Bill Haast's Miami Serpentarium: The Florida Attraction of a Bygone Era

For almost four decades Bill Haast charmed curious tourists who flocked to his South Florida attraction the Miami Serpentarium to watch his snake show.

This place reminded you of a bygone era especially in Florida, when entrepreneurs could set up quirky roadside attractions to thrill both kids and wintering vacationers.

The Serpentarium’s landmark 35 ft high hooded concrete Cobra stuck out its red forked tongue as it gazed menacingly down at motorists along Route 1 for years.

Haast’s death-defying act didn’t disappoint. In his trademark lab coat, he would approach a venomous reptile,  lure it with a hand gesture and grab its head with the other.   Then he would shove the snake’s fangs into the top of a vial and watch the venom trickle down.

Jaws dropped, children shrieked in horrified spine-tingling glee at this attraction.

Born in Peterson, New Jersey he caught his first snake at seven and was bitten by a rattlesnake at a Boy Scout summer camp when he was only 11.   He started extracting venom from his snakes when he was 15 years old.

At 19 he got a job at a Florida roadside snake farm, but the Depression killed the business so he worked for a moonshiner on the edge of the Everglades, until Revenue agents busted their still and speakeasy.

He then landed a job with Miami-based Pan American Airways delivering food and medicine to Africa and Asia.   He began buying and smuggling exotic snakes through customs in tool boxes.

“In those days there were no laws prohibiting it,  but the crew members didn’t appreciate it” Haast said.

Every week since 1948 when he opened the Serpentarium,  Haast would inject his arm with a cocktail of venom made from 28 poisonous snakes.   He handled more than three million snakes and survived 173 snake bites, 17 nearly killed him.

By 1965 the Serpentarium housed more than 500 snakes, in 400 cages and three pits in the courtyard.   Haast extracted venom 70-100 times a day from 60 different species of poisonous snakes, usually in front of an audience of paying customers.

He snake charmed up to 500-100,000 spectators a year,  and became the “Venom Poster Boy”.

The medical establishment and the FDA never bought into Haast’s enthusiasm for the lethal snake juice as treatment for multiple sclerosis, lupus, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease.

The attraction prospered until a tragedy in 1977 when a 6 year old boy fell into a crocodile pit with a 12 foot 2,000 pounder named “Cookie” and was killed.

The incident left Haast badly shaken, although the boy’s father did not blame Haast,  he wanted nothing else to do with the Serpentarium.

He later opened the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories in Punta Gorda, Florida that produced snake venom for medical and research use.

His hands were mangled from years of enduring the nerve and tissue destroying poison that snakes spew.

Many times Haast donated his blood to be used in treating snake bite victims and saved 21 lives

Living to 100 years old he believed the long-term benefits of the shots spared him from many of the maladies of old age.

The giant cobra was donated to a South Miami High School as a mascot for the “Cobras” football team.

The site is now home to City Hall and a McDonald’s.