Disappearing cat in a very small house

[TripleKatPad]

I had a traumatic evening this week. My cat disappeared. By the end of the night, I was a raving lunatic. I was imagining burglars and/or a maniac tormenting me. And worse.

Star character of this story: Junebug, a 2-year-old now, but once a feral 4-week-old kitten who wandered into my life. She growls low in her throat at doorbells, mailmen, lawn mowers, garbage trucks, shadows, pretty much anything. Often such an occurrence is followed by a beeline for under the bed.

Prologue Part 1: Two weeks ago, I came home from work and found my TV on. This seemed very odd to me, as I am quite fastidious about my leave-for-work routine: lights off, lunch packed, cats fed, meds taken, hatches battened, etc. I had a momentary thought that a sicko came into my house and did nothing but turn on the TV (because nothing else was disturbed). I realized that was silly.

Prologue Part 2: Junebug had developed a nasty abscess on her neck, probably a result of a bout of rough-housing-gone-wrong with her older sister, Purrle. The wound was huge and...too gross to share here. I took her to the vet a week to the day after the TV incident. We came home with antibiotics (2 a day for two weeks!), but otherwise I was assured that June would be fine.

Fast-forward exactly one week from the vet visit (and 2 weeks since the TV thing) to the very bad night this week: I came home from work and prepared to work another couple hours as is usual for me. (I don't mind working from home when I can put on my ratty "air conditioned" shorts and tank.)

My other two cats, Purrle and Sushi, greeted me at the door like they always do. It was no surprise that June did not. She usually hangs back to make sure the person coming in is safe.

After an hour, I realized she had not come into the kitchen to get her supper so I took a tour around the house, using my best kitty-voice to coax her out. No Junebug. Ok, I thought, she's snoozing somewhere. I'll check again in 30 minutes.

So as not to drag this out more than I have, I will describe the following five hours this way: I began circuiting my 900-square-foot house, room-to-room, with ever-increasing levels of desperation. I looked in every nook and cranny. I looked in the obvious places and then crawled with a flashlight looking in the impossible places. I looked in the refrigerator, washer, dryer, behind the furnace, and in the kitchen cabinets that even I cannot reach. I pulled everything out from under the bed, searched all three closets a dozen times. She wasn't in the linen cubby for sure. Even though I knew she could not get outside, I wandered around outside my house and street in between the inside circuits, plaintively calling for her.

By 11pm I was a wreck. I had gone through several stages of grief and wild imaginings by this time. My baby is lost outside. My baby has had a relapse and is in a coma. The maniac came into my house and stole my baby just to torture me.

I poured myself a stiff drink and started to write about it (my therapy for distressful situations). I prepared an email to my boss telling him I would not be in the next morning. After I had finished several paragraphs, I glanced to my right...and there she was. I don't know from which room she came. She was just there. She was very scared and skittish, wouldn't let me touch her, but otherwise seemed unharmed.

Four days later, she's still skittish, but has been in view when I have come home from work.

I have been in the same house since 1993 and this is not the first time a cat "disappeared" on me or the first time I have searched top to bottom trying to find it. Eventually, he/she would come out. But it never was a five-hour ordeal like this.

What I really want to know after all of this is where in the world could she have been after I had convinced myself that I searched every possible place.

I'm hoping someone else here has a similar story to share, just so I won't feel too inadequate.

Edited to change foot-square to square-foot. Duh.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. You have witnessed the feline capacity for locating portals into other universes

and slipping through those portals to hang out in such other universes, doing who knows what. After awhile they materialize back into our world (maybe when they get hungry or bored), and just like your cat did, they will just sit there with this look, like, "What??"

That's the only explanation I can offer; my cats have done this, too.

[badgerpup]

2. Had that happen once in a studio apartment.

ONE room...plus bathroom and kitchen. Cat disappeared. Knew she hadn't gone out, since the egress checkpoint ran through me.

She'd crawled underneath a chest of drawers and gotten into one of the drawers from the back and inside.
Found her purely by chance...had checked all the possible/probable places, even remotely so.
Now let's go for IMpossible/probable. BINGO!


Personally, I'm convinced that some of them have teleportation skills and truly DO walk through walls.

[TripleKatPad]

5. I had not considered KittyTeleportation

All I got was an inscrutable stare when I questioned June about that possibility.

[elleng]

7. Thats a good one, backing into chest of drawers!

How often have we discovered 'lost' papers/gloves that way?

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

9. I had a cat do that same thing!

Who is going to look in a drawer in a chest?! But now I do. One of mine likes to sit on shelves in the armoire nd once in a while she gets shut in for short durations.

