A hungry black bear broke into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, scared several employees, and ate 60 cupcakes before walking away.
Employees at Taste by Spellbound, located in Avon, Connecticut, were loading cakes into a delivery van Wednesday when the bear appeared. There are between 1,000 and 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, according to the state environmental agency, and last year they were sighted in 158 of the state’s 169 locations.
The bakery’s owner, Miriam Stephens, wrote in an Instagram post that she heard employee Maureen Williams yelling for help and that there was a bear in the garage.
Williams told WTNH television that she tried to scare the bear away, but it backed off and came back three times. He added that he tried to attack her, so she got out of the garage and started running.
Surveillance footage obtained by WTNH shows bakery workers walking around the establishment to try to scare off the bear, but they started running after the animal startled them.
The video shows the bear pulling a container of cupcakes from the garage to the parking lot. Stephens said that the bear ate 60 cupcakes.
One of the pastry chefs finally got the bear to go away after honking his car horn, according to Williams.
The three-foot-tall thief had already left by the time police and agents from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection arrived at the site.
No one was hurt in one of a series of disturbing interactions between black bears and humans in Connecticut.
Statistics compiled by the department show there were a record 67 reports of bears entering Connecticut homes in 2022. The previous record was 45 in 2020.
