'You Could See Them Looking At Me': Woman Finds 3 Bears In Yard

CORNING, NY — Reese Gatto wasn't named Goldilocks. But maybe she should have been.

Around 3 a.m. Friday, she was dead asleep when her fiance burst into their bedroom in Corning going on about something about there being bears outside.

Bears. Plural. In Corning. She didn't believe him.

Gatto, a nurse who previously worked in the Pennsylvania oil fields for half a decade, is familiar with bears.

"There were tons of bears there," she says, referring to Trout Run, Pennsylvania. "I know what bears look like."

And they don't usually mosey out to the middle of Corning, a small city of about 11,000 people in Steuben County on the Chemung River, she tells Patch. Gatto and her fiance, Chris, live in the middle of town.

Bears? Impossible. But that's exactly what her fiance said was in their yard.

"He's like 'There are three bears,' and I was like, 'We live in Corning. There are not three bears in Corning. That's crazy."

He tells her to go to the window. See for herself.

Sure enough, she was wrong.

"They were tearing into the garbage," she says.

She opened the front door to the porch. She just had to take photos of what was going down in the yard. Six eyes met her gaze in the dead of night.

"I thought it was crazy. Like there are three bears and they aren't even scared," she says. "They were stopping to look at me! Like, you could see them looking at me as I'm like 'Go away! You're making a mess!"

She was able to record video too.

"Yes I do," Gatto tells Patch. "There's cursing in it though."

Indeed, there is a curse word in the video, in which the black bears can be seen tearing through the garbage, not a care in the world.

"They're making a mess!" a stunned Gatto can be heard saying in the video, along with other colorful language.

The bears stayed 15-20 minutes. Just sitting there eating the garbage.

At the end of the night, the only injuries were to her four trash bags. Fortunately, Gatto says, the garbage workers still took them.

Photo/video credit: Reese Gatto, used with permission.