Cat lost in move surprises West Virginia family at new home 40 miles away. ‘A miracle’

Halie Kutscher was sitting on the back porch of the home she and her family had recently moved into when her husband looked up and saw an orange cat sitting in their yard.

They thought the cat looked like Oliver, their 2-year-old orange tabby that went missing about two months prior on the day the family packed up their old house in Bridgeport, West Virginia, Kutscher told McClatchy News.

But they were stunned. How could their pet find them at their new home in Morgantown, about 40 miles northeast of Bridgeport, after all that time?

Kutscher said she called out to the cat with an affectionate nickname the family often used — “Roliver” — and he immediately reacted.

“He started bellowing,” she said. “It was so distinctive. It was like an, ‘I’m trying to tell you something meow.’ That’s when I knew, ‘Oh my god, that’s him.’”

The last time Kutscher had seen the cat was on May 21 when the family loaded their first round of belongings into a U-Haul to make the 45-minute drive to Morgantown.

Kutscher didn’t want to keep Oliver cooped up during the moving process, so she let him outside to roam. The adventurous cat usually howled at the door to be let out at night and would always return in the morning, she said.

But as the day went on and the family drove back and forth a few more times moving more rounds of items, Oliver never appeared.

Over the course of the next month or so, the Kutschers would return to their old house, put out food and call Oliver’s name. They talked to all of their old neighbors and asked them to keep an eye out for their pet.

“It was heartbreaking,” Kutscher said. “My 9-year-old son would be walking up and down the street yelling his name, sobbing uncontrollably. It was a lot to deal with.”

It was late in the afternoon on July 24 when Oliver surprised the family at their new home.

“I dropped to my knees and just held him and sobbed,” Kutscher said.

Her husband and son joined in. Her daughter, who is almost 2 years old, was still too young to understand what was happening.

But the family dog, a pit bull who acts territorial when new animals come to the house, seemed to recognize Oliver and came up to sniff him.

“That’s how we knew it was 100% (Oliver),” Kutscher said.

A microchip scan at the vet later confirmed the cat was in fact Oliver, Kutscher said.

Danielle Jo Bays, senior analyst of cat protection and policy for the Humane Society of the United States, told McClatchy News that she was stumped as to how Oliver could have found his family to a new home 40 miles away.

“For the cat to travel that far to a place he’d never been is kind of spectacular,” she said. “One of the things that I like so much about cats is they confound us sometimes. They do things that are just hard to explain. It’s kind of magical.”

One theory, Bays said, is that he could have somehow hitched a ride in one of the moving trucks and became disoriented when he arrived at the new house.

But no one will ever really know how Oliver, or so many other pets that find their way back to their families, do it, she said.

“It’s a good story in a sense that, when you lose your pet, not to give up, not to just assume that they’re gone and that you’ll never see them,” she said.

She encouraged pet owners to get their animals microchipped and put collars on them with a tag and phone number.

Often when cats go missing, they stay close to home, she said.

“They tend to be within a few houses of where they were lost, but they may be hiding under a deck or in a garage,” she said. “So it really helps to go and look. Ask your neighbors, ‘Can I look under your deck?’”

Kutscher said she’s convinced Oliver, who her son Max picked out at a Humane Society animal shelter as a tiny kitten two years ago, made the trek to be back with his family

‘“It just has to be a miracle,” she said.

The ordeal served as a life lesson for her 9-year-old son, who slept with an orange Beanie Baby cat every night that Oliver was gone and prayed for his return.

“We used it as an opportunity to teach him to have faith and to hope and to pray,” she said. “When you put good out there in the world, good comes back.”

Woman wakes up to dog snuggling with her in bed — but it wasn’t one of her 3 pups

Dog lost in Florida 8 years ago is returned to Missouri family. ‘Same great snuggler’

Escaped cat named Rowdy turns herself in after roaming Boston airport for three weeks