Kitten found screaming in apartment wall, saved and rescued by tenant and given loving home, but his litter mates proved to be trickier to save: ‘We were successful in trapping Onigiri and Nigiri, but Unagi was much more cautious.’

Author image for Laurent Shinar
Laurent Shinar • Writer and Editor
Jul 16, 2026 6:15 PM EDT

It is not every day that you go to the bathroom and by the time you leave, your kitten rescue mission has begun. But that is the logic defying detail that sparked what turned out to be one of the more wholesome cat family rescues we have heard off.

The pages of Reddit's r/cats subreddit are full of feline rescue stories. Often telling the tale of a disheveled cat who is found roaming the streets and offered a warm and loving home to live in and leave behind the harm and horrors of the streets. The feline usually obliges and the pair of them live happily ever after. And do not get us wrong, these are wonderful stories, but they do not quite compare to the complexity and cuteness of the story we have lined up for you today. It is a tale of mysterious noises that turn into precious moments of peril and end in heartwarming harmony.

Unlike most cats who are rescued, this feline decided that getting as close as possible to the hooman she was destined to be with was the best way of making her Cat Distribution Delivery of herself work. But being a young kitten and not completely understanding the way that walls work she soon found herself mere inches from the hooman who would become her pawrent and love her, yet separated by a wall. For she herself had gotten in between the interior and exterior walls. And so an emotional and surprising rescue begins. Where kittens get caught, pawrents fall hopelessly in love and get far more than they might have bargained for.
 

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    "I wasn't sure if it was a cat or just my ventilation ducts being bad BOR W QIH2 HO
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    Kitten being held by man in blue sweater with bubble showing kitten in wall

    Kittens represented by models

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    Two days ago I heard what sounded like meowing coming from the walls of my bathroom. I wasn't sure if it was a cat or just my ventilation ducts being bad (my apartment kind of soks and I've had problems everywhere), so I put in a maintenance request. Yesterday, I received a call from my apartment maintenance staff saying they cut holes in the drywall of my dining area and found a kitten in my walls and that it wasn't cooperating with
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    them in coming out, so they put some wet food in a cage and just hoped the kitten would smell the food and eventually come out. The kitten was running around in the back of the wall behind two pipes, and after some inspection I realized that the kitten might be too short to climb over the pipes and too scared (or its head was too large) to climb through the pipes. Additionally, one
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    maintenance guy said the kitten had fallen into (or walked in? Idrk) my insulation through a vent, and that there were 2 or 3 other kittens by that ventilation opening. I have no clue what that means or where that vent is, but that means this kitten is potentially part of a larger litter of kittens belonging to another cat somewhere in my apartment complex.
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    After talking with my maintenance people some more I got the impression that they weren't going to actively try to help the kitten get out, and I happen to have a soul and don't want a kitten to just d so my friends and I took matters into our own hands. I took the wet food from the cage and placed it into the drywall so the kitten didn't starve (cuz it had been almost 2 days without food at this point), and my friends came over and were able to fish the kitten out. After about two hours of
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    luring him around with wet cat food we finally got him out of my walls and got him to a vet. The next part I wasn't present for (I work pretty insane hours so I had to go to bed), but the vet apparently said there was no microchip and the cat was very healthy and well fed. Apparently he's around 4 weeks old (no guarantees though). The vets conclusion was that the mother was somewhere nearby in my apartment complex, but since the kitten wasn't microchipped they said it's likely that the kitten an
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  • Well, that is certainly not what you might expect from a minor home repair complaint. And what a whole heap of different problems that presents our rescuer to deal with. To begin with, one kitten in the wall is a heck of a lot to handle. Although not the end of the world seeing as it took them two hours of trying. So there is little to be said for the salaried workers who could have spent some time trying to help this poor and probably terrified kitten. But then you add more kittens curled up in the insulation and yet more kittens outside. This is one heck of a situation to handle.
     

