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Patti and Sam Carey were enjoying a pleasant Farmville evening at home on their backyard patio on Pinecrest Road Thursday, May 28, when they spotted a bear just outside their fence about 30 steps away.

“It was crazy!” Patti Carey said.

She said she and her husband moved to Farmville in June 2019 from Amelia. In the short time they have lived on Pinecrest, she said she had seen a lot of deer and also a fox multiple times, but never a bear.

That changed at about 8:45 p.m. Thursday.

“My husband and I were sitting outside, and we were facing each other, and I was facing the opposite way, and he just kind of out of the blue says, ‘There’s a bear,’” Patti said. “And I thought, ‘Right, sure, right.’”

But when she turned around, she noted being astonished to see that, indeed, it was a bear, not far outside their fenced-in backyard. The bear was located near the corner of Irving Street and Pinecrest Road, but it was actually in the yard of a neighbor with a Fourth Avenue address.

Patti said while the bear was not huge, it was not a cub.

“I jumped up then,” she said. As she described the incident to others later, “a friend of mine said, ‘Did you scream and run in the house?’ I said, ‘No, I wanted to get a picture.’”

Patti said the bear went down to the end of their neighbor’s yard where there are some trees, and it stopped there. The Careys’ dog, which was inside their fence, saw the bear at this point and began barking excitedly.

“The bear just kind of turned around and looked, and then he just kind of ignored us, thankfully,” Patti said.

It was around those trees where the bear stopped briefly that the Careys lost track of it. Out of concern, Patti called a neighbor in the vicinity of that location.

“I didn’t want her to go outside in her back

(yard),” Patti said of the neighbor. “We didn’t know where (the bear) went. She said that she had seen bear droppings before in her driveway, but she had never seen a bear.”

Patti said the bear appeared to be headed across Pinecrest to the back of Creekwood Trail.

Speculating on where the bear came from, along with the other wildlife she has seen, Patti said she wonders if they follow the little creek nearby.

“There’s a lot of woods over here next to us, because Pinecrest is a dead-end road,” she said. “And then behind that is Creekwood. And there’s still a lot of forest over there, a lot of woods.”