Bears ‘Carjack’ Kentucky Barber’s Car In Smoky Mountains Vacation

GATLINBURG, TN — Chad Morris got more than he bargained for after he told a group of friends that he wanted to see a bear, wrestle with a bear and more or less conquer a bear. The Owensboro, Kentucky, barber who recently vacationed with his family in the Great Smoky Mountains near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, got his chance with a family of four bears.

Three bear cubs were already in his car, parked outside the cabin the family had rented. One the bears was peering out the driver’s seat window as if it was ready to take off on a joyride. The mother bear was keeping watch. All the weight-lifting Morris had been doing was wasn’t a match for the bear family.

He high-tailed it to a safe distance away and photographed the spectacle and put the pictures up on Facebook, where they’ve been shared, liked and commented upon multiple times. “This is real life,” he wrote. “Tell me we are being punked.”

“It was quite the special moment,” Morris said of the, ahem, carjacking bears in an interview with news station WBRC. "They were awful big."

It’s not unusual to see black bears in Gatlinburg. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is full of them as one of the largest protected areas for black bears in the eastern U.S., and an estimated 1,500 inhabit all elevations at the park — roughly two bears for every square mile of the park.

Morris told news station WFIE that he expected seeing bears would be a highlight of the vacation.

“I was telling my friends, I want to see a bear, I want to see a bear you know?" Morris told the news outlet. "Been lifting weights a little bit, want to see a bear, tussle with a bear and it was like well, you get four on one, now what do you wanna do big boy? And I was like nah, I’ll pass.”

After about 10 minutes, the bears left the car, but also a reminder they had been there. Though they caused little damage to the exterior of the car, one “took a chunk out of the seat,” Morris told WFIE.

In a comment on his Facebook page, Morris said they also scratched up a football and chewed up a coffee cup he had left on the console.

After the bears retreated, Morris put up the windows on his car, telling WFIE “they stayed up every time I parked.”