It’s an accepted truth that cats do some very strange things. More often that not we’ll just leave them to it, but for others, there’s a certain determination to find the root cause of their behavior.
This is what Reddit user TuckerTroubles14 did. Having taken to the website, he informed the users that his cat, Tucker, had taken to sitting by a wall in his house, and mewing animatedly.
This became an obsession for Tucker, who would sit there for hours on end, and even neglect to eat or drink.
Having logged onto Reddit to discuss what had been happening, and to ask for advice, TuckerTroubles14 had a number of potential causes suggested to him, one of which was the possibility of some sort of pet infestation.
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After first taking Tucker to a vet to check that everything was ok with him (it was), he called pest control, who weren’t able to attend for a number of days.
Deciding that this would be too long a waiting time, he decided to knock through the wall itself.
Having discovered a warm point in the wall where Tucker was on sentry duty, he determined that there might be less insulation at this point, and knocked through it. In his own words, here is what he discovered:
“First, there appears to be no evidence of critters or bugs. Second, there is about three feet of clearance between the dining room wall and the opposite, living room wall. This area is mostly insulated but there is a gap in the insulation at the base of the living room wall, where there is a small, 2' x 1' cast iron doorway."
“Now, this may sound creepy, but the cast iron chute is not actually the creepy part. This house is extremely old (Germantown, PA) and has a number of additions. After some (slightly frantic) googling, coal chutes were pretty common on old houses, they were a place that people would shovel coal from ground level down into the basement.
"The fact that the coal chute is in the middle of my house, behind a wall, actually makes some sense. The dining room is an addition, and I imagine that it's grafted onto the outer perimeter of the original house.
"The creepy part is that there is no basement under the living room. The edge of the basement is under the dining room. Which means that the coal chute drops down to an original basement that I literally don't have access to.”
So there you have it: Tucker was trying to alert his owner to a secret room in the house – so secret that it’s literally inaccessible.
While his owner can breathe a sigh of relief that Tucker was ok, it does beg the question: what else do our pets know about where we live that we don’t? Mystery upon mystery…
You can read the original Reddit post here.
