Upon hearing cries emanating from a basement pipe, a woman discovers an individual trapped inside

When Kass, the creator behind the @PhillyFoodGirl TikTok account, turned off her home’s air conditioning, she probably didn’t think it would result in her becoming a cat mom. But with no noise coming from the AC, Kass began hearing little mews coming from the ductwork outside her house. So Kass and her partner entered into rescue mode.

At first, Kass could only see one cat inside the duct. But she knew there were multiple kittens in there because the cat she saw wasn’t making the mewing sounds. And in a follow-up video, Kass explained that she could also hear a mother cat growling somewhere in the duct.

Later that night, Kass left a few cat treats outside of the duct opening, stepped away and attempted to coax the kittens out. One brave kitten emerged to investigate the treats — then another.

“This is the luckiest day of my life!” Kass said on TikTok. “Is this real life right now?”

Kass explained later that she knew the kittens were safe in the duct with their mother, so she went to bed with the idea to formulate a rescue plan in the morning.

But, unfortunately, the mission did not continue to go as smoothly as it had the first day. The next morning, Kass said that she again heard a kitten meowing, “but it was just a different kind of a cry,” she explained in another video.

“A woman from our local animal center actually lives in my development, so I … texted her, and [she] asked if we had any humane traps,” Kass said, adding that she put a cat carrier with wet food inside it in front of the duct, but there were “no signs of the two kittens.” However, she could still hear the meowing.

“It was so loud from inside the tube,” she said. “But we couldn’t see him.” That’s when she realized the duct connects to a gas fireplace in her basement. And when she and her family went inside and downstairs, it became clear that the kitten was trapped in a vertical piece of duct connected to that fireplace.

“We knew for a fact he had been down there at least two days,” Kass said about the kitten in another update video. “So we [wanted] to get him out as soon as possible.”

To get the kitten out of the sticky situation, Kass and her family had to “MacGuyver it,” she said, using metal clippers to remove a portion of the pipe above the kitten so her husband could reach down and grab him.

“Once we got him out, he stopped crying,” Kass said. “We gave him some food. He was so hungry, he was literally ravenous. That’s when we were like ‘Wait a second.’ The crying that we heard from the day before and that morning was not the two [kittens] that we saw. It was him having been stuck down there the whole time.”

Kass and her family brought the kitten to the local animal center, where he was given a once-over and a clean bill of health. He’s about 5 weeks old and the family decided to call him Murph and officially adopted him.

So far, it seems like Murph is adjusting really well to his new life as a family cat and has a special fondness for his dad (the one who pulled him from the duct).

Unfortunately, Kass doesn’t know where the other two kittens and their mom went. “I think she took off with the babies because she’s not here,” she said. “We haven’t heard anything, and the babies are nowhere to be found. I’m going to keep an eye out for them, but I don’t know.”

She said the mother cat has been a stray in her neighborhood for many years, and she hopes that the local animal center will be able to trap and spay her at some point in the near future.

Murph’s life may have had a harrowing start, but it’s all smooth sailing from here.