“I’ve seen bears on the side of the road and the edge of the woods, but not in my van eating my lunch!” – Carrie Watts, Rabun County
Carrie Watts has been a home health nurse for ten years. In that time, the Rabun County mother of two has been lots of places and seen lots of things, but nothing could prepare her for what she encountered last week at Lake Burton.
It was June 9 and Watts was visiting a client on Lakeside Drive. While working inside the house she caught a glimpse of something outside the window. “The client had three black cats and I thought the cat had crawled into my van,” Watts tells Now Habersham. “As I got to looking I thought, ‘That’s a huge cat’, and then, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s a bear!'”
It was. A big black bear. Watts estimates it weighed between 175-200 pounds.
The bear had climbed through her open van windows and made itself right at home.
“The bear ate my lunch!” she exclaims. “It was pretty wild. It’s funny now, but it was scary then.”
Local repairman “saves the day”
Watts tried everything she knew to scare the bear out of her van.
“I started setting off the alarm on my van to try to get it out of the van and that didn’t work, so, I went in the kitchen to get pots and pans to make loud noises and try to scare him,” she recounts. “He ate my lunch and didn’t get out for about two hours.”
Just as she was about to call officials to come help, a heating and air man arrived on the scene. The loud noise of the truck engine must have startled the bear and it bolted through the van window and ran off into the woods.
Watts credits Shane Smith with coming to her rescue.
“He come to the door and his face was about as red as mine,” she says of the local HVACC repairman. “He said, ‘Ma’am is that your minivan? There’s a big black bear that just came out of it.'”
“If he hadn’t pulled up I don’t know how I would have gotten that bear out of there, ” Watts says. “He really saved the day.”
Before leaving, Watts said she made Smith “walk with me to the van.” They checked the back windows to make sure there were no other wild animals inside.
Aftermath
Surprisingly, for the length of time it was in her van, the bear caused little damage. It devoured her lunch and tossed about her daughter’s carseat. Other than that, her van was intact but her life was about to get crazy.
Watts posted video and photos of the incident to her Facebook page and it went viral. The story was picked up by news outlets all over the country.
Watts says her 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter think it’s “so cool to see their mom on the news.”
Mixed in with their excitement, there’s some worry, too.
“Well my 3-year-old makes me check the van every time we leave the house now because she’s afraid there’s one (a bear) in it.”
Watts says, “never, never, never, never” before has she encountered something like this. “I’ve seen bears on the side of the road and the edge of the woods, but not in my van eating my lunch!”
She says it taught her a lesson, one she happily shares with her fellow Northeast Georgians: “Just don’t leave your windows down if you’re working on Lake Burton.”
