A California couple were in for quite a surprise when they woke up one morning recently. Someone, or some thing, had raided their kitchen while they were asleep.
When they checked their home security camera footage, it turned out that a bear had come into their home and helped itself to a little late-night snack.
The couple was sleeping just one room over from the bear in their Claremont home. Despite being so close, they said they didn’t hear a peep.
“We didn’t hear a thing,” one of the homeowners, Anju Kapoor, told KTLA News. “We were in the bedroom over there, and we didn’t hear a thing. Otherwise, I’m a light sleeper, and I wake up a lot at night.”
The bear climbed through a window after ripping open a screen
The bear took a variety of fruits, nuts, and meats from the kitchen and left a trail of pistachio shells.
“Everything was thrown around, and it was very unusual, of course, you don’t see your kitchen like that,” she told Fox 11 News, adding, “It was kind of surreal, interesting to see a bear in my kitchen.”
Kapoor first thought the intruder might be a couple of squirrels because she and her husband had seen two “large squirrels” near their house just before the break-in. However, when she saw a torn screen on a window she had left open to vent out the kitchen after cooking, she decided to check her security cameras.
“I wasn’t scared, I’m still not scared,” Kapoor told KTLA News after finding “lots of mess” in her kitchen.
“If I had walked in here and saw a bear, I would be very scared, but it didn’t happen like that. So for me, it’s still an interesting little story kind of thing,” she told Fox 11 News.
In 2025, an adult bear and a cub attempted to enter the house’s crawl space but were unsuccessful. She thinks the cub may have been the one to return to the home that night.
What should you do if a bear enters your home?
When she contacted Animal Control and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, they told her to put rags soaked in ammonia around the entry points of her home.
“Bears have noses that are 100 times more powerful than a human’s, eight times more powerful than a bloodhound. They can smell something from five miles away,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Cort Klopping said.
“Ammonia is going to be a smell that bears do not like and, because their noses are so powerful, that really magnifies the unpleasant smell.”