Valeria Möller, 29, was walking over a footbridge at around 3am after a night out at the Brygg CC pub in Skellefteå she heard a rustling in the nearby woodland.
She feared being confronted by a mugger but instead a bear ambled out and stood facing her ten metres away on the cycle path, local newspaper NSD reports.
“He looked at me and I, well, you can imagine! I hunkered down on my knees and just had time to think: what do I do if he approaches me?”
But instead the bear turned away and wandered 80 metres or so down the footpath before veering off towards the Klinfors river.
Her husband had walked ahead of her and was almost home, but now Valeria Möller phoned him to recount what had just happened. He didn’t believe her.
“But he came to get me. I wanted to wait and see if the bear would return so he’d believe me, but instead he said something like: ‘let’s go home and get you to sleep’, haha,” she told NSD.
Bear sightings are almost unheard of inside Skellefteå, a town of 32,000 located 800 kilometres north of Stockholm, and none of her friends believed her when she told them the next morning.
But Möller was certain she hadn’t been seeing things and enlisted the help of a pair of local hunters, who made their way to the scene.
“One of the hunters just said: ‘Congratulations, here’s your proof.”
Bear droppings marked the spot where she had come face to face with the animal under the glare of streetlights just hours before.
Please whitelist us to continue reading.