Moment when Mary Hollenback, a Florida woman, discovers that a huge alligator burst through the screen door of her house and took up residence in her kitchen.

A Florida woman heard a noise at her door and, thinking someone was trying to break into the wrong house, got up to scare them away.

Instead, Mary Hollenback confronted an 8-foot alligator lumbering through her home.

The huge reptile was so strong that it opened the front door in Venice, south of Sarasota, despite the magnetic closure that held it in place.

He went into his kitchen looking for food while Hollenback panicked and wondered how he was going to get the huge animal out.

‘I’m sitting on my couch. It’s already late afternoon. “I was watching TV and I heard the front door ring, the screen door,” she said. WFLA.

‘I thought someone who didn’t live here was trying to get in, thinking they were probably in the wrong house, because that happens a lot.

‘I got up from the couch and walked around the door ready to say “you’re in the wrong place.”

I probably didn’t get any further or closer to the front door than you are now. Close enough to look and see that it wasn’t a person trying to get in, it was an alligator.

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

Very carefully, he crept up behind the alligator and snatched his phone.

Two Sarasota County sheriff’s deputies and three Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission agents came to remove the reptile.

They cornered the animal and clamped its jaws shut, then three of them loaded it into a truck and took it to an alligator farm.

“One officer was really funny because he told me that when he saw the report, he didn’t believe me until he walked into the house and saw the alligator,” Hollenback said.

Hollenback believed the alligator crossed a pond on the other side of the road, unnoticed by neighbors.