A good Samaritan brought back an Ottawa family's treasured Wild Thing sculpture Thursday night after it vanished earlier this week from their front yard overnight.

"He's back! He is kind of banged up, but we are thrilled this coverage brought him home," wrote owner Laura Dennis in an email.

The statue now has some cracks and its feet are missing, as well as its horns and one ear.

CBC News had reported that the 45-kilogram, concrete creature that looked like the monstrous character from Maurice Sendak's famed children's book had disappeared. It was hand-crafted for the son of Laura Dennis by his grandfather when the boy was born.

"Right off of our lawn today!! We are devastated," Dennis wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday, after the family woke to find the statue gone from the garden of their home on Woodward Avenue in Ottawa's Carlington neighbourhood.

News of the theft had generated plenty of sympathetic comments online.

Dennis said she planned to put up some missing posters, and friends and neighbours have vowed to help.

"I've had so many responses on Facebook saying, 'This was a favourite of ours, we walk to the park through your neighbourhood just to see it, the children all love it.'"

"Whoever took it must have planned it, there are no drag marks, they would have needed a few people or a vehicle," Dennis wrote.

What Dennis couldn't get over is the irony around the theft since Where the Wild Things Are is a book written to warn children about what happens when they behave badly.

Who sees a monument to a story about getting along with each other and then steals it?

"Somebody without much though of other people, I guess. And somebody who thought they want it more than the people who love it do," she said.