The Mysterious Vanishing Cat

Cats are good at hiding. Sampson used to hide a lot, when he lived in England. If anyone new came into the house – a friend, a plumber, anyone – he would disappear and we wouldn’t find him for hours. We knew he was in the house, somewhere, but we never could find him until he was ready to be found.

Lola is also good at hiding. S (my husband) has always said that she and her sister Maisi had portals that they would hop through, disappearing to other worlds where they would get up to who knows what trouble. Those portals of course also explained how they would get from the living room, fast asleep, to the bedroom wide-eyed and bushy-tailed with nary a second in between.

(I hasten to add that we do know these portals aren’t real. We’re not that crazy. Probably.)

Recently Lola disappeared. We knew she was in the flat. There’s no way she could have got out. But we looked in all the usual places – under the bookshelf in the living room, in the many cubbies of the many cat trees, under the bed, behind the desk in the bedroom… She was in none of these places.

We checked the less usual places – in the bathroom (perhaps she’d snuck in whilst the door was open) and the pantry (she liked to sit on the box for the pizza stone, given the chance). No sign of her.

Of course we found her eventually. She was under the bookshelf in the living room. The one next to the one we’d checked under, obviously. But… surely we would have noticed if she’d been under there all along. Right?

Must have been portals.

Love,

Lady Joyful

Do your cats travel through portals? Do they mysteriously vanish only to turn up in the unlikeliest of places? Where’s the most unusual place you’ve found your cats hiding?

Don't miss out!
Subscribe To Newsletter

Receive top cat news, competitions, tips and more!

Invalid email address
Give it a try. You can unsubscribe at any time.

43 thoughts on “The Mysterious Vanishing Cat

  1. MELewis says:

    Our white female cat, Bianca, does this. None of the others (all males) have. I wonder if it’s a color thing? Does the white coat make her want to vanish, ghost-like?

    • Lady Joyful says:

      It could well be a colour thing, I hadn’t thought of that. So if Lola (white cat) hiding is vanishing ghost-like then maybe Sampson (black-cat) is hiding shadow-like. Thanks for commenting 🙂

  2. franhunne4u says:

    My two have their go to places when they want to withdraw – one of the two cat caves for my feline, under the bed for my tom … but still – occasionally they are not to be found. I look and look everwhere – and after 10 minutes or a quarter of an hour looking, I can see them, sitting on the window sill or on the floor under the table. The portals must be somewhere there1

  3. K. Caffee says:

    Mine don’t necessarily turn up where I don’t expect them. They just flat out vanish. There’s not a lot of places they can hide. So far they haven’t tried to ghost through the door, but how you manage to loose a 15 pound orange long hair in a small room with no doors for several house I’d be glad to know. At least my little black lady I have an excuse – she’s black, so shadows swallow her whole. But Punkin? I know he can dimension travel. Only explanation.

  4. Jennifer Barraclough says:

    Soon after we acquired Leo as a foster kitten he disappeared, and we feared he had somehow escaped outside. After hours of frantic searching we heard a faint miaow coming from the fireplace, and found him sitting on a shelf inside the chimney (the fire was not lit by the way).

  5. terrepruitt says:

    Well, we have never thought of it as “portals”. Although, along the same “science fiction” type of thinking WE (my husband and I) believe that cats have “cloaking” abilities. There is NO OTHER EXPLANATION as to why we can walk into a room and thoroughly, visually examine it and find NO FELINE, then turn to see, the cat!

    So . . . YES! Portals, cloaking devices, mind control . . . . whatever . . . the cats possess the power and we are but their playthings!

    (Not for a second did I think you/your hubby were crazy . . . . I’ve had a portal-jumping-cloaking-abled cat!)

    • Lady Joyful says:

      Yes, exactly! Cats certainly have some sort of mysterious sci-fi ability that we are yet to fully understand. Thanks for your comment! (And for not thinking we are crazy 😉 )

    • Lady Joyful says:

      Yes, our cats do that too! It’s so weird. When Lola’s sister Maisi was still alive we would get confused by the teleporting, but just assume that we’d been mistaken about which one we’d seen first (they looked very similar), but Lola still does it even now! Thanks for commenting 🙂

  6. spykeyone says:

    One of our cats (Dolly) like to hide directly behind my head on the sofa. She’s definitely not there when I sit down but somehow manages to position herself just outside my peripheral vision so when she sneezes in my ear it has maximum effect and makes me mess myself… She’s not my favourite out of the two…

  7. RoseMills says:

    My tabby Ivy was a stray kitten before we took her in, and she does not deal with strangers well! She can hide for hours and we still haven’t quite worked out where she goes – it’s a one bed flat, so she can’t go far either!

  8. greg1948 says:

    I have a cat has a great disappearing act. I have not found her secret hideout yet. If I call her enough times, suddenly she will appear out of nowhere, as if she stepped out of another dimension.

  9. Faith says:

    Portals would so make so much more sense. Im convince they have some secret portal place where they keep their starch of one of my socks from most of my pairs and all other items they hide and I can never find when looking. I don’t live in a massively large place so it doesn’t make sense that all of there toy balls go missing and I buy new ones. Those go missing and then they find them when need be. Not just their toys though. Socks. Keys. Pens and other items. I swear there’s just a portal or magic door I don’t know about.

    • Lady Joyful says:

      Ah, I hadn’t considered the possibility of cats stashing things beyond the portals… Perhaps the land beyond the portals is The Land of Missing Things (or, as another commenter suggested, it may just be Narnia 😉 ) Thanks for commenting!

      • Faith says:

        Cat Narnia wouldn’t that be super fun to write about lol. I believe it’s the same kind of portal the house gnomes use when I can’t find my keys… Lol

  10. Ben Herman: In My Not So Humble Opinion says:

    When our cat Nettie was less than a year old we couldn’t find her. We searched all over the place. My girlfriend was convinced that Nettie had run out of the apartment and gotten lost. Despite me arguing that Nettie had to be somewhere in the apt, I was forced by my girlfriend to go outside and circle the block several times calling Nettie’s name at the top of my lungs. I finally came home empty-handed. And then, about five minutes later, Nettie suddenly popped out from the very top shelf of the bedroom closet, nonchalantly as can be.

  11. Nancy says:

    My mostly-black tortoiseshell has the Disappearing Cat Act down pat. You can look every conceivable place and not find her, but go to the fridge and open the container with the chicken and she appears out of nowhere. If she doesn’t, there has been a wrinkle in the time-space continuum (i.e., she got on the wrong side of a closed door). 🙂

  12. Gayle Nastasi says:

    Our lilac point Siamese (not all-white, but close enough), Sachet, was the inter-dimensional portal queen. For her entire 19 years, she would vanish for hours. We’d even launched outdoor searches several times, afraid she’d slipped out a door unnoticed. She would then just appear, sitting behind us, with that, “What’s all the fuss about?” look in her blue eyes. We never did figure out where her hiding place was.

Why not meow a comment to fellow readers?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.