Occasionally, they do have to teleport and report to the Grand Kitty Master of the universe on their progress in enslaving all of humanity.

I have one sure fire method for corralling all kittys - to shake a bag of their favorite treats loudly in a maraca type fashion. They come rocketing out of rooms and richocheting down the hallways. If someone doesn't show up after the treat rattle, THEN I get concerned.

[spooky3]

25. sounds as if your screen name is especially appropriate!

one of mine also comes like a rocket when she hears dry food being shaken in its plastic bin. The key being turned in the lock brings another one. Whistles and calling sometimes work too, but only when they felt like it anyway.

[mak3cats]

27. This works in kitchen cupboards, too...

...talk about furry silverware.

[Why Syzygy]

3. Is that a rental house?

If not, and I were you, I would get the locks changed. And FOLLOW her ;)

[TripleKatPad]

4. Maybe I need a KittyCam?

That's what a friend suggested.

[Why Syzygy]

6. Great Idea!

She can wear one of those little helmets ... or ...
http://www.thinkfasttoys.com/product.php?productid=24963&cat=1045&page=1&gclid=CPbo4qiEk5wCFQG7sgodLA0ieQ

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. When I was living in a four-person household in graduate school,

our communal cat failed to return from one of his nightly patrols of the neighborhood.

After 24 hours, we went outside and began calling his name. We heard a faint, disembodied meow. We called again. Same faint meow.

We followed the meows, and they led to the neighbors' backyard, but we couldn't see the cat. Finally, one of the housemates suggested that he might be in the neighbors' basement.

We knocked on the front door and said that we thought our cat had wandered into their basement. They said we were free to look, so we went downstairs into an absolutely bare basement--no furniture, no appliances, just a furnace and hot water heater. No sign of the cat either.

We called his name again. This time the meowing seemed to come out of the basement wall. We were mighty puzzled. Then one of the housemates noticed a metal door in the wall. We opened it, and out jumped the cat, giving us this indignant look that said, "Why didn't you idiots rescue me before this?" He had somehow gotten trapped in the neighbors' coal scuttle.
*************
More recently, I woke up to find that Kidley had vanished. He wasn't on my bed, or under my bed, or anywhere else in the bedroom, nor in the office, nor the office closet, nor anywhere else he usually hangs out. I was baffled, because I live in an apartment, and while I've heard of cats opening doors, I've never heard of them undoing deadbolt locks.

He turned out to be in plain sight, but just in a place I hadn't thought of looking. I have a two-level end table next to the couch, and he had decided that the lower level, under the place where the lamp sits, made a nice little cat cave.

[Blue Gardener]

10. They are amazing creatures

Just when you think you've found all their favorite hiding places, they find another one.

[Island Blue]

11. Do you have a bed with a box spring?

I couldn't find my Luke one day (who by your description is apparently the twin of your Junebug). I searched EVERYWHERE in my small house. Finally I somehow realized that there was a hole in the gauzy (sp?) material on the bottom of the box spring and he had crawled up in there and found a "home". Needless to say, I quickly removed the gauzy material because I was afraid he'd get trapped in there or something.

[CountAllVotes]

12. I have two cats that do this

it is quite freaky and I attribute it to Feline Teleporter syndrome. It cannot be cured FYI. :rofl:

:dem:

[alstephenson]

13. I had the same thing happen many years ago.

I was in the process of moving and couldn't find my indoor kitty. I looked everywhere inside and walked the neighborhood just in case she might have gotten out. I was frantic! Then all of a sudden she comes out from under the kitchen cabinets. She had crawled up into the corner area, which was open at the bottom but was a "false" corner - it didn't go through to the cabinet. I have no idea how she got up into such a small space, but I was certainly glad to see her and glad to know where she had been!

[Jersey Devil]

14. Had a cat that disappeared one night and came home 7 years later

When he came back he had a collar with a phone number on it and when we called we found it was a neighbor's child who thought he was abandoned and took him in. Naturally we returned him but it sure was funny to see the cat walk in the door after all that time.

