‘The great escape!’ by 43 monkeys from Yemassee facility no surprise to residents

As a steady flow of rain fell on Yemassee, South Carolina Thursday morning, the search was on for a troop of female monkeys on the loose.

There are more monkeys than people in Yemassee, a town 25 miles northwest of Beaufort off of Interstate 95 with a population of just over 1,000. Last night around 9 p.m., 43 of the 6,000 Rhesus macaque monkeys from the Alpha Genesis facility , a primate research center on Castle Hall Road, escaped when three doors were left open.

The people who call Yemassee home were not entirely shocked by the news. In 2014, 26 monkeys escaped and 19 more escaped two years later in 2016. But they were surprised by the number of escapees this time around.

Tabitha Jackson has lived in Yemassee for her entire life. She jokingly said that her uncle, Willie Frazier, who lived behind the post office in town would tell her stories about waking up in the morning to a monkey swinging from muscadine vines eating grapes in his backyard.

"I say just let them roam. They'll come home when they're ready," Jackson said Thursday morning.

Karl Nettles, an ice distributor in town, playfully called the incident "the great escape," as he unloaded bags of ice off his loading truck into a storage room. Like Jackson, he thinks the monkeys will eventually make their way back to the facility, where they "eat better than we do," or will face the unfortunate fate of running into the occasional territorial hog or black bear in the wooded areas throughout Yemassee.

The monkeys are so well taken care of that he "wouldn't mind being down there" with them, Mayor Colin Moore said.