Moment Florida woman Mary Hollenback discovers huge alligator has burst through screen door of her house and made itself at home in her kitchen

A Florida woman heard a rattle at her door and, thinking it was someone trying to enter the wrong house, got up to shoo them away.

Instead, Mary Hollenback was confronted by an 8ft alligator lumbering through her home.

The enormous reptile was so strong it punched open the front door in Venice, south of Sarasota, despite the magnetic clasp keeping it in place.

He strolled into her kitchen looking for a meal as Hollenback panicked and wondered how she was going to get the huge animal out.

‘I’m sitting on my sofa. It’s late in the afternoon. I’m just watching TV, and I heard my front door rattle, my screen door,’ she told WFLA.

‘I thought somebody who didn’t live here was trying to come in, thinking that they were probably in the wrong house, because that happens frequently.

‘I got off the couch and came around the door prepared to say “you’re in the wrong place.”

‘I probably got no further, no closer to the front door than you are right now. Just close enough to look and see that it wasn’t a person trying to get in – it was an alligator.’

Hollenback said she was shaking too much to call any number except 911, but her phone was on the kitchen counter just inches from the beast.

Very carefully, she sneaked up behind the alligator and snatched her phone.

Two Sarasota County Sheriff’s deputies and three officers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission came to remove the reptile.

They corralled the animal and clenched its jaws shut, then three of them hauled it into a pickup truck and it was taken to an alligator farm.

‘The one deputy was really pretty funny because he told me that when he saw the report, he didn’t believe me until he walked in the house and saw the gator,’ Hollenback said.

Hollenback believed the alligator wandered across from a pond on the other side of the road, somehow unnoticed by neighbors.