Young Mom’s Ultrasound Pic Reveals Late Father Kissing Unborn Daughter, She Says

Illustration - Shutterstock

Mom-to-be Shantel Carrillo, 30, attended a routine week-20 ultrasound appointment on Nov. 18, 2019, and everything looked normal. Shantel and her partner, Bryce Vinson, were delighted to see their unborn baby daughter’s face and didn’t notice anything unusual about the ultrasound until Shantel shared the photo online.

“Right when I posted [the photo], like 30 seconds later, somebody was like, ‘There’s an angel kissing your baby,’” Shantel told NBC San Diego.

Shantel quickly concluded that it wasn’t just a random likeness gracing the photo. The expectant mom, from Santee, California, maintains that her week-20 ultrasound depicts an uncanny likeness of her late father, Chuck, kissing her unborn daughter tenderly on the face.

Chuck passed away suddenly of a heart attack in 2016. Shantel was his only daughter.

Shantel posted her ultrasound image alongside a 10-year-old throwback snapshot of her father holding her eldest daughter, Myree, as a baby. The side-by-side comparison quickly went viral.

“I found a picture of my dad looking at my first daughter the same way that he was looking at the ultrasound, and it’s like dead-on,” Shantel said of the uncanny resemblance, as per the Tribune News Wire.

“It has his nose, his little chubby cheeks, his little double chin, and my dad wore a hat, like, all the time,” she added. “It looks like the bill of his hat and his lips are just touching hers so perfectly.”

Shantel’s daughter Myree told NBC 7 that she was “mind-blown” by the image. “I was shocked,” she said. “I was like, ‘Wow.’ It looked like my grandpa. I kind of think it is him.”

The expectant mom speculated that the dad-shaped silhouette in the top-left corner of the ultrasound could, in fact, be her placenta. “It does look a lot like my dad and it’s awesome. And, you know, it could be him, just saying, ‘Hey, I’m here, and it’s all good,’” Shantel reflected. “Or it could be that the placenta just looks like my dad, which is awesome, too.”

Shantel’s unborn baby daughter is due on April 5, 2020. April was, incidentally, the month that Shantel’s father was born.

Shantel firmly believes that her proud father would have relished being part of his second granddaughter’s life. “I feel like he’s including himself in this some way, somehow,” Shantel told WYMT. “That’s kind of like a kiss, like ‘It’s going to be okay,’ like, ‘Just relax. I’m here.’ That’s how it kind of feels to me; validation, like he’s got my back.”

Nor is Shantel’s “angel” the first peculiar presence to be spotted in a pregnancy ultrasound.

According to CafeMom, Utah couple Makelle and Jared Ahlin’s baby boy was pictured, supposedly, throwing heavy metal horns in the womb. Disney vacation planner Joanne Crowley’s baby girl, similarly dexterous in utero, made the peace sign when she was scanned by the ultrasound equipment.

Meanwhile, Mehgan Merriott and Robert Cooper were delighted when their unborn baby, the latest child in a long line of military servicemen, performed a salute. “I almost cried,” Mehgan told ABC News. “I thought it was sweet.”

Whether or not her father’s presence can be verified, Shantel Carrillo has concluded that her week-20 ultrasound is “just a cool picture to have.”

“[I]t just is what it is,” she said.

Revealing that she sometimes prays to her father to watch over her family, Shantel opened up to NBC 7. “He’s around,” she said. “[H]e’s doing his job; being a granddad.”