Man Narrowly Avoids Vicious Bear Attack While Walking to His Car

A man’s quick thinking saved him from a bear claw to the face.

On Sept. 25, security cameras in a parking lot in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia, captured a terrifying close encounter between a man and a large brown bear.

In the footage obtained by ViralBear, a man approaches his car in a parking lot while another vehicle backs into a spot in the same lot. On the other side of the parking lot’s wall, a bear watches the car back into the space and then climbs over the wall into the lot.

Luckily, the man walking to his car spies the bear — likely a Kamchatka brown bear — just before it lunges over the wall straight at him. In response, the man quickly gets into the backseat of a nearby car and shuts the door.

The charging bear slams against the car as the door closes, swiping at the space where the man’s head was moments before. After battering the vehicle with its paws for a few seconds, the bear leaves the man inside alone to chase after another car.

The footage concludes with a close-up of the bear as it leaves the parking lot. The man, who narrowly avoided a severe bear attack, gets to leave the frightening incident with a nerve-racking animal encounter story to share with his friends.

This scary incident comes days after a Connecticut mother came home to find a wild bear rummaging through her house while her sleeping daughter was inside.

“I came home and noticed that the whole screen door was broken, the metal pieces bent,” Michele Lemis of Simsbury told NBC Connecticut about the Sunday, Sept. 21 incident.

Lemis called her 17-year-old daughter to let her know about the bear and to stay locked in her room. The mom then contacted 9-1-1 for assistance.

Police officers responded and shooed the bear out of the house before it could approach Lemis’ daughter, who was hiding in the closet after receiving her mom’s phone call about the animal’s break-in.

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For brown bear attacks, the National Park Service recommends that you “leave your pack on and PLAY DEAD. Lay flat on your stomach with your hands clasped behind your neck. Spread your legs to make it harder for the bear to turn you over. Remain still until the bear leaves the area.”

If the bear continues to attack, the NPS advises fighting back vigorously, using “whatever you have at hand to hit the bear in the face.”