Mum terrified when she sees 'ghost baby' in son's cot

A mum laid awake fretting for an entire night after viewing what appeared to be a ghost laying next to her sleeping son.

Maritza Elizabeth, from the US state of Illinois, “freaked out” and got hardly any sleep after checking her baby monitoring camera and seeing the face of a child that wasn’t her own staring back at her.

Terrified, she crept into her son’s room, but retreated back to her own bed out of sheer terror.

“So last night I was positive there was a ghost baby in the bed with my son. I was so freaked out, I barely slept. I even tried creeping in there with a flashlight while my son was sleeping,” Ms Elizabeth wrote in a post to Facebook on October 18.

She investigated the supposed ethereal being in the light of day the following morning.

Baby monitor shows mum's son asleep next to an image of a child on his mattress that looked like a ghost.
The baby monitor showed a child's face next to her sleeping son. Source: Maritza Elizabeth

To her relief, the “ghost” was revealed to be nothing more than a printed image of a child on her son’s mattress.

“It turns out my husband just forgot to put the mattress protector on when he changed the sheets. I could kill him,” she wrote.

Her comedic story soon when viral, accumulating nearly 300,000 shares, more than 260 comments and over 400,000 reactions.

This came as a huge shock to Ms Elizabeth who told Yahoo News Australia that she and her husband rarely used social media.

“It’s been pretty crazy. Neither my husband or I are big on social media. We don’t do Twitter or Instagram or any of that. The most I ever do is change my profile picture,” she said.

“But I had originally posted about ‘ghost baby’ in one of my mom groups before we solved the case. Once we came to the hilarious conclusion together, some of the ladies in there asked that I make the post shareable.

Daylight reveals under the sheet the image of the crying baby to be a label on the mattress.
The ghost was revealed to be a printed image of a child on a mattress label. Source: Maritza Elizabeth

“Now it seems all my friends are seeing my posts everywhere and tagging me in.”

Many people shared in the amusing mistaken ghost story in comments to her post.

“This is hilarious! I was so freaked out this morning with the original post,” one person wrote.

“Nope. I’d be going in the room with a cross, some salt, and a gun, scooping up my baby and getting them right out of there,” another person said.

Several others admitted they too would have left the house.

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