Today we’re reviewing a replacement RV mattress from a company called GhostBed.

RV mattresses - I don’t understand why but they are universally horrible. I’m not sure how this started but the mattresses in RVs are some of the most rock hard, flimsy and lousy sleeping surfaces known to human kind.

In fact, when I was selling RVs, we would get customers who would just ask us to dispose of the mattresses and I would take them to a shelter. It didn’t take long before I had to find a new place to take them as the shelter was no longer interested.

When GhostBed offered to send us one of their mattresses to try out, who am I to turn it down?

GhostBed RV mattress

GhostBed is one of the companies that ships mattresses rolled-up like a burrito in a vacuum-sealed plastic roll. If you haven’t been shopping for beds lately this has been the trend in the industry and has also meant that mattress buyers get a lower cost and, potentially, a better bed.

The biggest hurdle to this system is how one determines if the mattress is right for them and what happens if it isn’t.

Interestingly GhostBed was founded by Marc Werner and you may recognize that last name if you’ve been shopping for a ladder recently. Marc’s family is actually the ones who created the Werner Ladders and Marc is third generation there. But he also had issues with mattress shopping and mattresses in general. As such he worked to create a new company that produced a different product and Ghost Bed is the result.

Choosing a replacement RV mattress

One of the first things that impressed my Peggy was the mattress choice tool on Ghost Bed’s website. This is “Marc’s Mattress Tool” and is a series of questions designed to help you to choose a mattress.

It’s actually a well done system and helped us choose a replacement RV mattress.

We have been parked in my wife’s sister’s driveway for a week now and plan to be here a short while longer and one of the benefits of this has been being able to get products shipped to us. This includes the Ghost Bed which came in a box that you wouldn’t think would have a whole mattress in it.

The unboxing

I hope you find the video I’ve attached here of the Ghost Bed mattress informative and there’s a time lapse portion of removing our old mattress, which was surprisingly light yet stiff. Then you see us unpacking the new mattress.

Essentially you unwrap all the plastic and the mattress magically expands to form, well, a mattress.

First impression

Our old mattress was that hard-as-a-rock RV model with a three inch foam topper. It worked okay.

The new Ghost Bed mattress feels firmer than what we’re typically used to but the cover and materials you touch are really nice.

One of the things I can’t generally do is lie on a mattress on my back for very long. Typically this results in a significant pain if I do it for more than ten minutes so I usually get in bed and almost immediately roll over onto my side.

Once we had the new mattress in place I stretched out on it and was fiddling around with my phone. Eventually I realized that I had been lying there for quite some time and was concerned about my back, but there was no reason for concern. No pain, no pinch.

Promising.

Snore test

Of course the full test is sleeping on the mattress and both my wife and I found it to be very comfortable. Despite the initial impression that it was firmer than what we were used to, it seems that the mattress has some slow-moving give to it.

The bottom line is both of us really liked the sleep experience of this bed.

That’s saying something as we have a sleep number bed at home and our “numbers” are quite different. Peggy likes to sleep on a rock, I on a cloud. But this one mattress served both of us very well.

Other considerations

One of the things that can bother me are the smells of some products. For example, when I was selling RVs there were models I just wouldn’t go into any more due to the strong chemical smell in them.

I was concerned that something that ships like this would have a smell to it but I didn’t detect any. I didn’t feel the need to air out the mattress at all to get rid of unpleasant odors - there just weren’t any. This is saying something as I have to wash new clothes before I can wear them as there is just an unpleasant smell that I don’t like.

The bottom line

Would I recommend this mattress? Absolutely. I also like that the company has the mattress chooser tool to help you choose what’s appropriate for you.

Ghost Bed also offers some of the odd sizes that some RVs need including short queens and short kings. The mattress we got is certainly heavier than the one we took out but when you combine the foam topper and the mattress that came out of our trailer, this one’s not far off in weight.

I am also a fan of supporting US-based companies that make stuff here, so GhostBed checks that box as well.

Of course the obvious challenge is comparing this to any other mattress out there and I am only able to compare this to our previous RV bed, the bed we had at home and any mattresses I’ve experience in hotels. I think this does compare well to all those experiences.

While we found the combination of the torture mattress plus the foam topper to be acceptable in the trailer, this is a much better experience.

I also have been told that foam-based mattresses tend to feel hot. We have been testing this in July of 2022 in Colorado where the daytime temps have been in the 90s and nights cool down to an acceptable 70-ish. In testing this we never ran the trailer’s AC so I could check on the heat factor and I can report that Ghost Bed’s claim that these mattresses sleep cool seems to be true.

Further, the company offers a 101 night trial so if you go through the process of picking a mattress that fits your preferences, get it into your RV (or home) and don’t like it, there are no consequences.

As mentioned above I did get this mattress from Ghost Bed to write this story but I’m always honest with you all when this happens and also forewarn the company that if I don’t like the product, I’m going to share that with you.

Here’s the tell on this. I like this mattress enough that, we looked at a new GhostBed mattress when we moved to New Mexico. The only reason we didn’t get one is that they don’t offer a split queen. Bummer. In fact we prefer the GhostBed mattress in our trailer to the one we got for our home.

As mentioned, we had a Sleep Number bed and, in the process of moving, left it in the garage for a couple of days where the community cats rendered it unusable. So we knew we had to buy a new mattress when we got a new house and this is the one we both agree is worth spending our own hardly-earned money on.

Get your own GhostBed

Now that we’ve had the GhostBed for months we reached out to GhostBed to see if they would be willing to offer you a discount. They were.

So, if you’re looking for your own RV mattress we do recommend considering a GhostBed RV mattress. To be honest with you we have partnered with them but, like any RV-related product, we only recommend what we use and enjoy ourselves.