Goin' On A Bear Hunt

"It was something man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it."

– Sallah, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

"You can never, ever listen to this."

– Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man.

Introduction

"Goin' On A Bear Hunt" (AKA "The Preschool Trauma Tape") was a song released on the 2000 studio album "Kids in Action" by children's music artists Greg & Steve. The song tells the story of the unnamed narrators venturing out in the woodlands with a group of preschool-aged children to hunt for wild bears, only to explore a dark cavern and just manage to make it back home before being attacked by a provoked grizzly bear. The song was played on several occasions at the preschool program at Sarah W. Starkweather Elementary School in the West Chester Area School District, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Based on his own personal anecdotes, Samuel Burke supposedly attended this preschool program and was terrified the first time the song was played for his class. Furthermore, whenever the song was played after this point, he'd frantically beg to leave the classroom until the song was over. In his own words from 2021...

"The first couple minutes of the song started off simple and innocent enough, but then, it all got very, very quiet. The kids and their guides were lost in the woods, seemingly in the dark, before discovering a bear getting ready to charge. At that point, they literally began running for their lives, the tension only ceasing when the door to their house was shut tight. Oh, my god, that tension literally shook me to the core. Hell, I might as well have watched Bill Maher's Religulous at age eight. The trauma could only get worse from there."