A trip to a Spirit Halloween store in Plano turned into a wild scene Monday night after a pet monkey escaped its owner and began swinging through the rafters.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s usually a store filled with fake frights became a real-life spectacle as shoppers watched the animal climb poles, swing from wires and crawl across the ceiling for more than 30 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was animal kingdom live,\u201d said Arlene Pinkston, who was shopping with her daughters at the Spirit Halloween off U.S. 75.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy daughter looked up and she said, \u2018What in the world?\u2019 and she’s like, \u2018Is that a real monkey?\u2019 and I looked up and said, \u2018Well, it\u2019s got a diaper on so I guess it is real,\u2019\u201d Pinkston said with a laugh.<\/p>\n
Pinkston said she took out her phone to record the moment, certain no one would believe her otherwise.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019ll definitely be one that I will not forget anytime soon,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Jimmy Harris, a store employee, said the pet monkey appeared to have gotten spooked by the store\u2019s animatronic decorations and ran away from its owner.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was entertaining,\u201d Harris said. \u201cA lot of people just stood and watched it for like 30 minutes, the whole time, they were like, \u2018monkey,\u2019 and we had kids trying to catch it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Plano police were called to the store. In a statement, officers said, \u201cHe observed the monkey swinging from the rafters wearing a diaper. Eventually, a cookie was offered to the monkey by the owner, and was able to gain control of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pinkston said she wasn\u2019t there for the end of the chaos.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt had jumped down on the floor and ran past my leg, and at that point I was like, OK, I\u2019ve had enough,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Police said the monkey was not injured and posed no threat to anyone. Spirit Halloween corporate offices did not immediately respond to NBC 5\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A trip to a Spirit Halloween store in Plano turned into a wild scene Monday night after a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[160,162,161],"class_list":{"0":"post-25543","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-plano","8":"tag-plano","9":"tag-plano-headlines","10":"tag-plano-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}