Mom says opossum lived in daughters' bedroom for 3 days before family realized

A woman said an opossum was living in her children's bedroom for three days before she realized there really was a "creature" stirring in the closet, and not just an imaginary friend or stuffed animal.

Caitlin Burch shared her hilariously terrifying story on Twitter in a reply to Chrissy Teigen's fiasco with a pet hamster getting loose, and Burch's photo of the critter went viral.

"Hi this possum was living in my children's bedroom for 3 days before we believed them," she said.

Burch, who lives in Ohio, said last summer her daughters kept saying they saw the "creature" moving along the wall in their room, usually at night.

Burch and her husband checked the bedroom, but didn't immediately find any wild animals hiding in the shadows.

Sure enough, they later discovered an actual opossum camping out in the closet.

"We ended up waiting until it crawled into a bin in their closet," she said, describing the "I told you so" moment for her daughters.

"My husband put a pitchfork over it to make sure it didn't move. Then we put a cookie sheet over it and he carried the whole thing outside."

Burch joked that she was trying to take some better pictures of the opossum, but "the three other people in my house were not amused by my photography."

She said her daughters were scared upon finding the opossum, but bravely went right back to sleeping in their room.

"If I had known it was in the house, we would have been in a hotel for sure," she said.

And the opossum must have felt right at home, because it refused to leave. Burch said after they released the critter outside, she spotted it the next day "still hanging around the yard."

This story was reported from Los Angeles.