The Cat Lady's Abandoned House in the Woods: a Red Ambassador and a Full Fridge

The story that goes with this house starts in the 1990s. A couple built it as a secluded dream home in the woods, and then the husband died suddenly. His widow, a veterinarian, stayed. She filled the place with stray cats and picked up a local nickname, and she lived there alone for decades until 2020, when she left and took none of it with her. Nobody knows why, or where the cats went. The exact location stays off this page.

What I know is what was left. The grass was overgrown, there was moss and a tree on the roof, and a fallen tree had brought down the back porch. I went in expecting a cat house. It was that, and also a place that had been broken into and scrapped.

What we found

The garage came first. A red AMC Ambassador sat on flat tires with trophies on a shelf nearby. The calendar on the wall said January 1999. There was a bees nest in the ceiling, bird feeders and a lawn mower. Inside the car the seats were leather and the odometer read 65,000 miles. It had been entered in something called the AMC Nationals, and somebody had already been in it before me.

The house was a mess in places and untouched in others. The lights still worked. The living room had a recliner, a Christmas stocking on the wall, cat toys, a perch stool, cat food and shooting, golf and rifle trophies. There was a picture of the woman who lived there, a VHS player, a radio and a tape deck, and no TV.

Then I found photos of the house, and in them her cats were perched on the same pillars I was standing next to. That is not something I find often. I made sure every picture went back where it came from.

The kitchen table was set. The fans worked. The clock on the stove was flashing, which meant the power had gone out at some point. There were Good Housekeeping and Disney World cookbooks, a lot of glassware, napkins, some handwritten notes, and mice droppings everywhere. The pantry still had garlic powder, Lipton tea, Progresso, peanut butter and jelly. I forgot to film the fridge until the end. It still had Miller Lite and Hershey’s syrup, and it smelled so bad I got out of there. One calendar in the fridge said 2013 and another said 2006, so I’d say she stopped using calendars around 2006.

Upstairs had a floppy drive, a landline, an old printer and a bathroom with a jacuzzi surrounded by hardwood, which would have had a great view of the woods. The medicine cabinet was still stocked. Somebody had taken the faucets, so the place had been scrapped for money.

The basement was the other half of the house. Board games, a 2001 calendar, water damage, and the copper cut out of the walls, so there was no water in the whole house. It smelled like mold and I saw mushrooms growing on the floor. There was a treadmill, a ping pong table, ceiling tiles on the ground and a little bar with alcohol left on it. A fireplace and a TV were still down there. It looked so nice upstairs and so trashed down here.

The last bedroom is the one I’m proudest of, because it took the longest to clean. I had to hide a lot of clothes and towels to make it look right. There were cat sweatshirts, cat slippers, Stephen King books, and hummingbird items that looked brand new, like she bought them and never got around to using them. A wall of cat photos showed six or maybe seven cats in one shot, and a mama cat with a pile of kittens. There were four litter boxes in that one room.

As far as I could tell this was a vacation home that went abandoned several years ago, maybe around 2018. The taxes went unpaid for about four years, and the house was broken into and vandalized so much that I cleaned up a lot of it before filming. I did not finish. My guess is the lady passed away or went to a nursing home, and your guess is as good as mine. New owners will probably take it over soon. They have already put up trail cams, so if you come here you will get in trouble.

Why places like this end up empty

A house like this usually doesn’t get abandoned in one day. It goes unpaid first. The Center for Community Progress calls tax delinquency an early warning sign of a property’s decline, and years of unpaid taxes often mean the owner has left.

After that the government is slow. Foreclosure typically takes years, and during that time the city pays to board up the building, cut the lot and answer emergency calls. Those costs stack on top of the taxes until the total debt is greater than what the property could sell for. If a tax lien doesn’t sell at the first auction, it can keep cycling through the system for another two, three, six or even ten years while the building gets worse.

That is a long time for a house in the woods with the power still on. In this one, the calendar in the fridge stopped at 2013.