[XemaSab]

15. Did you check behind the books on the bookshelf?

:shrug:

[david13]

16. No. These cats all have the ability to make themselves invisible.

Don't you know that. It was first identified I think by T S Eliot as well as C L Dodgeson as Lewis Carroll.
I returned from Palm Springs recently with mine, and he went into an armoire I keep open with a towel inside for his sleeping pleasure. It took me 2 hours to find him. More recently he started sleeping wedged behind the paper shredder. That took half an hour to find him.
Outside is ridiculous. I don't allow him out anymore. He roamed about one block east and under a house. For some reason I thought he was around maybe in a yard and I knocked on a door and asked to search the back yard for him. 2 old ladies let me in to the living room. They couldn't hear but I could hear him under the floor, under the house, calling up to me. I had to go home and wait 2 hours for him to come back.
They love to hide, particularly when they know you are looking for them. They think it is funny.
Mine never turned the tv on, though, he will set off the alarm on my car, not by the car, but with the remote.
He will turn the tv off. He doesn't like the sound.
Ah, but to me it is so much fun.
dc

[Louisiana1976]

17. I live in a 1-BR apartment and my cat still manages to find hiding places.

[blueraven95]

18. I'm sorry you were so freaked out

I think just about every cat owner has had that experience, but it's worse somehow when said cat is injured.


My I recommend Lloyd Alexander's "Time Cat" - it's a kid's book, but I find the concept, that cats have the ability to travel through time and space on adventures, rather comforting whenever I'm doing the desperate search of the house.

[FloriTexan]

19. What a nightmare...

I too had one who climbed up in side the box springs. Another one, disappeared on me when I was moving from a small one bedroom apartment. I had locked him in the bathroom while the movers came and went so he wouldn't escape and after all the furniture was moved out, I left him to wander the apartment. We unloaded everthing at the new apartment and I went back to retrieve him and he was GONE. There was no furniture, no boxes, no nothing for him to hide in. I was looking up the chimney and checking doors and windows, all access was blocked. After about an hour of panic I found that he must have paniced when he came out of the bathroom and saw all of HIS belongings were gone, so he somehow stuffed himself into the dryer vent in the wall. He was all but invisible only saw him via the glint of a flashlight on his eyes. Getting him out was a painful process.

[TripleKatPad]

20. Checking back in from my original OP

Wanted to share that all these weeks later, my Junebug has fully recovered.

And she is still testing me. She regularly disappears for hours on end.

It is clear she has found a hidey-hole I cannot find. That's ok with me. I accept my role as an inferior...the lowly food-giver, ear-rubber and convenient platform upon which to sleep.

It is my happy lot.

[BrklynLiberal]

21. Glad to find that Junebug is feeling better.

I have also experienced that weird sensation of knowing my cat has to be in the house, but being totally unable to locate her.
They do hide and I do believe they teleport into other dimensions. That has to be the answer...

[ginnyinWI]

24. I hear you.

I too am a lowly ear-rubber and warm lap, satisfying the whims of Zelda, the cat who can disappear into the basement without a trace. But when she shows up and wants to knead on a lap (with claws) and settle down for a long snooze, we are so happy to have her company that we will sit much longer than we wanted to, just so as not to disturb Her Highness. It's like, "oh you walked out of the room and left the remote out of my reach, and Zelda is on my lap! I couldn't get up and had to watch the commercial!" Yeah like that--we're at her mercy. :)

And she is big cat and takes up a whole lap--it's very warm and cozy with a living fur rug on your lap.

[Submariner]

22. My kitty cat did the same hiding away routine, but in the late 1980's

it was easy to get him to reveal himself. We would press the button on the automatic can opener and the whirring noise would get him up next to the can opener in about 10 seconds, no matter where he was hiding in the house.

It was a Pavlov's dog kind of conditioning I guess. Can opener whirring = chunky albacore tuna packed in spring water (he HATED tuna packed in oil)....fussy little bastage.

[kestrel91316]

23. This is part and parcel of owning cats. I will admit to becoming

completely hysterical on at least two occasions when I couldn't find one or another of my cats. Of course, it also happened once with my Great Pyrenees back in 1982, and it's not easy to misplace a 125 lb white dog in a tiny house. That was embarrassing.

[david13]

26. What a beautiful cat Ginny. One time my cat got a pigeon into the

house. I came home and there was a pigeon looking out the window, with few feathers left, wishing he could get out. I had a difficult time figuring out how my cat got the pigeon into the house.
dc

[mak3cats]

28. I have several places:

I've had cats for years, and I always have at least one that channels Houdini. Here are some of the spots that I've found my critters:

1. In a lidded copy paper box in the closet (they nose the lid up, get in and let the lid back down). I found Gabe the first time he did this (after an hour of panic) only because I finally spotted him peeking at me through the hand-hole on the end of the box.

2. In the bottom of the washer (where the motor is). Bho was a real scaredy-cat when he first came to live with me and somehow was able to squeeze himself between the washer and the wall and enter the machine through a four-inch opening on the back.

3. And the newest trick (just in the last couple of weeks): Gabe has discovered that he can leap from a table in the basement to the top of a steel beam (it supports my living room floor), and from there get on top of one of the heat ducts. This winter, that will be the first place I'll look...