A woman was terrified after finding a snake nesting inside the storeroom of her house.

She immediately called the emergency services to come to her house in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia on Tuesday (September 1) afternoon.

Rescue workers found the sunbeam snake among a pile of cardboard boxes

The worried woman said: "I know that colourful snakes are more likely to be venomous than plain ones, so I didn't want to go near it."

A team of firefighters arrived at her house to take the strange snake, which was identified later as a rainbow snake.

An official from the Semarang City Fire Service said: "We deployed five officers to the house after she told us that it might be a venomous snake."

However, the snake turned out to be nonvenomous so the firefighters grabbed it and put it in a sack to be released later.