ST ALBANS, Maine — Last July, an adventurous orange cat from the quaint town of St. Albans decided to tag along on a road trip and capture the hearts of many along the way.
Andrea Scholten and her family had traveled from Maine to Ohio on the way to Wisconsin for the 2022 EAA AirVenture Oshkosh air show when they noticed another member of the family had unexpectedly joined the trip.
When stopping in Toledo, Ohio to rest after driving nearly 900 miles, the Scholten family cranked open their pop-up camper—and to their surprise—were met with a familiar furry face. There sat Delilah.
"I open the door, and there's Delilah," Scholten said in July 2022. "I just screamed 'Delilah!' and my husband and the kids were like 'Delilah!' So, we went to Target, we bought her food, litter, a collar that we could write her name on because we were completely unprepared for this."
Soon after, Delilah took the internet by storm, becoming an Oshkosh star on social media. Scholten took to Facebook, sharing updates and photos of Delilah's journey to the air show with #stowawayoshkoshcat.
"We put a story up with a photo of her and people thought it was hysterical," Scholten said. "They were commenting, 'We want more Delilah,' so we did. Every day a couple of times a day I would put up a post and we used the hashtag ... People loved Delilah."
Quickly becoming an internet sensation, people attending the festivities in Oshkosh brought Delilah gifts to the Scholten family's camper, and even one of the skywriters made a cat in the sky for her.
Now, one year later, Delilah tagged along with her family back to Oshkosh for this year's air show adventure—this time, intentionally.
This time around, Delilah was fully prepped with all her luxuries. She even had her comfy bed to lounge in during the car ride to America's Dairyland.
Scholten said months before the air show, many on Facebook were asking if Delilah was coming back, anticipating her return. Throughout their time at the AirVenture this year, the family held "visitation hours" in the evenings so fans could come to meet Delilah.
"She got all kinds of visitors, and she got spoiled rotten," Scholten said. "We left there with bags of treats for her. We had people bring us salsa. We [even] had one of the local gourmet popcorn companies give us a bunch of popcorn."
Many of the visitors posted photos they took with Delilah to a 2023 EAA AirVenture Oshkosh Facebook page dedicated to photos and videos taken at the show, using her signature hashtag.
Scholten estimates around 100 people stopped in to meet Delilah, and she handed out "I met Delilah" cards with Delilah's photo and pawprint on it as a keepsake. One visitor was a bearded dragon named Doby. And even the skywriter group who painted a cat in the sky last year came to meet their inspiration.
"She was quite a little celebrity there," Scholten added.
Last year, Scholten said the family was aiming to get Delilah a brick under the Brown Arch to leave her permanent mark at Oshkosh. And they did just that.
The Scholtens started a GoFundMe for anyone who wanted to donate to help get Delilah a brick. All the money used to get a brick goes directly to supporting the Experimental Aircraft Association.
"That earned about half of a large brick," Scholten said. "So we decided, what the heck? Let's just put the rest of it in, and we are going to get a full-size brick."
The brick depicts the exact design the skywriter drew in the sky for Delilah in 2022.
Now, for years to come, Delilah's spontaneous cross-country journey will remain engraved in Oshkosh—and in people's hearts.
