Years ago, Mufasa the cat managed to disappear. We looked for him all day, outside and inside, and found no trace of him. We assumed the worst, that he’d gotten out and was as good as coyote food. It was a very somber night. The next morning, my sister opens a drawer to get dressed, when there is Mufasa, calmly sleeping on some clothes. He had apparently been in that drawer all day and all night and never made a sound.
My aunt’s cat disappeared for something like six months, and when it showed up again it was a sorry, thin, unhealthy, worn-out critter. It’s their opinion that the cat must have been asleep in the furniture they moved the weekend it vanished and hopped out unnoticed at their destination - 33 miles (54km) away.
With the help of their vet it was soon back to health… only to be struck and killed by a car outside their house less than a year later.
I read this in my local newspaper 20 years ago( hence no cite). One family in my neighbouring state moved some 500 kilometers , forgetting their pet cat. 
After 2 months or so , the cat turned up at their new home and sat on the owners lap.
The cat walked some 500 kms to be with it’s owners. 
They published photograph of the cat and the owner also…
My grandpa told me this story about a bull they sold to someone when he was young ( it happened almost 100 years ago ). I have no reason to disbelieve him.
That bull somehow escaped from the new owner ( approx 30 or so kilometers) and came back to grandpa’s family … Now there was a swollen river in between, and he could never understand how the bull would have swam across that river…
When we adopted Beastie we had him isolated on the sun porch. He could sniff at us and the other cats through two windows and they could sniff him.
We was pretty aggressive when we got him and would attack when you went in to feed him. He had no front claws but that sucker has teeth and he knows how to use them. One morning I got up early and it was still dark. The light had burnt out on the porch so I was waiting for it to get lighter before I went in to give him fresh food and water as I did not want to be attacked in the dark.
I did notice that he did not come up to the window to at least bitch at me though. I called him several times but no Beastie. I figured he was just sleeping.
After it got a little light out I went out on the porch. No Beastie. I searched and called I mean the porch is not that big. Suddenly I noticed the screen was pushed out.
I began to panic. I repeated OMG out loud several times. I mean we only had him two days. He is front declawed, never been outside and has no clue where he is.
“OMG, OMG that poor cat is gone” I felt horrible. :eek:
I opened the front screen door which I thought was a feeble attempt to call him. As soon as I opened the door he jumped up from under the steps and trotted in the house to his litter box.
I would have never in a million years thought he would have stuck around. He even looked at me with a “what took you so long” look.
It was a miracle that cat did not freak out. He is not scared of anything and is rather bossy and pushy. I can only think his fearless personality is what saved him.
One of our cats has been in the wars just lately. He’s been to the vets and had a large wounded closed with 11 sticthes so he’s got a very visible bald patch on his shoulder with a line of stitches (white closure against black fur/grey skin). And he’s got a buster collar on his head.
How can a cat with a whopping great lampshade on his head still manage to hide somewhere in the house and not be found for hours?
My dog Lita does all the time. She’s a Border Collie mix, and was probably born in the wild, so she likes to roam outside by instinct. My back yard is fenced in, but no matter how many holes I plug up and fix, she finds a new spot to dig out. She can also flatten her body to tapeworm thickness.
I tried a shock collar on her, and it worked for a few months, but then she got to where she would dig through the pain. I thought maybe the wire didn’t have enough juice, so I turned up the power. The collar would bounce on her neck like a rattlesnake in heat and it still didn’t deter her.
Luckily, my neighbors are cool about this and enjoy having her around when she shows up looking all cute and cuddly. Before though, she would roam for miles and either somebody would find her and call my number I have on her collar, or the SPCA would and charge me $57.
We had a beagle when I was about 6. Got her as a very young (6+ weeks) puppy. She used to hide under my mother’s desk. WHich doesn’t sound that surprising until you realize it’s one of those old-fashioned ones that looks like a chest of drawers, with the front panel that flips down and makes a writing surface, and has perhaps 4 inches of clearance between the floor and the bottom edge of the trim below the drawers. She outgrew that after a month or so though.
Then there was the time the hamster - who lived in a cage in the basement (rec room) somehow made it out of the cage, upstairs, into my bedroom, and in the space under my desk. That was the sort of desk that had solid wood all the way down to the carpet on the front/sides of the drawer area (it had an open “kneehole” design to the left of that). So the hamster was beneath the drawers, in a space that was surrounded on 3 sides by solid wood and backed up by the wall, with just an inch gap between wall and desk. No clue HOW in HELL the thing got all the way up there, though subsequent experience with another hamster proved they can climb stairs (we found that one in the laundry room behind the washing machine. On her next walkabout we never did find her!).
About 25 years ago, I was living in Charlotte and my fiance was living in Chapel Hill. I drove to CH for the weekend, with the cat riding in the car. I stopped briefly, about 2 miles from his apartment, and the cat managed to escape from the car, and dashed across Highway 54 (fairly major road on the western edge of Carrboro, for those of you who know the area) A couple of total strangers helped me look for her but every time we got near her, she bolted further. Finally I gave up and went the rest of the way to the apartment.
We went back a couple of hours later, headed across the road to where she’d last been seen, called once, and she came running up.
My hamster disappeared and turned up in a drawer, where he’d made a nest by chewing up my mom’s favorite pair of jeans. :smack:
And I also have amazing, disappearing/reappearing cats. I still don’t know where all their hiding places are.
My cat, Poe, is… well, let’s just say he’s not the sharpest cheddar on the cheese rack.
We often leave a window open with a big box-fan running to help keep the house cool. Apparently one day, he leaned up against the fan a little too hard, knocked it askew, and fell out. From the second story.
The thing is, he often tries to sneak out of the house, which we don’t allow because as a former lab-animal, he really has zero concept of the outside world and things like… cars, and dogs. Anyway, he often tries to bolt out the door, but the thing is he can never shut the hell up and we are always able to follow the steady stream of cat chatter and toss him back into the house.
Anyway, we didn’t even realize he’d gone out the window until NajaSpouse 1)realized we hadn’t seen Poe in a while and 2) we could sure hear him talking but it sounded an awful lot like it was coming from out in the driveway.
Evidently he fell out of the second-story window then sat underneath it complaining about the experience until we came along to pick him up. He was just fine, but remained surly for about another five minutes until he forgot all about it.
My brother’s house in college was pretty much the regular hang out for most of our friends. One day my friend’s cat turned up there, which was strange because his house was over a mile away. I don’t think he even went missing, he just showed up.
My border collie can slither into the most amazing spaces! Once she maneuvered herself up into the boxsprings and was “lost” for an hour.
No matter how small I make the “cat passage” crack in the door, Scout seems to be able to flatten herself and sneak in for a cat food (and poo) feast.
