The parents of little Summer Haipule today spoke of their relief after the return of the schoolgirl whose game of hide and seek sparked a 12-hour police hunt.

While more than 80 police officers, a helicopter and dozens of friends searched through the night, the gap-toothed six-year-old was fast asleep in a neighbour's house just four doors from her home in Moulsecoomb, Brighton.

Vicky Wilson found her asleep under a cot where she is thought to have dozed off while hiding from her playmate, Mrs Wilson's five-year-old son Connor.

A daisy chain and pirate comic were found in her makeshift den.

The house had been visited twice by police conducting house-to-house inquiries but not searched.

Summer was back in the arms of her mother Minday, 34, today, coming to terms with the blaze of publicity that followed her reported abduction from outside a chip shop near her home.

Her father, 28, who changed his name from Christopher Anderson to Dragon by deed poll, was out shopping when the alarm was raised.

He said today: "There was a phone call that Summer couldn't be found, so I came straight home.

"I went out in a car with someone, looking around. There were people with bikes out on the hills looking. As the night wore on it got worse and worse. We didn't know what would happen."

More than 80 police officers were drafted in after reports that the six-year-old had been dragged off the street and bundled into a battered Ford Escort near her home in Bolney Road at 7pm on Monday.

The detailed report, which included descriptions of the greasy-haired driver and a cobweb-like crack in the car windscreen, came from a 13-year-old family friend.

Summer's five-year-old pal, later confessed he knew she was there all the time but was scared to tell his mother in case he got into trouble.

Minday said: "There was a huge void, there were just so many feelings and thoughts going through my head, all at the same time.

"Of course we were getting misinterpretations of what had actually happened. At one point we thought she'd been abducted.

"I think it was just an excitable young boy who had heard that there was a child missing and thought he'd make up a bit of a story.

"He hadn't realised, I hope, how he was making us feel and the wasted police work. They had 80 officers out, but in the end we've got her back and that's what matters."

Police took Summer - nicknamed Hermione Granger because of her resemblance to the Harry Potter character - to hospital for a check-up.

A criminal inquiry was halted when it revealed she had not been harmed.