Employees at a Connecticut bakery were left terrified last week after a hungry black bear barged into the garage and helped itself to 60 cupcakes.
Miriam Stephens, owner of Taste by Spellbound in the town of Avon, said workers were loading cakes into a van for delivery on Wednesday when the bear strolled in.
The employee "looked up and saw a bear staring at her from the South Windsor side," Stephens wrote in an Instagram post. "All of the sudden we hear her screaming bloody murder and then yelling, ‘there’s a bear in [the] garage!’"
Williams told TV station WTNH that she shouted to scare the bear off but it retreated and came back three times. She said the bear charged at her so she backed out of the garage and ran.
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Surveillance video obtained by WTNH shows bakery workers walking around the side of the business to try to scare the bear, but then running away after it scares them.
The video shows the bear dragging a container of cupcakes from the garage into the parking lot. Stephens said the bear ate 60 cupcakes.
A baker finally got the bear to leave by honking a car horn, Williams said.
"They are more scared of us than us of them," a post on the bakery's Instgram page read. "We all have had a good laugh about it at this point and think the bears are cute."
The bakery added that no bears will be harmed because they did not heart anyone.
The four-footed thief was gone by the time police and officers from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection arrived.
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No one was injured in the encounter. Yet the incident underscored the rise in a series of troubling interactions between black bears and humans in Connecticut.
Statistics compiled by the department show that there were a record 67 reports of bears entering Connecticut homes in 2022 – up from 45 in 2020.
Last month, a 74-year-old woman suffered bites to her arms and legs when she was attacked by a bear while walking her dog in a Hartford suburb. There were two attacks last year, including one in October where a 10-year-old boy was mauled in a backyard.
"The frequency and severity of bear-human interactions is increasing," DEEP spokesperson Paul Copleman said Friday.
There are between 1,000 and 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, the state environmental agency says, with sightings last year in 158 of the state's 169 towns and cities.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