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    that other maintenance guy said earlier is true then theres a whole litter of strays, with at least 2 or 3 other kittens somewhere in my apartment complex. Currently two of my friends who helped rescue the kitten are taking care of him, they're roommates and happen to own two other cats (one of whom they raised as a kitten) so he's in good hands for now, but they don't have the means to fully own him and continue raising him. We're
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    planning on taking him to get dewormed and vaccinated next week. I've been looking into getting a cat for a while now and I've reached a point of financial stability in my life so I think I can handle it. I originally intended to adopt from the Atlanta Humane Society, but after living with this kitten for almost 2 days in my walls I want to find a home for him. However, I recognized that this is a kitten and not a fully grown cat, and that comes with a different set of challenges.
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    I promised an update post and it's been a hectic 6 weeks now, but things are starting to settle down a bit so I figured it was high time I made this post to update everyone. First and most importantly, we kept the kitten! The response from my original post was overwhelmingly positive and supportive, and thanks to yall's advice (and Jackson Galaxy and Kitten Lady) we were able to get toys, kitten food, and most recently furniture for our cute boy.
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    I know the top comment was to name him Wall-e, but after a bunch of Always Sunny in Philadelphia comments we decided to name him Charlie! We felt like the name fit him better since he's so mischevious and kept escaping his enclosure, much to the dismay of me and my friends. We also didn't have an Eve for him :(. His full name is Charlie Kismet Sullivan: Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Sullivan as a long form of Sully (which is short for insulation), and Kismet for destiny/fate in Turk
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    We also got a lot of comments telling us to get him a playmate! Unfortunately we weren't able to get a playmate from his litter (more on that later), and we really wanted to get a void since they go under-adopted in shelters (also because void). We ended up adopting a 3 month old void named Corn Munch, which made him 6 weeks older than Charlie. We're not sure who named him (someone keeps dropping off cereal named cats at our local shelter), but we changed his name to Louie to match the -ie from
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  • Goodness, from living in a wall for a few days, detached from its fur family to living a life of indoor luxury with a new feline sibling no less is more than more street cats and shelter cats can ever dream off. It is so incredibly rare for a situation like this to pan out and workout in favor of both the cat and rescuer. Often, these tougher stories of kitten rescue end in some sort of compromise at a minimum. But this kitten and his brother are so incredibly lucky to be living out the rest of their days with a pawrent who is so darn dedicated that he was prepawed to leap into a wall to save them if need be.
     

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    URI when he was 2 months old, and it seemed like his nasal ducts never fully cleared it out at the shelter, but after a month of viral treatment + eye ointment his nasal duct is fully cleared and he's perfectly healthy! We kept Louie and Charlie separate for about a week (because we weren't sure at the time if Louie still had a URI), but after Louie was cleared of having a URI we decided to introduce them! The first two days were a bit odd, we kept Charlie in an enclosure for the first day and l
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    batting at each other's hands through the enclosure so we let them at it after 3 days and they've been great friends since. They're both able to keep each other entertained while I'm at work, and they started sleeping together after the first week (although Charlie keeps trying to steal Louie's wet food ;). Currently Charlie is around 10 weeks old, while Louie is just over 4 months old. They're both keeping up with their vaccines, and they're both perfectly healthy!
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    Now onto the rest of Charlie's original family. In my original post I mentioned that we suspected there was one other kitten. We now know Charlie was part of a litter of 4 kittens! One is orange/white, one is almost pure white, and the other is a grey/white tabby (although its hard to see the tabby from the pictures, he looks grey tbh). We named them Nigiri, Onigiri, and Unagi respectively. As for the mom, one of my friends said to name her Itamae, so thats her unofficial name now. Honestly I
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    don't understand how she was able to feed 4 kittens so well in the wild so props to her for doing some amazing cat parenting. We originally attempted to trap all 4 of the remaining cats (the 3 kittens and mother) 3 weeks after we rescued Charlie (the week after Halloween). We were successfull in trapping Onigiri and Nigiri, but Unagi was much more cautious. We waited for 8 hours after trapping the original two, but then mom swung by and started meowing for her kittens. Unagi was then able to elu
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    someone else in my apartment complex was feeding Itamae (the kittens were too young at the time to leave their den). About a week later we tried trapping Itamae and Unagi again, and ended up catching two full adult cats, one of whom was Itamae. It was at this point we realized there was a cat colony on our hands with at least 3 stray adult cats at our apartment complex, as we had noticed a completely separate adult cat as well. At this point we realized we didn't have the time, resources, or tra
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    ROB We CH SHIP
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    had racked up a few thousand in vet bills at this point). We originally wanted to at least get Itamae spayed but she escaped from her trap, and has not been fooled by our traps since. Since then I've been leaving food and traps out for both Unagi and Itamae in the hopes that they'll randomly step into one, but so far our efforts have been fruitless. Itamae has gotten smart enough to eat food from the trap without stepping on the pressure plate, and Unagi doesn't even want to go near the traps. I
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    will keep trying. We'd like to rescue Unagi at least since it's fully weaned off mother's milk now to get them all fixed up, but if it doesn't get trapped then there's not much we can do. Unagi doesn't leave the den often (if it even lives there at all anymore) and none of us have the time to monitor Unagi 24/7. It definitely has fleas at least, and with the winter season coming/already here I'm a bit worried about its survival. Thankfully winter here doesn't get too cold normally (30's at the l
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    trapping day soon. I also can't confidently say I've seen Unagi recently so hopefully it's still alive. It's made it this far so I have hope. Anyways, after trapping Onigiri and Nigiri, we found out that Onigiri (the white one) is a girl, while Nigiri (the orange/white one) is a boy. Nigiri was always the curious one: he'd be the first to leave the den, first to explore new areas, and first to eat any food we left out. Onigiri was almost like his baby sitter: she would hiss and bat at anyone who
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    we realized they were a bonded pair, and we didn't want to separate them. Additionally they had fleas when we first trapped them, and Nigiri looked like he had an eye infection. Because I didn't have the space in my apartment, we took them to a friend's house since he also had experience with cats and lived locally (and he had a house, so he had plenty of space for them). They were quarantined off for about two weeks, and just started being introduced to the rest of his cats. Originally we wante
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    1007
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