Brett Ingram was in for a surprise when she sat down on her couch after a long day of work last week. An opossum somehow found its way into her home and decided that her Christmas tree would be the perfect place to call its new home.
In a TikTok that’s received over 4.3 million views, Ingram showed a little furry opossum staring out at her from her faux snowy Christmas tree.
“I am literally freaking out right now,” she said. “I have no idea how this possum got in my house and up into my tree, and I’m trying to get it out, but it will not let me, and I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know how it got in here, I don’t leave my doors open. Somebody help!”
Ingram described the whole series of events in another TikTok. She explained she’d just gotten home from work and was sitting on her couch when she heard a sneeze. “I have three dogs and a cat, so figured it was one of them, but I looked over and they weren’t there. I looked down — no animals,” she said.
When the little sneeze happened again, she said, “I got up and I started looking to see if my cat was stuck behind the couch or something or sleeping in the window. But as I was looking around I see this really big, long-looking rat tail and I just kind of stop because I was in shock. I didn’t know what it was.”
Then Ingram called her boyfriend, who told her to wear rubber gloves when pulling the opossum off the tree. She had to take matters into her own hands, since Animal Control “didn’t come after hours, it’s a small town.”
“I get the gloves and I grab around his body and I start trying to pull him out of the tree,” she explained. This was harder than she thought it was going to be, since the opossum was gripping the Christmas tree, “holding on for dear life.”
After several tugging attempts and trying to lure the opossum away from the tree with food, Ingram finally tried “plucking his fingers from the branch one at a time.” Once he was detached, he “started to flop around” and dropped to the floor.
However, the chase wasn’t over. The opossum tried to flee, running under one of Ingram’s couches.
She chased him from couch to couch five times. “I thought they were slow animals but that must be a misconception because that (animal) was fast!” Ingram added.
Ingram was finally able to catch him after tackling him “like an NFL football player.” She explained that she would have kept him as a pet “if it didn’t smell so horrid.”