‘New Tenant': Bear Enters Missoula Apartments, Residents Forced to Stay Inside
We've all been trapped in our house when we didn't want an unwanted visitor to know we weren't home.
Usually, that visitor isn't 250-pounds, furry, hungry, and packing big teeth.
That's what happened at a Missoula apartment complex Monday when a black bear decided to take up residence at an apartment complex off Russell Street.
At first, ABC-FOX Montana Sports Anchor Zach Kaplan thought it was funny to see the bear on the lawn, like a "new tenant".
"I just looked over to the one of my parking lots and, I see this bear roaming. So I took a video and tweeted it out of him going across my lawn. Just thought it was funny, innocent," Kaplan tells me. "And then he started to go towards my building, which doesn't have doors kind of blocking the hallway. And so there he kind of took refuge in the first-floor hallway of my building."
"The question I had when I was looking at your pictures and your video was once he got in the hallway, were you able to go into your apartment?" I asked. "Were other people sort of stuck in their apartments or what? What did you and your neighbors do anyway?"
Listen to the interview with Zach Kaplan
"I live up on the third floor, so he was pretty far away from the staircase and he was just trying to rest. He wasn't trying to bother anybody," Kaplan explains. "But the folks on the 1st floor, oh, they were stuck in their apartment for about an hour, hour and a half. I think one actually did try to come out of the hallway. And found out there's a black bear there. And a pretty rude awakening, if you will."
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Kaplan hails from back east, so I asked him what his Penn State classmates and family thought of the bear.
"So a lot of my friends are pretty stunned. And my mother, I Facetimed my own mother at one point she 'said get away from the thing!' And I said, 'Mom, the game warden's here. I live in Montana'. You've gotta expect this kind of stuff with wildlife. Sometimes you can't be phased by it. I'm used to covering the Grizzlies here in town, but this is a very different kind of coverage."