Baby monitors can be spooky at the best of times. They bathe your kid in an eerie grey-green haze and make your child’s eyes glow like a demon’s.
They can also play some pretty nasty tricks on you, as one Illinois mother found out just a few weeks before Halloween.
Maritza Cibuls says she was terrified when she checked her baby monitor one night and saw that her son, Lincoln, was not alone in his crib. The baby monitor showed a ghostly baby seemingly lying next to Lincoln, with eyes, hair and a mouth clearly visible.
“I was positive there was a ghost baby in the bed with my son,” Cibuls wrote in a now-viral Facebook post on Oct. 18. “I barely slept.”
She added that she tried “creeping in there” to investigate her son’s spectral sleeping buddy but couldn’t get to the bottom of it.
“The more I looked at it, the more I was thinking I was tricking myself into believing that it’s something,” Cibuls told the Washington Post.
She shared the photo to a mommy group on Facebook that night in hopes of getting some second opinions on it.
“I said something like, ‘Hey, do you guys see the baby? It’s really creeping me out’ because I wanted to know if I was going crazy,” she said.
Cibuls figured it out the next morning. Her son did not have a ghostly bedfellow, nor was it one of those “this rag looks like Jesus” cases. There actually was a baby face in the bed with her son — but it was on the mattress itself.
The baby face was on a label still attached to the child’s mattress, and it showed up on the baby monitor because the boy had drooled onto it.
“We have a very drooly baby,” Cibuls told Good Morning America. “He’s like a St. Bernard.”
Cibuls blamed her husband for the phantom child, saying he had forgotten to put the child’s mattress pad back on the bed.
“I could kill him,” she wrote on Facebook alongside two laughing emojis.
Her Facebook post has accumulated more than 522,000 reactions and 314,000 shares since Oct. 18. Most of the reactions have been positive, although Cibuls says she’s also faced some harsh criticism for what felt like a harmless post. The critics have accused her of failing to rescue her child from what was — obviously — a phantom menace.
“If I really thought our child was in danger, I wouldn’t have left him in there,” Cibuls said.
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