When Shantel Carrillo posted the ultrasound of her unborn daughter on Facebook, she was focused on just one thing: the image of her baby’s profile. She hadn’t noticed anything else. But just a few seconds later, messages began arriving from friends and family who saw something different in the photograph.
According to them, a man’s profile seemed to appear over the baby’s face, tilted toward her as if he were kissing her. And for some of the people who knew Shantel’s father, the silhouette especially resembled him.
Shantel was five months pregnant with her second daughter when she had the ultrasound at Sharp Grossmont Hospital, in California, in November 2019. Her father, Charles — whom the family called Chuck — had died suddenly in 2016.
When she looked at the image again, Shantel also began to see the resemblance. She pointed out that the figure seemed to have the nose, cheeks, chin, and even the visor of the hat her father used to wear. Then she looked for a photograph of Charles with his first granddaughter and compared the two images.
The resemblance was especially emotional because Charles had been very close to his first granddaughter. Shantel said that although he was a strong-willed person, he melted when he was with her. Now she was expecting another girl, who was due to be born in April, just a few days before her grandfather’s birthday.
Her stepmother also saw the ultrasound and, according to Shantel, ended up crying when she noticed the resemblance. For the expectant mother, the image became more than a curiosity: “It was like a validation”, she said. “This is something he would do”.
The ultrasound, of course, does not prove that the silhouette is really Charles. It is an interpretation of a medical image that different people may perceive in different ways. But for Shantel, it remained a deeply special memory of her father and of a pregnancy during which, in some way, she felt that he was close by.