Hungry Bears Are Coming For Your Candy Stash
Think you're safe locked up at home during these "unprecedented times"? Wrong. If this story from CNN is to be believed (and I always believe bear stories because I don't trust those floofy bastards), marauding gangs of teenage bears have begun breaking into houses and stealing their candy.
Michelle Eberhard of Gatlinburg, Tennessee tells CNN that last Friday morning, she was sitting in a rented picturesque mountain cabin having a little chitchat with a friend as their husbands went golfing, when a bear decided that he, too, wanted to be inside that picturesque mountain cabin. The women hurried upstairs and hid in a bedroom; the bear opened the locked front door, because in addition to being hungry, Tennessee black bears are gifted in lock picking, safe cracking, and kicking down doors like renegade cops that don't play by the rules, but goddamnit do they get the job done.
Once the cabin had been breached, it became clear that the bear was, in fact, merely the leader of a whole posse of bears, with three other intruders hanging out on the porch standing guard as their capo ransacked the house. Eberhard was unable to determine how many bears actually entered her cabin, but she told CNN that based on the noise and resulting damage, those bears were not messing around (or, depending on how you look at it, were messing around quite a lot).
"It knocked over the trash, it knocked over a book, and it destroyed a couple of decks of cards and it scratched up a lot of stuff. There were scratches on walls and the floor," she said. They also didn't knock over or destroy any furniture, which was very nice of them.
Eberhard called the cabin's owner, who then called the police. When an officer arrived the posse dispersed, leaving only one bear burglar inside the cabin; he was able to evade justice by leaping off a balcony.
The bears stole five pounds of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, a pound of M&M's, two pounds of Sour Patch Kids, two bags of potato chips, a tub of peanut butter pretzels, two bags of Dove salted caramel candy, two beers, and two Diet Cokes. They also stole Eberhard's allergy medicine, perhaps because they were unsure if any members of the gang had an undiscovered peanut allergy.
After the officer and her friend left, Eberhard said she saw eleven bears roaming around the cabin, because you don't force a "made" bear to jump off a balcony and get away with it. However, it seems that the bears were only there to send a message: Eberhard and her husband found scratches on the side of the house, and the grill had been knocked over. That was enough to convince the couple to head back home to Indiana, because there is no point of social distancing in the woods if it means fighting off a bear to defend your Reese's stash.