Alaska woman attacked by bear up through her toilet

Shannon Stevens said ‘I got out there and sat down on toilet and immediately something bit my butt right as I sat down. I jumped up and I screamed when it happened’

Alaska woman Shannon Stevens was bitten in the butt by a bear as she sat down on the seat of an outhouse in the wilderness in the southeastern part of the state.

Ms Stevens told The Associated Press: “I got out there and sat down on the toilet and immediately something bit my butt right as I sat down. I jumped up and I screamed when it happened.”

Her brother Erik Stevens heard her yell and rushed over to see what was going on. He said: “I opened the toilet seat and there’s just a bear face just right there at the level of the toilet seat, just looking right back up through the hole, right at me."

They had travelled by snowmobile into the backcountry to stay at Mr Stevens' yurt about 20 miles northwest of the town of Haines.

He added: “I just shut the lid as fast as I could. I said, ‘There’s a bear down there, we got to get out of here now. And we ran back to the yurt as fast as we could.”

Ms Stevens said of her injury: “It was bleeding, but it wasn’t super bad."

Staying in the yurt overnight, they found the bear's tracks all over the surrounding area the next morning as they ventured outside to see that it had left the area.

“You could see them across the snow, coming up to the side of the outhouse,” Ms Stevens said of the pawprints in the snow.

They thought the bear had got into the outhouse through an opening in the backdoor at the bottom of the structure.

Ms Stevens said: “I expect it’s probably not that bad of a little den in the winter."

The hunch of Alaska Department of Fish and Game Wildlife Management Biologist Carl Koch is that it was a black bear based on pictures of the prints and a reported sighting of a black bear half a mile away two days after the butt-biting incident.

Despite it being winter and hibernation-season, Mr Koch says they get reports of bear sightings all the time even at this time of year. Last year was a record year for bear problems around Haines. Mr Koch cited a low salmon supply and less than great berry season as possible reasons.

He said: “It is also possible a bear couldn’t put on enough fat when they go in the den, that they might be out and about more often or earlier."

Mr Koch suggested that Ms Stevens might have been swatted by a paw rather than bitten.

“As far as getting swatted on the butt when you’re sitting down in winter, she could be the only person on Earth that this has ever happened to, for all I know,” he said.

Mr Stevens said he would carry bear spray in future and Ms Stevens told The Associated Press she was "going to be better about looking inside the toilet before sitting down, for sure".