The five-bedroom house sits on pastoral acreage in the American countryside. At less than $180,000, it seemed a steal. But a bargain it was not.

Ben and Amber Sessions soon realised the dream home they had purchased in Rexburg, Idaho, for their growing family in 2009 was infested with hundreds upon hundreds of garter snakes. The ground around the home appeared to move at times, so thick was it with snakes.

Throngs of reptiles crawled beneath the outer walls. At night, the young couple said they would lie awake and listen to slithering inside the walls. "It was like living in one of those horror movies," said Ben Sessions, 31.

The home was most likely built on a winter snake den, or hibernaculum, where the reptiles gather in large numbers to hibernate, said Rob Cavallaro, a wildlife biologist with the Idaho department of fish and game.

In the spring and summer the snakes fan out across south-east Idaho, but as the days get shorter and cooler, they return to the den to ball up for heat and spring breeding.

Cavallaro has heard only of one other eastern Idaho home that was located on a snake den. There was also a bridge-widening project where workers ran into a hibernaculum, he said.

"It is an important site for the snakes," Cavallaro said. "Every now and then we build on them and it becomes a conflict."

Neal and Denise Ard lived in the home, and in 2006 they invited the local news station to come and film the buckets of snakes they had collected on the property. The video, which has 2.4m views on YouTube, was taken down before the Ards abandoned the home.

The Sessionses would frequently eat out because their well water carried the foul smelling musk that the snakes release as a warning to predators.

Each day, before Amber Sessions, who is pregnant, and their two small boys got out of bed, her husband said he would do a "morning sweep" through the house to ensure none of the snakes got inside. That didn't always work. One day, he heard his wife scream from the laundry room, where she had almost stepped on a snake.

"I was terrified she was going to miscarry," he said, adding that they invited relatives to snap pictures.

At the height of the infestation, Ben Sessions said he killed 42 snakes in one day before he decided he could not do it anymore. He had waged war against the snakes and "they won".

He and his wife had little recourse when they decided to flee the home. They had signed a document noting the snake infestation. They said they had been assured by their estate agent that the snakes were just a story invented by the previous owners to leave their mortgage behind.

But the so-called Idaho snake house was no myth, according to the Sessionses, their neighbours, as demonstrated by videos and photographs taken by them and past residents of the house. The couple said it seemed like almost everyone else in this tiny Idaho college town knew about it.

"I felt bad," said Dustin Chambers, a neighbour. "By the time we knew someone had bought it, they were already moving in. It was too late."

He said all of Rexburg pretty much knows the home as the "snake house".

The Sessionses filed for bankruptcy; the house repossessed. They left in December 2009, the day after their daughter was born, just three months after moving in.

"We're not going to pay for house full of snakes," Ben Sessions said.

Amber Sessions, 27, said she felt like their family was starting to fall apart.

"It was just so stressful," she said. "It felt like we were living in Satan's lair, that's the only way to really explain it."

Several months ago, the house briefly went back on the market.

Now owned by JP Morgan Chase, it was listed at $114,900 (£71,000) in December 2010, according to Zillow.com, a real estate data company. The property has since been taken off the market, while Chase decides what to do with it.