A Reddit user shared a story he said came from someone he knew personally, and the whole thing happened in one of those ways that sounds almost funny until you picture yourself being the guy in the stand. According to the post, the hunter was already settled into his ladder stand in the dark, sitting there quietly waiting on daylight and deer movement, when a black bear came in under him. At first, the bear was just nosing around beneath the stand like bears often do, checking scents, probably curious about whatever had been left in the area and whatever human smell had drifted down from above. The hunter stayed put, figuring the bear would move on.
It didn’t.
Instead, the bear started climbing the ladder.
From the way the story was told, this was not some little bear poking at the bottom rung and wandering off. The animal actually came up the ladder toward the platform while the hunter was still in the stand. The man did not want to shoot it, and he also did not have any easy exit once the bear committed to coming up. So he froze and hoped the thing would lose interest before it got any farther. It did not lose interest. It climbed high enough that the weight and movement started affecting the stand itself.
Then the situation got truly bad.
According to the post, as the bear climbed onto the stand, the whole setup began peeling away from the tree. Anybody who has hunted from ladder stands can picture exactly how awful that is. The platform and ladder are strapped tight to the trunk, and they feel solid right up until something shifts the wrong way. In this case, a black bear crawling into the structure was enough to start prying the whole thing loose. So now the hunter was not just trapped with a bear climbing into his stand. He was trapped in a stand that was starting to come off the tree with a bear in it too.
The man was still inside while all of this was happening.
That is the detail that really carries the story. He was not watching from another tree or hearing about it later. He was in the stand while the bear climbed up, got onto the structure, and began dragging the whole thing away from the trunk. The poster said the hunter later described it as the scariest thing that had ever happened to him, even while laughing about it after the fact. That sounds about right. Some hunting stories turn funny later because the only other option is to keep feeling the terror of them forever.
The bear eventually pulled enough of the stand free that the whole thing basically became the bear’s problem too. The story, as told in the thread, was that the bear more or less stole the stand, which is where the title came from. It was not “bear wandered underneath me” or “bear climbed partway up and dropped back down.” It was a full-on mess where the animal committed to the stand hard enough that the hunter wound up losing the stand to the bear in the process.
The poster also made a point of saying the hunter obviously did not want to kill the bear and recognized that the whole encounter got as bad as it did partly because he stayed there trying not to escalate it. That makes the whole thing even more vivid. There was no glorious ending with some clean shot or loud warning that solved everything. The hunter basically had to live through a black bear invading his stand and tearing it off the tree while he was still in it.
So the story came down to this: a man sat in a ladder stand waiting to hunt, a black bear came in below him, climbed the ladder, got into the stand itself, and caused the entire setup to start peeling off the tree with the hunter still inside. By the end, the bear had effectively taken the stand, and the hunter was left with what he later called the scariest experience of his life.
What do you think — if a black bear actually started climbing into your ladder stand while you were already sitting in it, would you stay put and hope it backed off, or bail out before the whole stand started coming loose?
Original Reddit post: Bear steals a man’s treestand
