A giant rat attacked a baby girl as she lay sleeping in her crib.

Lindsey Molyneux, 30, said that she and her husband had been relaxing in front of the television when they heard Lolly screaming over a baby monitor, and when they rushed to the 16-month-old's room they found their daughter covered in blood with deep bite marks on her arm.

Then Lindsey's husband Michael, 41, spotted the foot-long rodent scurrying across the floor of their one bedroom apartment in London, according to the Mirror.

Molyneux said that the animal, which they nicknamed Ratzilla, had also gnawed through Lolly's pajama pants.

She said the girls had gone to bed around 8pm and Lolly's cries came about an hour later as Molyneux and her husband were about to watch "I'm a Celebrity".

"So we were waiting for that and she just started crying through the monitor. I went in because I didn't want her to wake her twin Lily up," she said according to the Daily Mail.

"I went in there and she was shaking and I thought maybe she was just having one of her nightmares," she said.

Molyneux said her daughter threw up on her shoulder so she walked out of the bedroom to clean her up in the kitchen, where she saw all the blood.

"I just started screaming, I tried not to swear but every swear word was coming out of my mouth," she said.

"I said 'she's bleeding, she's bleeding'. I couldn't see where she was bleeding from then I suddenly saw her hand, you could just see that it was gushing out," she said.

"The only way I could describe it is we were just befuddled, we just could not figure out what had happened. We've got no pets and there's nothing around her bed that could do that."

It was when she was on the phone with emergency services that she saw the rat scurry past her.

"I was literally on the phone to the nurse. I saw it at the door and it was about a foot long. I just started screaming down the phone at this poor woman, 'there's a rat'. The nurse said 'okay you need to take her to A&E,'" she said.

"Mother bear instinct kicked in with us and we were like 'now we know what it is, we have to get it out of the house,'" Molyneux said.

"My husband filmed it on his phone. As I got off the phone, my husband ended up getting the broom," she said. "I went around the patio door, opened up the front door and as soon as I opened it up it's legged it. You could clearly see it was a rat, the size of it was massive."

Doctors at the emergency room confirmed that a rat had bitten Lolly. Molyneux said that her doctor didn't believe the story until she showed him the footage.

"He was looking at me like I was crazy before I showed him the video," she said.

Lolly received treatment for the bite and is now recovering well.

Since the incident the couple have disinfected and cleaned the entire house in Camden, North London. They have also called pest controllers to lay traps and check nearby sewers. She said that pest controllers were unsure how the rat got in but she noted that the front door had been left open for half an hour earlier in the night to let air in the house.

"It's not even the thought that it bit her, that's bad enough, it's just the thought that it was crawling on her," Molyneux said. "It's got in once and I'm still afraid it can get in again."

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