It’s not unusual to see black bears in Northeast Georgia, but it’s downright rare to see them staring back at you from a store window.
That’s what happened to David Griggs of Tiger on Friday as he drove through Clayton on his way home from work.
Heading down South Main Street around 1 a.m., Griggs saw a bear run across the road in front of him.
“First, it ran into the fence next to Reeves Hardware where they’re doing remodeling, then, down the side of the wall, and all of a sudden it just jumped through the window!” Griggs tells Now Habersham.
When the bear jumped, so did Griggs, right to his cell phone camera.
He began recording the bear through the storefront window. At one point in the video, the bear stands up on a couch and paws at the window, apparently searching for a way out.
Griggs called 911 to report the wild intruder.
“I know it wreaked havoc on the inside,” he says. “All I could think about was all the nice furniture and stuff that was about to be destroyed. ‘Cause, the bear was not concerned at all ’bout what got broke and what didn’t. It just wanted out of there.”
The bear did cause some damage. In addition to the broken window pane where the bear entered, it punctured a picture of a bear that was hanging on the wall and damaged a couple of leather chairs, says assistant store manager Sonya Shook.
In between his misadventures, the bear slept.
In a photo taken by one of the store owners, the bear is seen curled up on the floor next to a hearth sleeping.
The rangers eventually corraled the bear to the front door and “it went running down the street,” says Shook. She and another store associate, Hannah Bleckley, later had fun with the situation in a Facebook Live post on social media.
“We’ve had a beary crazy day today,” Shook says in the video. “The news is true. We did have a bear in here. It was a real bear. It’s very exciting!”
Shook says this is the first time in Reeves Hardware’s 94-year history that they’ve had a bear in the store.
“A previous store across the street had a cow go thru the window one time years ago,” she tells Now Habersham. But that’s a different story for another day.
