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‘A Whole Puzzling Kind of Night.’ The Saga of the Mom Who Investigated the ‘Ghost Baby’ Visit Has a Glorious Ending

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One woman thought she was living in her own pre-Halloween spectacle when she noticed there appeared to be a ghost in her son’s crib. But this spooky tale had a much happier ending.

Last Thursday, while using a baby monitor to watch her 18-month-old son, Lincoln, sleep, Maritza Cibuls caught the strange shape of what looked like another baby next to her own. “Do you guys see the baby,” she recalls asking fellow mom friends in a Facebook group, “or am I crazy?”

After sending a picture to her husband too, she knew it was time for an inspection, and so she set out to discover whether it was a puddle of drool or stain (with an uncanny resemblance to a baby), or if it was something spookier at play.

“I was trying to be extra careful. I couldn’t really do a whole thorough investigation, because my son was sleeping,” Cibuls tells TIME. Using her phone’s flashlight and feeling around the crib, her expedition was to no avail. “I didn’t see anything, there was nothing in there,” she says.

Still, when Cibuls, who lives in the Chicago area, left Lincoln’s room and checked out the baby monitor, there it was again: the “ghost baby.” “It was a whole puzzling kind of night,” she says.

When inquiring with other moms in a Facebook group, Cibuls did receive some interesting feedback. “I actually had someone on there who was a clairvoyant medium who was telling me, ‘That is a spirit,'” she says. Someone else told her to go to church because a spirit was haunting her.

But then, once Lincoln woke up on Friday morning, it was finally Cibuls’ chance to open the curtains and figure out what kind of witchcraft was underway. And she could see the truth clear as day: Her husband hadn’t put the mattress cover on when changing the sheets, leaving a huge image of a baby’s face, embossed in the mattress label, to shine through the sheets in the light of the baby monitor’s camera.

Cibuls shared her ghost story with Facebook on Friday, garnering 301,000 shares and 71,000 likes as of Tuesday morning. “It turns out my husband just forgot to put the mattress protector on when he changed the sheets,” she explained in her post.

While she was relieved that there was no ghost haunting her baby boy after all, she couldn’t help but laugh. “I see this big, giant baby sticker, just looking up at me,” she says. “I was amused, but I was so embarrassed.”

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Write to Rachel E. Greenspan at rachel.greenspan@time.com