Nicci Knight is the owner of a kick-ass name and a remarkable cat. Or was the owner. Or is the owner. It’s confusing, but it all makes sense in a bit.
See, Knight was chilling poolside on a family vacation in Turkey when she got a call back from home. It was a couple of neighborhood kids, contacting her through her video doorbell. They held up a dead cat that looked exactly like Ted. The kids said they’d found his body in their garden pond. Knight contacted her cat sitter and arranged for the cat’s body to be cremated at Heavenly Pets Crematorium.
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Four days later, while she was still on vacation, the cat sitter called back. Ted had returned. He was perfectly fine. He even brought a dead mouse as a gift. The sitter thought she was seeing a ghost. But it was not a feline specter. It was Ted in the flesh. The sitter contacted Knight, who called the crematorium to call off the cremation. They told her that didn’t make much sense because they had a bucket of ashes that used to be Ted. If that’s not Ted, then who the hell was it?
Turns out it was just some neighborhood cat that looked exactly like Ted. The crematorium was understanding and empathetic throughout the whole thing. They even had a bit of a sense of humor—the kind people who burned dead animals for a living tend to have. The name they filled out on the box containing the ashes, they wrote “Not Dead Ted,” according to the BBC.
Knight hopes to track down the owner of Not Dead Ted— who is, to be clear, quite dead— to give them the memory bag given to her by the crematorium containing the ashes, a framed paw print, and a sympathy card.