It's funny, I have absolutely no innate fear of snakes at all, in fact when I see one in the wild I'm always tempted to catch it and pick it up!
That being said, I do have a snake that when I first got it I was terrified of it, in fact I put it up for sale for awhile but changed my mind later on and decided to keep it. I bought my five foot long 1400 gram Australian Woma python from a guy on Kingsnake.com and when he shipped it he didn't use enough packing and the snake got all beat up. I initially put him in a glass critter cage with a screen top and a large snake hide. He was so aggressive that he would coil up and give me the evil eye from across the room and strike the glass so hard I thought the tank was going to break! Talk about a terrifying experience. He was so mean I was afraid to even take him out of the tank or even to feed him.
After about three months I moved him over to my new ARS rack system and that's when everything changed. I finally was able to handle him for short periods, eventually he became very tame and now is one of my tamest snakes. It took him about four months to finally eat something and now he is on small rats. You can still see the scars along his back from where he got beat up in the mail. Now I'll never ship a snake to my house, I always have them hold it at the FedEx center for pickup.
If you are not afraid of snakes I'm betting you have never encountered a really big mean snake! It's like saying you are not afraid of dogs. If you met the wrong dog you would be very afraid! In general I'm not afraid of snakes, but I know there are snakes out there that can be terrifying.
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