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Central Park Zoo Escape Hoax

Name: Central Park Zoo Escape Hoax
Start: 1874-11-09
Location: Central Park Zoo

When: November 9, 1874
Where: Central Park Zoo
Part of: The New York Zoo hoax at Central Park

The New York Herald published a fabricated cover story on November 9, 1874, claiming a mass animal escape from the Central Park Zoo resulted in several deaths.

The hoax, known as the Central Park Zoo escape or menagerie scare, involved a false report of a mass escape of animals from the Central Park Zoo. The New York Herald's cover story claimed several people were killed by the free-roaming beasts.

Sources

Central Park Zoo Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-03

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.