Bear destroys a van to escape, then wanders into a house and eats a box of muffin mix

Her family survived the incident. Her van “not so much.”

That was a North Carolina woman’s humorous take on a startling incident that she captured on camera, when a black bear smashed its way out of her family’s van.

How the bear got stuck inside of the van that was parked at the Asheville home is almost as captivating as the short clip of it forcing its way out.

Almost.

Nicole Minkin Lissenden shared the video on YouTube. It shows the bear pushing on the driver’s side window, causing it to explode, which allowed the bear to climb out.

But before that, Lissenden said she “unwittingly closed him in.”

One of the van’s doors was open Sunday, and Lissenden said she noticed trash was nearby, and closed the door, the Citizen-Times reported.

When she returned to the van, she was startled to realize a bear was inside, Lissenden wrote in the description of the video on YouTube.

“The bear was getting more and more upset and thrashing around a lot, and that set off the alarm and started honking the horn,” Lissenden said, according to the Citizen-Times.

The keyless entry was not working, because the bear had damaged the car, and Lissenden’s husband “had to unlock it with the key,” she wrote on YouTube.

But the video shows as soon as he did that, and wisely ran away, the bear smashed the window.

As Lissenden put it on YouTube, “The bear found another way out.”

“He tore all of the kids’ car seats out and tore up the seats to the car. He was just thrashing and clawing trying to get out of that van,” Lissenden said according to the Citizen-Times, which reported the bear then ran to the next-door neighbors home, ransacked the kitchen and ate a box of muffin mix before the owners startled it into running away by yelling at the bear.

This story was originally published September 18, 2018 at 2:19 PM with the headline "Bear destroys a van to escape, then wanders into a house and eats a box of muffin mix."