Julie Thornton Johnson and her husband Jimmy Johnson are dog people.
They have three of their own who often sleep in their bed.
So, when a strange dog wandered into their bed in the middle of the night they really didn’t think anything of it.
The southeastern Tennessee couple didn’t know that anything was out of the ordinary until the next morning after a thunderstorm.
That’s when Jimmy looked over at his wife and asked, “Julie, whose dog is this?”
She didn’t have an answer for him because she had absolutely no idea who this 90-lb bulldog-lab mix was laying in their king-size bed, or where she came from.
“He and I locked eyes for a second and just were silent. And I was like, ‘That’s not our dog,’ ” Julie told The Washington Post.
The dog was just lying on her back, belly up hoping to get some scritches.
“One, how did the dog get in my house? And two, we have three dogs, and they bark at anything. A squirrel in the yard, a rabbit, a bird, they bark. And there was no noise,” Julie said.
The couple believes they must have accidentally left the back door open but they still don’t know how she managed to snuggle up beside them without their other dogs making a fuss.
Julie and Jimmy said they were “taken aback” by the whole ordeal.
“It was obvious then that she was of no harm to anybody. She was just a pup having a spend-a-night party,” Julie told USA Today.
Julie and Jimmy were ready to adopt their new friend, but they figured they should try to find her parents to make sure they were stealing someone’s fur baby.
“This is the weirdest post I have ever had to make,” she wrote on Facebook. “Is this your dog?”
A few hours later, Cris Hawkins and Felecia Johnson responded saying the mystery dog belonged to them and her name is Nala.
Nala ran off after getting loose from her collar during a walk. They searched for the dog but had to turn back when it got dark.
They hoped that Nala would eventually find her way back home.
Instead, she found her way into Julie and Jimmy’s house after being scared by the thunderstorm.
“She definitely did not use the key under the mat. She did not come down the chimney, she did not break-in through a window,” said Julie. “We’ve had some people asking us like, ‘Well, did she come in through the air conditioning vents? How did this dog get in the house?’ Nope, she walked right in the front door.”
Julie woke up around 4:30 a.m. and just assumed the lump was one of her dogs. It wasn’t until 6:30 a.m. that Jimmy woke up and realized this wasn’t the case.
“She’s almost as big as I am, but since she’s been a puppy, I carry her on my hip like she’s a little kid. And now that she’s grown, she’s still expects me to do that,” the dog’s owner said. “It’s a lot harder now, but I had to carry this big dog out of (Julie and Jimmy’s) house. If it wasn’t crazy enough. … I had to carry her out like a child.”
Now Nala and her parents have some new friends. They even had a playdate with Julie’s dogs. The story about Nala’s slumber party ended up going viral.
“We never honestly never would have thought that Nala would you know invite five other amazing beings into our lives,” said Hawkins. “I feel like other people need to share in this laughter, so I reshared the post with that Julie had originally had posted and it just it blew up.”
Learn more about these new friends in the video below.
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