Bear wanders into hotel lobby, climbs on furniture

Sept. 12 (UPI) -- A shocked employee of an Alaska hotel snapped photos of a black bear that wandered into the lobby and climbed on a couch before being chased out by workers.

Cheryl Verschueren, who works at the front desk of Seward's Breeze Inn, told the Seward Times the bear entered through a propped-open back door about 3 p.m. Sunday in an attempt to escape "people trying to take photographs."

The bear walked through a long hallway into the main lobby of the hotel, where Verschueren snapped photos of the animal wandering around, sniffing objects and climbing on furniture.

"Scared the crap out of me at first, but you could tell he was pretty scared," Verschueren wrote on Facebook. "Poor li'l guy."

One of the photos shows another hotel employee calmly insisting the bear get down from a lobby couch.

The workers were eventually able to direct the bear out the front door, where it then crossed the Seward Highway toward the boardwalk around Seward's lagoon.

A bear, believed to be the same animal, was spotted earlier in the day wandering around the Seward Harbor and a local Chevron station, but it remained outside until its brief hotel visit.

Verschueren said she was unaware of any previous bears inside the hotel, but one of the animals tried to enter the bank building that currently houses Seward's Wells Fargo in 1999.