Clinton Hill residents have been on the lookout for a loose lemur roaming the streets after flyers popped up in the neighborhood over the weekend.
The posters claimed that a 4-year-old lemur by the name of Beans escaped from his cage while in transit through the nabe on March 30, offering a substantial reward for his return.
Such antics would not be out of the ordinary for the borough, which has a long history of exotic pets sightings — but this lemur is a leg-puller.
One prank-loving couple decided to pull off their most elaborate caper this April Fool’s Day to hoodwink their Clinton Hill apartment building neighbors.
Crystal Bennett and Andy Gonzalez told Brooklyn Paper that they have been pulling an April 1 prank on their building — home to seven families — for the past 15 years, each year more elaborate than the last.
“My husband and I are both big pranksters,” said Bennett. “Every April Fool’s Day was like World War Three. It got so intense and competitive that we decided one year to unite forces to target our building, but we’re all friends and we’re very close and we all have families the same age.”
In previous years, neighbors were tricked by the couple into believing that their building is on the site of a former burial ground after contractors unearthed some fake bones in the back lot. Last year, one neighborhood volunteered to take in the couple’s mail while they were out of town, only to find the lobby stacked with hundreds of fake parcels of all sizes on April. 1.
As part of this year’s ruse, the couple first circulated a photoshopped photo of a lemur in one of the building’s air conditioning vents among the neighbor’s group chat, asking if anyone else had spotted the creature.
The second part of the prank was printing out the missing lemur flyers and posting them on trees and lampposts in their neighborhood during the early hours of the morning, in an effort to increase the validity of their initial “sighting” of the primate.
After putting in the ground work, they brought the prank home by shredding some boxes in the building lobby and placed a moving cat toy inside to make it look like the lemur had ventured out of the vents.
But what started as some light-hearted neighborly fun, quickly got “out of control” once the flyers started circulating on social media.
“I am now getting emails like crazy from as far as Kansas, with people asking if we have found the lemur and if Beans is ok,” Bennett said, noting that her neighbors have grown skeptical around this time of year from years of being pranked. “I’m getting tons of comments and emails and outreach from people all over the city, but our neighbors have said nothing. And I think it’s because they don’t want to give away the fact that they fell for it or not.”
Bennett and Gonzalez said they have been enjoying the wider reaction to their April Fool’s Day joke, and intend on upping the ante next year.
“It’s actually pretty funny just walking the neighborhood and hearing people’s comments and seeing everyone in the street, collecting around every poster and taking pictures of it,” said Bennett. “The heat is on for 2025.”
