Bear Destroys Front Porch After Accidentally Locking Itself In
on Mar 28, 2022
Melissa Champney from Grafton, New Hampshire said she and her husband woke up one morning to the sound of a big black bear wreaking havoc on their front porch.
The Grafton couple said that the bear caught them by surprise and it took them about 45 minutes to figure out how to get it to go away.
According to Melissa, they normally leave their screened-in front porched door open so that the cats can get in and get some food.
However, on this particular day, the bear walked through the open entrance and accidentally shut the door behind him, causing the animal to be trapped and panicked, looking for a way out.
“I looked out the dining room window and there was a really big bear stuck on the porch — eating the porch, as a matter of fact,” Melissa told WMUR. “When he came in, he must have shut the door behind him then he was essentially trapped in this 8 x 12 area.”
Melissa said for 45 minutes, the bear destroyed her porch while they tried to figure out how to let him out of the only entrance to the home. Eventually, her husband got the bright idea to crawl out of a window and go around to the front of the home to open up the door.
Fortunately, when he opened the door, the bear ran off and didn’t attack him and that was the end of the whole ordeal. However, their front porch was left looking like it was hit by a wrecking ball.
“He removes sheetrock, removes screens, he pretty much trashed the entire porch,” Melissa said.
According to Andrew Timmins with the New Hampshire Department of Fish and Game, it’s very rare for a black bear to break into a human’s home, however, it has certainly happened before in the past and this is just one example of it happening.
“Bears find their food by a sense of smell. So, keeping these items such as a grill clean or keeping your garbage in air-tight containers so the smell cant get out, those are the first important steps to tricking a bear and not letting the bear find it,” Andrew said.
