12-year-old Wash. girl takes captivating image, on 2008 Christmas Day

METHOW VALLEY, Wash. —

Seven years ago, when kiro7.com first published a photo taken by a 12-year-old girl in the Methow Valley on Christmas Day in 2008, the global interest it generated staggered the website's server.

The photo inspired impassioned discussion and debate from the spiritual and skeptical alike, for weeks. Hundreds of comments ranged from "It gives me peace," to "It had to be photoshopped."

Seven years after the photo was taken, kiro7.com revisited the Kirkland family, who decided to share it.

"I sure remember that phone call," recalls KIRO 7 reporter Gary Horcher. "Todd Goldberg and I were baseball teammates years back, and he called me from a vacation cabin in Winthrop saying, 'Gary, I've got something here. It's a very interesting picture taken by my daughter, but I have no idea what to do with this.'"

Goldberg explained that his daughter, Sophie, took the photo while experimenting with a digital camera she received as a Hanukkah gift days before.

"Todd told me Sophie and her 15-year-old friend took a walk from their cabin in the dark, and they were shooting pictures of snowflakes flying with the camera flash, because it made the snow looked like shooting stars," Horcher recalled.

"I'm not going to even tell you anything else about this," Goldberg told Horcher. "Take a look at it, and you tell me what you think this is, and call me back."

"I looked at it and instantly recalled all the paintings of apparitions I'd seen of the Virgin Mary," Horcher said. "I started looking up old paintings online and comparing them, and it was really striking. It looked to me like a mother carrying a baby at first glance, and people in the newsroom just went 'wow.'"

Sophie Goldberg, who is now 20 years old, studying pediatric psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, was a soft-spoken middle school student in 2008, preparing for her Bat Mitzvah.

Horcher interviewed Sophie Goldberg when the family returned from Winthrop to their home in Kirkland, on Jan. 3, 2008.

"I came over with a KIRO 7 photographer, Chelsea Shepherd, who knew a lot about digital photography," Horcher said. "Our bosses wanted her to examine Sophie's camera before we did the interview. Chelsea went through every picture on the memory stick taken before and after that image was captured, and she said she didn't think there was any way that photo was altered or staged. It looks like it's made of water droplets or fog."

"Sophie said she and her friend said were bored sitting around the cabin, so they went on a hike in the snow, shooting flash pictures each other, of the falling snow around the river bank, because she said the river fog and the snow made 'cool' images," Horcher said.

In the interview, Sophie Goldberg said she and her friend would stop and look at each photo they shot, and one image stopped them cold.

Sophie Goldberg said at first, she and her friend thought it looked like the ghost of a man. Terrified, they both ran into the cabin to show their parents what they saw on the camera screen.

"Later, I thought, that could be Virgin Mary," Sophie Goldberg said.

Her father, Todd Goldberg, who raised Sophie and her twin brothers in the Jewish tradition, is still fascinated by the photo, and its effect on people when he shows it to them.

"One guy looked at it, and he started crying," Todd Goldberg said, adding his family was never looking for attention. "We just thought we'd share it, and let people make up their own minds about what it is, and what it means."

Horcher heard from TV networks and reporters from Japan to Ireland, asking about the image, and about Sophie Goldberg.

"I told them, she's just an innocent 12-year-old girl," Horcher said. "This is a kid who was scared at first of the image she captured in the blink of a flash. But when I talked to her, she thought it was cool and interesting."

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