There really is a bear in Westport (or has been recently), but it didn’t show up at Bootleg BBQ over the weekend, as a Facebook photo posted by owner Fred Melnyk shows.

“It was totally fake,” Melnyk said Monday. “The whole thing was staged. I have a very talented friend” who photoshopped the image and a few other friends helped out to stage the photo.

Melnyk said he thought staging the bear photo would be fun, and he was right — the post immediately went viral and as of Monday morning had been viewed more than 30,000 times.

Sunday evening, Melnyk called up his friend and asked how they could set the record state and come clean in a fun way. The response was another photoshopped image that he also posted to the restaurant’s Facebook page — the bear was replaced with Sasquatch.