Having a new baby in the house can sometimes leave you feeling a bit delirious. After all, that first year of parenthood is filled with lots of middle-of-the-night wake-up calls, and after a while, the sleep derivation can really get to you. So when Maritza Cibuls recently checked on her sleeping baby last Friday night — and was shocked by what she saw in the video monitor — she thought she might be losing it. But right there, clear as day, she could see a "ghost baby" staring back at her on the baby monitor. Or at least, that's what it looked like.
Cibuls tells CafeMom that it happened around 8:30 p.m., shortly after putting her 18-month-old son down for the night.
There on the video screen, right next to her sleeping son, was what appeared to be the face of another baby looking straight at her. And it honestly terrified her.
"At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me," she admits. "I tried to ignore it, but it was really starting to creep me out. My husband was working that night, so I was even more freaked out."
Desperate to get to the bottom of things, Cibuls crept into her son's room with a flashlight and shone it around on the crib ...
But nothing was there.
Confused and seriously creeped out, Cibuls says she barely slept a wink that night, wondering what on earth the ghost baby could be.
The mom of two, who also has a 2-year-old daughter, even snapped a photo of the video monitor and sent it to her husband, Corey, her mom, and her best friend. All three had different theories.
She even ended up posting it in a mom's group to get an outsider's opinion — or to see whether she "was just going crazy."
The next morning, once daylight had hit the room, she cautiously decided to investigate the matter further.
And that's when she locked eyes with it. The "ghost baby" was once again staring back at her, from inside her son's crib.
Well, except for one thing: It wasn't exactly a ghost.
It turns out, the "ghost baby" was actually the photo of a baby model -- on a giant sticker attached to her son's crib mattress.
Apparently, Cibuls's husband had been the one to make the crib last. In the process, he'd forgotten to place the mattress protector on first, which made the sheets somewhat translucent when they were picked up by the monitor's night vision, and … well, the rest has gone down in viral Facebook history.
Once Cibuls realized what was really going on, she couldn't stop laughing.
"When I told my husband he had forgot to put the mattress protector on, he didn’t get it at first," she admits. "He was like, 'So?'"
But after she explained it, she says they both "got a good laugh out of it."
"It was just so unexpected to both of us," she tells CafeMom.
Since sharing the story Friday on Facebook, her post has racked up a whopping 290K shares.
"I’m screaming," one woman commented.
"That looks creepy as crap!!" another added.
Meanwhile, hundreds of others tagged their fellow mom friends and partners in the post, declaring that they could totally see themselves doing something like this.
"I was DEFINITELY shocked to see how fast this story spread," Cibuls tells CafeMom, who adds that she's not usually big into using social media. It was actually the women in her close-knit mom group — the ones she says have been with her "from the beginning, trying to figure it out" — who encouraged her to share it.
"We never imagined it would spread so far beyond our friends," she says. But in just a few short days, she says the messages have been piling up. Most thank the mom for the laugh, though others she says are a bit out there.
"Some messages are strange, insistent there is indeed a spirit there and telling me to go to church," she says with a laugh. "But mostly [we've been getting] good stuff."
Although this is definitely the strangest thing to happen during her last two years of parenthood, Cibuls says that since becoming a mom, the laughter in the house has certainly been kicked up a notch.
"I definitely find myself laughing more at all our crazy parenting adventures," she says. "Especially now that we have two [kids] so close in age. Sometimes they do stuff that initially stresses me out. I want to yell, but then I see their cute little faces, smiling up at me, and can’t help but smile back. My daughter always asks me, 'Mommy, do you want to laugh with me?' And I do. It’s so much easier to laugh than cry."
It certainly is easier to laugh than cry, but one thing's for sure: That scary "ghost baby" won't be making any repeat appearances.
Not if this mama can help it, anyway.
"Oh, my husband is no longer allowed to handle the bedding," Cibuls quips. "I’ll just be taking care of that from now on."
(Sounds like a MUCH safer plan, if you ask me.)
