ODDLY ENOUGH

ODDLY ENOUGH

Workers find mummified monkey in old store

MINNEAPOLIS

Workers renovating the old Dayton’s department store in downtown Minneapolis have discovered a mystery: the mummified remains of a monkey.

Crews found the carcass recently in an air duct on the seventh floor of the century-old building.

Cailin Rogers is a spokeswoman for the Dayton’s Project, an office, retail and restaurant complex going into the building. She says developers don’t know where the monkey came from or how it ended up in the air duct.

A historic site called Old Minneapolis posted a photo of the monkey on its Facebook page and solicited answers.

Alan Freed is one of the site’s co-administrators. He says one likely answer came from someone who posted on the page saying a longtime Dayton’s employee told him a monkey escaped from an eighth-floor pet store into the air conditioning ductwork in the 1960s.

Jail job applicant not hired, arrested instead in theft case from Maine

MANCHESTER, N.H.

A woman applying for a job at a New Hampshire county jail has been arrested because it turns out she was wanted on a charge in Maine.

Police say Kristina Hoefs, of Manchester, applied for the job early this month at the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections. But workers soon realized she was being sought on a theft-related offense in Maine.

Hoefs was taken into custody and taken to police headquarters. She was scheduled for arraignment.

It’s unknown if Hoefs has a lawyer. No phone number for her was found.

Handwritten note lands man VW bus of his dreams

LINDENHURST, N.Y.

A man has the car of his dreams eight years after he slipped a note inside the window of a blue 1971 Volkswagen bus that the then-16-year-old called his “future car.”

Kyle Cropsey of Lindenhurst, N.Y., received a call recently from Cris Mead, of Oakland, Calif. Mead’s father, Cornelius, had purchased the van new and named it Matilda, taking his family on cross-country trips.

The son was cleaning it out after his father’s death when he came across Cropsey’s note tucked in the VW’s log book.

Cris Mead tells Newsday the family decided to give Cropsey the van, on the condition he update them on its restoration and “go on plenty of adventures.”

Cropsey, who is 23 and teaches English, says “it was fate.”

Associated Press