Warning: This article contains content which some readers may find distressing
The tragic final moments of a man and his girlfriend who were eaten alive by a bear have been brought to light.
Timothy Treadwell's fascination with grizzly bears began during childhood trips to Alaska, where he camped with his family and developed a deep interest in the wildlife there.
The New Yorker started to then film himself living with the animals in Alaska’s Katmai National Park.
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As he grew older, that interest turned into a lifelong passion, and during his time in the park he would get extremely close to the bears, occasionally touching or interacting with them.
Although he was warned about the serious risks of approaching wild grizzlies, Treadwell continued making the trip year after year.
In October 2003, just hours before he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were due to leave the park on a seaplane, the pair were attacked and killed by a bear.
The 'Grizzly Man' managed to record the brutal attack, and as the couple didn’t have time to remove the lens, there was six long minutes of chilling audio captured, documenting their deaths.
The audio begins with Amie asking if the bear is still out there, before Timothy screams: “Get out here! I’m getting killed out here!”
The tent zipper can be heard as Amie rushes out, shouting for her boyfriend to ‘play dead’.
There’s a whole lot of screaming and shouting as it seems the bear releases Timothy from its grip and Amie heads over to help. But as soon as she does that, the animal apparently clamps its jaws around his head again and he starts to scream for his partner to ‘hit the bear’.
Amie tells him to ‘fight back’ as she attacks it with a frying pan. Following a series of screams, the tape then runs out, capturing the couple’s final moments.
Willy Fulton - who was their air taxi pilot for the flight home - knew immediately what had happened when he landed at Katmai National Park.
Typically, he would find them waiting at the shore to be picked up, but instead there was an eerie silence and the 'meanest looking bear' standing on top of a pile of human remains.
The tent was found collapsed and torn alongside their unopened evening snack. A ranger spotted fingers and an arm in a 3ft-high mound of grass, mud and twigs, alongside some other remains. Nearby, what was left of Timothy’s head was found.
In the following years, a documentary about their death was made by Werner Herzog: Grizzly Man.
Additional words by Jess Battison.
Anish Vij