Maura McLaughlin was asleep in her bed when she awoke to an unfamiliar feeling. Fur was rubbing against her fingers in the middle of the night, but it didn’t feel like one of her cats.
“My door was closed and I knew my cats were not inside the room,” McLaughlin, founder of the nonprofit Off The Wall Grafitti, told The Dodo. “So I was like, ‘What was that?’ And I just bolted upright and went into the living room to sleep on the couch.”
The next morning, McLaughlin learned she wasn’t the only one who had received a mysterious visitor. “One of the artists who’s living in my daughter’s room came in and said, ‘I had the cutest baby possum in my bedroom this morning,’” McLaughlin said. “‘I just scooped it up and put it outside and said, ‘hello.’”
McLaughlin couldn’t figure out how the possum got inside or why he decided to take a tour of the bedrooms. So she forgot about it until six months later when she was sitting in the living room of her home in Sherman Oaks, California, and the visitor returned.
“I heard this new sound, and I was like, ‘That is not my cats, that’s not a raccoon, what is slurping at the water bowl?’” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin slowly approached the sound, to find the possum eating her cats’ food. When McLaughlin tried to escort the animal outside, he made it clear that he didn’t want to leave.
