It is a living nightmare that came true for Allena Hansen, then 58: attacked in her own garden by a ravenous bear. Adding to the horror, the animal was eating her alive when she came to and decided to fight back hard – with the help of her pet dogs.
And now she has told her shocking story to hit podcast, How I Survived. Listen to a preview clip below…
Allena was working outside on her Californian ranch when a black bear suddenly appeared – and her life will never be the same.
‘It was about 10 feet away from me, and staring straight at me, like it had been waiting for me…I knew exactly what was going to happen and it did,’ Allena told the podcast. ‘And the thing was on me within a half a second of making eye contact.’
Like something out of the worst kind of horror movie, Allena came to with the bear chewing on her face.
‘I just remember coming to in the fetal position, in the wet sand, with this thing that had grabbed me by the ears, and bit into my face, and was sitting on me trying to chew my head off.
‘The horror of the situation was just overwhelming, and it hurt, obviously, like hell. I didn’t really have a plan of attack. I was just numb…’
When the bear bit into her eye and began to spit out her teeth, Allena decided she was not going to just lay there and accept her fate.
‘Do you know who I am, bear? Do you have any clue who you are eating?’ Allena thought.
The brave woman jammed her thumb into its eye, and called for her dogs, Deke the Mastiff and RK the Wolfhound, who were sleeping nearby. It was then that she blacked out.
‘I woke up, and I heard this screaming, and growling, and grunting, and fighting. I had my Irish Wolfhound, who was huge, and my English Mastiff, who’s also huge, and the bear were all on top of me, and there is blood, and fur, and screaming, and teeth, and claws, and me underneath all of this bleeding out,’ Allena told How I Survived.
Taking advantage of the dogs’ brave act, Allena managed to escape and find her way back to her car. Driving herself to the local fire station, she was then airlifted to hospital.
The bear had partially eaten the orbit of Allena’s eye, destroyed the bridge of her nose, much of her upper gums and palate, torn off her ears and lips and broken her jaw. She’d also lost 14 teeth and a segment of her left cheekbone.
‘There’s pictures all over the internet of what I looked like. You can’t even tell that’s a human being. It looks like a lump of hamburger, pretty much,’ Allena said.
Surgeons managed to put Allena back together. ‘I looked like nothing so much as this exquisitely executed patchwork quilt with thousands of little tiny stitches all over my face,’ she told the podcast.
‘Even just a year or two after the attack, I could pass in public, and nobody would really notice unless I drew attention to it, or mentioned it,’ Allena said.
Her dogs, RK and Deke, survived the attack.
Now nearly 70, Allena has a message for others who find themselves in a traumatic situation.
‘You’d be amazed what you can do if you have to, but you have to do something. The key to surviving is it doesn’t matter what you do, just start the ball rolling. Do something, and then improvise as you go along. You never know where it’s going to end up but it’s better than lying there, and letting something eat your head off!’
For more gripping survival stories, subscribe to How I Survived on iTunes, Acast, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
