Eric the Monkey’s New Glarus Escape Still Charms — And Haunts
In 1983, a rhesus monkey slipped loose near New Glarus and briefly became a local legend. Decades later, the story feels both delightfully odd and, in a post-Outbreak world, also a little unsettling.
For a stretch of days in the summer of 1983, rural New Glarus had a runaway monkey on the loose.
Not a prank, not a metaphor and not some garbled small-town rumor, but an actual 35-pound rhesus monkey named Eric, who escaped from a University of Wisconsin-affiliated research enclosure near New Glarus. It spent roughly a month roaming the hillsides, wooded areas and roadsides northwest of the village and captured the fascination of the community.
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