‘I have a gun!’ Man confronts intruder outside Tennessee cabin and finds bear in car
It sounded as if a party had erupted outside the cabin a family rented near the Great Smoky Mountains, but then they heard their own car horn just after midnight.
“We thought it was (people in) the cabin next door playing a prank,” Heather Adkins wrote on Facebook, noting her husband, Ashley, was not amused. “My husband was, like, ‘Get out of the car, I have a gun.’”
What happened next was captured in a strange video that has been shared 8,000 times on social media since Friday. The couple from London, Kentucky, slowly realized their shaking car had a bear in the passenger seat and it was pressing its front paws against the windshield.
Adkins told TV station WATE it took them a while to figure it out, because it was dark outside and the car had tinted windows. Video shows the windows were also fogged up.
The bear was trying to get out — unsuccessfully — and was ripping the interior to pieces in the process, she noted.
“Before you ask, all my doors were shut,” Heather Adkins wrote. “The bear opened my car door and then could not get back out. The one time I don’t lock my door.”
It happened last week in the tourist town of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and the couple wrote that it took the help of local police to get the bear out. An officer is heard in a video describing the bear as “a big ‘un.”
“We opened the hatch and it came out and went back in the woods,” Adkins posted.
Her video of its exit moment shows the family slamming their cabin door as the large bear leaves the car and turns toward the cabin door.
The car, a rental, was “destroyed on the inside,” Adkins wrote. However, the couple had it fully insured, she added.
Adkins believes the bear was in pursuit of a bag of Gummies snacks her son left in his backpack, which is seen ripped to shreds in a video.
This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 9:38 AM with the headline "‘I have a gun!’ Man confronts intruder outside Tennessee cabin and finds bear in car."