NATCHEZ — When Leah Ulmer and her children returned from their beach vacation last week, they had a strange invoice from their neighbor, William Pugh.

The bill listed prices owed for a net, a length of rope, a walking fee and a life endangerment fee.

While his invoice was a joke, his removal of a 6-foot alligator from the Ulmer’s swimming pool wasn’t.

Last Friday, swimming pool cleaners from Custom Pools were on the job at the Ulmer’s Cherrybark Lane home when they saw something out of the ordinary.

The Custom Pools employees knocked on the Ulmers door and began speaking with their housekeeper. Meanwhile, this got the attention of the next-door neighbors, the Pughs.

William and his wife, Kelly, and their children soon flocked around the pool to see the gator swimming along the edge and diving to the bottom of the pool.

William, who used to rope cows, decided to lead the charge in removing the alligator.

“He did it like you’re supposed to rope a cow,” Kelly said.

A Custom Pool employee worked a pole in tandem with William to fish the gator out.

“When (William) started pulling him out, (the gator) started rolling and when they got him on the ground, he opened his mouth and started hissing,” Kelly said.

Meanwhile, Kelly called Leah Ulmer to break the news.

“I thought it was a joke,” Ulmer said.

Kelly said she had to repeat that there was an alligator in Ulmer’s pool several times before Ulmer actually began to believe it.

“All the commotion in the background, I knew it wasn’t a joke,” Ulmer said.

Ulmer said in the nine years she has lived in the U.S. 61 South neighborhood she has never once seen an alligator.

“Our property backs up to a creek, and we’re right next to Beau Pré and they have some water there,” she said. “My husband says when it’s really dry (alligators) travel looking for water.”

The Ulmers had only built the pool three weeks prior and though both houses on either side of the Ulmers’ house have pools, they were the chosen ones.

“We were just the lucky ones, I guess,” Ulmer said.

No one knows how long the alligator was in the pool.

“He could have been there a couple of days,” she said. “We left on a Wednesday and this was Friday.”

Ulmer said she is thankful for her neighbors.

“That’s what living in the South is all about,” Ulmer said. “We had a bunch of gentlemen here who could rope him and net him and tape his mouth shut.”

And as for the aftermath, Ulmer said it’s still quite chilling to know an alligator has been in their pool.

It’s something the Ulmer children — ages 16, 13, 8 and 4 — are left to ponder.

“There’s been a lot of squealing and screaming,” Ulmer said. “We’ve been looking at the pictures and they’ve said ‘Oh my gosh mom, what if we had jumped in the dark?’”

Kelly said she’s been asking herself the same question.

“If one of (Ulmer’s) kid’s had jumped in the water — (the gator) was swimming down in the deep, it would get really close to the edge and you couldn’t see it,” Kelly said.

And as far as her pool goes, she’ll be watching it extra closely.

She said after the alligator was caught, it was released back into the wild nearby.

Those who saw the gator guessed it weighed approximately 150 pounds.