We had another visitor several years ago at Christmas. At the time, we had a lean-to garage where we kept the car and junk. It was a cold Christmas morning. Tom and I loaded up the dog to go for a walk in the woods. The dog didn't go in the car, she went to a chair in the garage. When we walked over to the chair we found what we thought was a dead cat. It was cold and didn't move. We were discussing what to do with it and where it came from when the cat lifted its head up. We brought it in the house and set it up in a bed with a heater. The cat was a red tabby with long hair. It was an adult fixed male that was bone thin.
After a week of hand feeding him he was getting around well enough to flea bathe and brush. Underneath all the dirt was a beautiful cat. We kept him around a second week to be sure he would pull through, then listed him in the paper as a free found. The sweetest woman came by with her husband, an older couple with no kids. She scooped the cat up in her arms and the cat purred and rubbed her chin. We contacted them a week later and they were happy with the cat. Once we knew they were going to keep the cat, we threw out their phone number.
The only other call we had about the cat was after we had adopted it out. The woman said her daughter lived around the corner from us. She was in the middle of a divorce and had a cat that matched that description. The cat had never been outside and was seven years old. She told us that the husband went to the house and took the cat. When he got out to the highway three blocks away, he threw it out the window while traveling 65m.p.h. Somehow the cat made it back to its's home, only now no one lived there. The man had moved to Topeka, the woman to Iowa. We think the cat stayed at the abandoned house outside in the cold. As an indoor cat, it didn't know how to hunt for food. For whatever reason, it found our lean-to as shelter from the cold. We told the woman that by description, we were sure it was the same cat and that it was fine and adopted into a great home. Hopefully, this gave both her and her daughter some peace of mind.