A 64-year-old woman has described an incredible escape from the grips of a python, that ensnared her for hours.

Arom Arunroj was preparing to do her dinner dishes at her home outside Bangkok when she felt a sharp pain in her thigh and looked down to see the huge snake taking hold of her.

“I was about to scoop some water and when I sat down, it bit me immediately,” Arom Arunroj told Thailand’s Thairath newspaper. “When I looked I saw the snake wrapping around me.”

The four-to-five-metre python coiled itself around her torso, squeezing her down to the floor of her kitchen.

“I grabbed it by the head, but it wouldn’t release me,” she said. “It only tightened.”

Pythons are non-venomous constrictors, which kill their prey by gradually squeezing the breath out of it.

Propped up against her kitchen door, Arom called out for help but it wasn’t until a neighbour happened to be walking by about an hour-and-a-half later and heard her screams that authorities were called.

Responding police officer Anusorn Wongmalee told The Associated Press on Thursday that when he arrived, Arom was still leaning against her door, looking exhausted and pale with the snake coiled around her.

“We were shocked to see the lady was tied down on the floor with the python wrapping around [her],” Police Major Sergeant Anusorn Wongmalee of the Phra Samut Chedi Police Station in Samut Prakan, a province south of Bangkok, told CNN.

“The snake was really big.”

Police and animal control officers used a crowbar to hit the snake on the head until it released its grip and slithered away.

“We couldn’t catch it,” police said.

In all, Arom spent about two hours on Tuesday night in the clutches of the python before being freed.

She was treated for several bites but appeared to be otherwise unharmed in videos of her talking to Thai media shortly after the incident.

Encounters with snakes are not uncommon in Thailand, and 26 people were killed by venomous snake bites in 2023, according to government statistics. A total of 12,000 people were treated for venomous bites by snakes and other animals in 2023.

The reticulated python is the largest snake found in Thailand and usually ranges in size from 1.5-6.5 metres, weighing up to about 75 kilograms. They have been found as big as 10-metres long and 130 kilograms.

Smaller pythons feed on small mammals such as rats, but larger snakes switch to prey such as pigs, deer and even domestic dogs and cats. Attacks on humans are not common.

-with AAP