Colton Michael and his wife came home one day in late July 2020 to find a beautiful Labrador retriever-border collie mix on their porch.
“She got out of her car and said, ‘Where did the dog come from?'” recalled Mr. Michael.
The pup was scared at first and wouldn’t let anyone near her, but she seemed pretty darn sure that that house was the place she needed to be.
And in her mind, it was home. The only problem was she hadn’t lived there in two years.
“My wife and I had just gotten home from work,” Michael told CNN. “Cleo was laying on the front porch at the front door, just laying there, waiting for somebody it seemed like.”It turns out that the home in Lawson, Missouri (about 30 miles northeast of Kansas City) belonged to her family before they moved.
But Cleo’s family hadn’t left her behind. They had taken her to their new home in Olathe, Kansas when the moved.
Apparently, she just didn’t like it there as much.
Mr. Michael told local television station KMBC that once he earned the dog’s trust he was able to take her to get her microchip checked. She was simply too well-groomed and healthy to be a stray.
The chip scan revealed that she was a 4-year-old pup whose name was Cleo and gave the Michaels the name of her owner.
“That’s when my wife pointed out that their last name was the same last name as the previous owner of the house,” Mr. Michael said.
Good memory – the couple had purchased the house in 2018!
So he went onto Facebook to see if the owner had a profile and noticed that the family had posted about their lost dog that had gone missing a week earlier.
Now it was clear why Cleo hadn’t trusted them at first.
“She finds her way home, and there’s some strangers living in it. That would be scary for anybody,” he said.
They expected to find her family not too far away – but the dog had, in fact, traveled 57 miles from her “new” home in Olathe, Kansas to prove her point!
They got in touch with Cleo’s owners right away to give them the good news.
Cleo’s owners had been beside themselves after she went missing on July 12, 2020. They simply couldn’t believe it when they found out where she had turned up.
“I told him that we found his dog, but once I told him where we were, he was kind of speechless,” Michael recalled.
No one has any idea how Cleo managed to make her 57-mile trip. It would have required to her cross at least one river (or a bridge full of heavy traffic)!
Cleo’s owners told CNN that they were stunned when they got the message, but overall they were just relieved she was ok. As dog owners know, that’s a long time to be missing and you start to fear the worst.
“It’s the most bizarre story. Really, she’s everything to us and to my mother,” son Drew told CNN.
The pup was very happy to be reunited with her family (though we don’t know if Cleo will try to make a return trip).
“Now that we know who she belongs to, if she pops up again, we know who to call,” Mr. Michael said.
But we think her family is going to be making it a little harder for her to escape.
“It just feels really good to be reunited with her,” Drew told KMBC after they drove to Lawson to pick her up.
Doesn’t it just make you want to go watch Homeward Bound now (we’re partial to the 1993 Disney version)? That was based on a true story, and there have been a handful of such stories in the decades since. But how these animals – both cats and dogs – do it remains a mystery.
We’re just glad Cleo is with her family and unharmed.
Be sure to scroll down below to see interviews with everyone involved and Cleo’s reunion with her family.
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