out. I never feel so close to God," he told The Ringer. But unlike his father, he now calls 911 when members of his church overdose on strychnine.
What It Actually Means to Believers
It's easy to write about snake handling from the outside as a morbid curiosity. That misses what's going on for the people in those rooms.
Handlers consistently describe the experience as a kind of total absorption. The world narrows, the body stops mattering and they feel entirely present with God. "Handling the snake, it's indescribable," Coots told NPR a few months before his death. For communities with little economic or social power, a faith that promises direct contact with God, with no priest, no hierarchy and no one in between, has always had a strong appeal.
None of that makes it any less dangerous, and it's hard to read the list of deaths without thinking about the children left behind. But it does help explain why a practice that has faced prison sentences, public ridicule, reality TV and death itself has survived for more than a century. Unlike groups such as the Peoples Temple at Jonestown, these churches have never had a single leader controlling their members. The people who pick up the snakes do it because they believe, and they'd tell you that's exactly the point.
