The ‘Cat Pee House’ is going viral on TikTok—here’s why. You read that right.

In a series of nine videos with a total of more than 6.7 million views (the most popular video alone has 4.8 million views), Hannah (@it_is_hannah_banana) explains how she accidentally ended up in a house soaked in cat urine.

“Wouldn’t you be able to smell it immediately?” you might ask. Obviously not.

“My beautiful first house turned into my worst nightmare,” Hannah wrote in the caption of her first clip.

How did Hannah discover the secret beneath the floorboards?

It turns out Hannah had rented the house for herself and her two teenagers for a year after her divorce. It was cheap and close to her parents, so it seemed like a perfect fit. The owners had banned animals in the house as they previously had a “pet problem,” but never went into detail.

It turns out it would have been good to know these details.

When she moved in, Hannah and her boys couldn’t smell anything wrong. After a few months, however, she noticed a faint smell of cat urine, especially when the air conditioning was on, but she put that down to the house being a hundred years old.

It wasn’t until Hannah bought the house and brought her cat Bella with her that she realized this was a more serious problem than she could have ever imagined.

Bella the cat noticed urine stains all over the house, which Hannah initially thought were just water stains.

When Hannah investigated further, sat down on the floor and sniffed it thoroughly, she realized that it “smelled like 50 cats had peed here.” It couldn’t have been Bella because she was rarely allowed in that part of the house.

Then Hannah started putting the pieces together.

“I bet the previous owner of this house’s pet problem was probably that she had a lot of cats,” she surmised.

In a comment, Hannah said the house was remodeled and the varnish and paint on the walls as well as ozone treatments temporarily eliminated the smell.

The story of the “Cat Peeing House”

As for the previous tenant who caused the problem, Hannah explained what happened in a comment. “Sadly, the woman who had all the cats was a crack addict and died of an overdose at a local gas station. A neighbor told me the story,” she wrote. “The cats were left in the house for a while. All in all, it’s sad.” In another comment, she stated there were 17 cats.

Hannah needed help to solve the problem. She called her dad and told him he needed to help her rip out some floorboards and replace them. She estimated it would cost her a few hundred dollars.

Hannah and her father were immediately surprised by the smell that hit them when her father ripped out a baseboard and had to grab N95 masks, but that didn’t alleviate the smell. “It was disgusting,” she says.

At first, Hannah thought the problem was only in her room, so she moved all of her things to one of her sons’ rooms while she redid the bedroom floor.

But the house turned out to be much more disastrous.

A stubborn cat urine problem

As Hannah walked through the house, she realized that the problem was present virtually everywhere.

“I was emotionally devastated when I realized we would probably have to tear down the whole house,” Hannah says, showing a video of herself crying.

This is how you can tell the problem was really bad: It’s a two-story house, and the urine from the upper floor was seeping up to the ceiling of the first floor. That’s a lot of cat urine.

Since Hannah thought the house was uninhabitable, she packed up her things for herself and her two children and moved into her parents’ house while she tried to clear up the cat pee saga.

A construction company came and sprayed and sealed the wood around the house to disinfect and neutralize the odor. To save money, Hannah and her family decided to do the flooring and finish work themselves.

Hannah is currently posting more storytime updates, but judging by this video, Hannah was apparently able to move back in with her kids after 10 months.

@it_is_hannah_banana The story of how cat pee destroyed my house #cats #house #catpisshouse ♬ Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – High Sound Quality – Amemiya

Is the problem really cat urine?

Some people in the comments section believe that the problem is not due to cat urine at all.

“Lol, again, this is not a cat pee house. This is a mold house. Mold smells like cat pee. That’s why you see it on the walls. If you do an ERMI, this house would fail miserably,” wrote one commenter. Mold specialists have determined that mold, especially black mold, smells like cat pee.

Commentators have also made other suggestions, some more legal than others.

“Have you ever thought about accidentally leaving a curling iron on near a curtain??” one person said.

“Do you have any recourse against the sellers in this regard?” asked another.

The Daily Dot reached out to Hannah for comment via TikTok message and comment.

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