Wild story about mother bear and cub rescuing lost girl in Alaska is fake

A rumor (archived) that circulated online in December 2025 claimed that a pair of trail camera photos authentically showed a mother bear and her cub rescuing a lost girl in Alaska.

According to the story, a young girl vanished during a January storm. Rescuers reportedly found her the next day curled up together with a mother bear and her cub. 

For example, on Dec. 9, the Facebook page StoryTime posted the claim. The story began, “In January 2025, in the snowy forests of Alaska, a little girl vanished during a heavy mist storm, but the trail cameras told a story no one could have imagined.”

Other Facebook users also shared the same claim alongside the alleged trail cam photos (archived, archived, archived).

Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting the tale (archived, archived, archived, archived). Because of the unusual nature of the story, it would have garnered widespread media attention if true.

The StoryTime Facebook page, which has the username “AJAnimalking,” is a frequent source of fake stories about animals. Snopes has previously debunked various other trail cam-based tales from this page. The page’s bio reads, “story (noun) – an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment,” which appeared to suggest some accounts on the site may not be true. 

This particular story appeared to use photos generated by artificial intelligence, which was also the case for other StoryTime posts Snopes has debunked. In this case, the “trail cam photos” showed a bear cub and a girl walking together in the snow but showed only one set of footprints. The time stamp on the photos, though partially obscured, did not align with the January date provided in the story caption.

Given the above, we rate this claim fake.

Alaska is home to brown, black and grizzly bears. Snopes reached out to the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife to ask if it had heard of the story or whether it was likely to be true given the way bears are known to interact with humans. We await a reply to our query.

Snopes contacted a manager of the StoryTime Facebook page to ask about the fictional stories displayed on its feed and will update this story if we receive more information.

These stories all very much resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.”

For further reading, Snopes has extensively reported on AI-generated stories about animals.