This odyssey has kept my friends and me fascinated. A cat has been peeing in my garage at night for 2 weeks. I spent so long trying to figure out how the heck it was getting in 🧵
I installed 2 cameras, motion sensors, a speaker that would play the sound of dogs barking when motion was detected… I could always see it moving around, but I could never capture the moment it entered or left. I needed to see that to know what I needed to fix on the door.
🔈 on:
There are a couple small gaps around the door, but even though cats can squeeze through surprisingly tight gaps, everyone simply couldn't believe it was doing that.
My best piece of evidence to go off of was a poor timelapse from one of the nights. Unfortunately the Ring cameras have been horrible at motion detection and they don't do continuous recording, so all I had was 30s-apart snapshots. It did look like it was coming in that way tho?

I thought perhaps the car was blocking the view. In multiple occasions I parked the car outside so the cameras had a clear view of the entire door. Whenever I parked the car outside, the car wouldn't enter the garage that night. Was it trolling me???

My friend joked that maybe the cat was pulling a Mission Impossible move and coming in the garage by hanging on to the bottom of the car. I laughed.
Then a few nights ago I was awake when I could see the cat in the garage cameras. While steaming it on my phone I walked down.

I entered and started yelling and banging things, expecting it would get scared and run away (and hopefully not want to come back). But to me surprise, it just disappeared under my car???
Looking at more footage I was now certain the cat wasn't entering or leaving.

The incredible thing is on *several* of the days when the cat was in the garage at night I drove during the day. Sometimes at freeway speeds. One day I parked it all day in SF. So if it did indeed enter by being somewhere under my car, then it was being driven along everywhere!

I looked with a flashlight under my car. It's a Tesla Model Y so the underside is mostly flat. I believe it may have found a comfortable spot somewhere around the front right wheel well / suspension area. But I haven't been able to see it and confirm exactly.

This was me banging the underside with a broom hoping it would come out. Here you can see my best guess as to where the cat may have been living.

But I may never know exactly.

As my last resort I put a humane trap with a can of tuna. After a couple of nights, I got it.
I'm writing this from bed just after seeing that it went in last night.
Plan is to take it to animal services.

In one of the videos a few nights ago the cat seemed to be trying to catch a fly or something like that. When it jumped, you could clearly hear a bell hanging off its neck. There's a good chance this cat has an owner.

2 days ago trying to piece everything together I realized that the first time I saw pee in the garage was right after I came from visiting my friend in Central California. There's a chance I accidentally drove someone's cat under my car all the way here from 180mi away.

I’ve been hesitant to update this thread because what happened after I posted it was so surreal and absurd that I thought people would either not believe it or think I made it up. But anyway. Here it goes.

Turns out the cat that had been living in my garage for 2 weeks was my friend’s cat. The cat had been missing, but didn’t think to mention this to me because the idea of his cat getting in my car and then living there at my house was preposterous.

He only realized this when he saw the pic I took of the cat in the cage. He called me and we had the most surreal conversation where we traced back everything that happened up until that point.
I also learned the cat is deaf, which explained why nothing I tried to scare him worked.

I had nicknamed this cat Houdini. His real name is Bowser. He’s now safely back at home.

The end.

@Javi Love it. This should be a movie.
@nighthawk 😂 if this was a movie plot you'd think the script is stupid because it's too unbeliever lol
@Javi Haha, fair point. Definitely a "yeah right, now you lost me" ending if it was a script. 😁