Other Animal (But Non-Buggy) Crackers

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Debunked: Child playing in the ball pit at a fast-food restaurant discovers a nest of venomous snakes and is badly bitten.

While it's unrealistic to eliminate all possibility that some child, somewhere, has been bitten by a venomous snake while in one of these ball pits, the story as told, with a "nest" of the serpents lurking in the depths of the pit waiting for a hapless victim, is quite impossible. For one thing, it would have been reported in every newspaper in the country (this story seems to always be set in the US), and assiduous searches have failed to turn up any such story.

Moreover, snakes don't nest in the manner described; when they do aggregate, it's in a sheltered retreat with a steady source of food. The level of activity in a ball pit would have driven them away long before they had a chance to accumulate in numbers.

Sometimes the snakes are replaced by hypodermic needles "loaded" either with HIV-infected blood or heroin. These variants clearly cross over from animal stories into the "urban fear" genre.