After walking through the bat cave at Karlsruhe Zoo a visitor returned home to find that she had accidentally taken a bat home in her jacket.

Woman accidentally smuggles home bat from zoo in Germany

After a 30-year-old woman and her young son visited Karlsuhe Zoo in Baden-Württemberg they returned home to find that the woman had accidentally smuggled a short-tailed fruit bat home in her jacket.

Elina Öfele had been in the zoo’s bat cave when the small animal unsuspectingly crawled into her jacket. Only when Öfele and her son arrived home did they discover the bat on her chest, before it flopped onto the floor.

Real bat mistaken for Halloween prank

Initially, Öfele believed that her husband had played an early Halloween trick on her, before realising the bat was real.

“I got an enormous fright and thought the bat was dead,” the school teacher told the Badischen Neusten Nachrichten, until the bat moved away and bit her on the hand.

After seeking the advice of a bat expert, Öfele and her family set up a nest for the animal in their bathroom, keeping it overnight in a cardboard box with a banana and honey mixed with water.

The next day the family returned the animal to the zoo. “We returned the bat to the bat cave and she is doing well,” zoo spokesperson Timo Deible told the newspaper.

Thumb image credit: Manoj Kumar Tuteja / Shutterstock.com