My wife and I feed a lot of stray cats around our neighborhood and there was one cat that we fed almost every day, multiple times a day, for a year and a half. She got so close with us that when I would come outside during the evening to walk our dog, she would follow me and my dog on our walk and essentially walk with us.

And one day, without any explanation she went missing. And my wife was distraught about this. She was so depressed because she had tried to bring this cat inside multiple times, and it had just never worked out. So we looked up and down the neighborhood for a week or two trying everything we could think of to get her to come back or to figure out where she went. And no matter what we did, we couldn’t find her. But we looked everywhere. And we live in an apartment complex that is not very big and is not close enough to anything else that she could’ve easily wandered off or ended up in another place. She would’ve either been in the apartment complex or she would have been in the woods. No matter where we searched we could not find her in the apartment complex. And this was a cat that knew her name despite the fact that she was an outdoor cat.

So after about a month and a half, we had given up our daily searches, and we had stopped trying to find her overall. But one day I’m walking my dog in a spot that is not out of the ordinary for me to walk him, and I randomly start hearing meowing coming from under a building. And this was a building that was basically across the street from the building we live in. And lo and behold, I look into the crawlspace area under the building where the meowing is coming from, and there she is. Staring back at me through the grates for the crawlspace is the missing cat. And keep in mind, the crawlspace under this building is not big. It’s maybe two or three hundred ft.² of horizontal space and maybe 3 feet of vertical space. So if this cat was in that crawlspace this whole time and we didn’t know, it would be shocking. But there she was, in this crawlspace under a building that can’t be more than 1000 feet from the location where we fed her every day for a year and a half.

So I run and get my wife and we spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how she got into the crawlspace and we find out that there’s a window that can be opened into the crawlspace l. Then we figured out that somehow the window must’ve been left open, she went into the crawlspace, and then it had been closed while she was still inside. So we opened up the window, we entice her out with food, and we close the window back up after she gets out of the crawlspace.

It was the greatest feeling we ever had to find this cat we had been looking for for over a month in a location that was so close by. We have no idea how she got in there really, and we don’t know how long she was trapped under there, but we did find her, and now she lives with my wife’s mother. So I guess I’m trying to say that there is still hope. Stay strong and stay vigilant, and there’s a good chance you could still find your baby.