Angela Kelsay was fast asleep in her Edinburgh, Indiana home when the sound of her bedroom door creaking open made her startle awake.
The mom of three first assumed it was her 2-year-old son, Lennox, who has been known to explore their home while his family sleeps, but when she saw a glowing sneer and pair of eyes headed toward her, her "demon-related PTSD" from watching scary movies got the best of her and she panicked.
In a hilarious Facebook post, Kelsay recounts the harrowing incident.
"In the doorway was a set of terrifying glowing eyes and mouth," Kelsay wrote. "It was hovering only a foot or so above the ground. I froze trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. Then silently it drifted a few feet closer ... That's when I called upon the Lord."
As the "demon grew closer," Kelsay began weighing her options for protecting herself. It was then that she heard a sweet voice say, "Mommy?"
"Oh. Sweet Baby Jesus in a manger," Kelsay continued in her post. "Oh, it was just my Lennox, thank you Lord. But wait... why the heck was he glowing? I flipped on the bedside light to reveal an (apparently glow-in-the-dark!) Ninja Turtle shirt."
Kelsay, who chronicles her family's funny adventures on Facebook at Midwest Mama: Basketball, Bows and Boogers, admits she "nearly throat chopped (her) two-year-old" before she realized he was just creeping silently through her bedroom in his glow-in-the-dark PJs.
"I am a particularly light sleeper — I have to be now that Lennox is around or he will sneak out of the house at 6 a.m., pull a barstool to the door, unlock a deadbolt and chain lock, make his way to the street, wait for a school bus to pull over and climb aboard. This is real life and actually happened," Kelsay told TODAY Parents. "I woke to the door creaking open which is not out of the ordinary, but then I heard nothing ... after I realized it was just my baby, I snatched him up and snuggled him in the bed with me and he quickly went right back to sleep."
Kelsay says sleep didn't come as easily for her, so in the morning she went downstairs to make coffee and start her day. Later, when a friend shared a similar story about a mom getting a scare from her toddler in the middle of the night, Kelsay decided to post hers.
"I said I was going to share the story with my Facebook world, but I didn't know I would end up sharing it with the actual world," said Kelsay of her now-viral post. "I'm just a regular old Indiana mom who did not see this coming. People have always told me I'm a good storyteller, but I just thought they were being nice."
CORRECTION (March 9, 2020, 1:10 p.m. EDT): An earlier version of this story misstated Angela Kelsay's location. She lives in Indiana, not Illinois.
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