Lou’s View – Dec. 4, 2013

The Great Christmas Tree Goblin

by Lou Bernard

“So how long have you been investigating the paranormal?” I get asked that a lot. I’ve been a member of the Lock Haven Paranormal Seekers since about 2007, but it goes back much longer than that. The truth is, I’ve been investigating the paranormal for about forty years. But I wasn’t always all that good at it.

I grew up in an old farmhouse on a Christmas tree farm—Green Valley Farm in Slatington, Lehigh County. I always think of home at this time of year. When I was about six years old, I wanted to form a paranormal investigative team—I couldn’t yet pronounce “paranormal investigative,” but I knew what it meant and I was determined to do it, by god. So I formed a team, and called it the “Ghost Gang.” Because of the limited pool of potential recruits available to me, it would up mostly being me, my cousins Pat and Janice, and my brother David. My brother informed me that he had no wish to be recruited as a ghost hunter, but I was bigger, so he was recruited on the team. (I also tried to recruit my younger brother Jonathan, but he’d run screaming for Mom as soon as I’d said the word “ghost,” thus rendering him unsuitable.)

In those days, my technique was lacking. I hadn’t yet gotten as scientific as I would one day become, what with all my science lessons coming mainly from Superman cartoons. Our first investigation consisted of shining flashlights around the house and shouting,”Hey! Any ghosts in here?” until we were told to go to bed.

Our second investigation was even less productive; we just repeatedly accused my older cousins Jim and Cathy of being ghosts until they got sick of it and told us to get lost. We also once found a perfume bottle of my mother’s that was shaped like a ghost—A plastic Avon thing, I think. And we learned that it glowed in the dark.

As best I recall, the Ghost Gang’s only other investigation involved looking at a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that my mother had hanging in the living room, and deciding that, yep, Lincoln was probably haunting our house. We never did prove that; I just assumed Lincoln must have had something to do with our house, because there was the portrait. Decades later, Dad explained to me that Mom had purchased that portrait for a dollar at a yard sale because she was sick of looking at a blank wall.

When the Ghost Gang broke up, I went solo, like a tiny David Lee Roth. I still didn’t find any ghosts, but I went through a lot of flashlight batteries.

My next big paranormal adventure came a couple of years later, when my father told me about the Great Christmas Tree Goblin.

I suspect this was a tale to scare me into staying inside the house after dark. Dad denies it, but I think he’s lying. My father was always trying to keep me inside the house, for whatever reason. Usually it was something ridiculous, like I was trying to exit through a third-story window. One summer day, Dad caught me attempting to rappel out of my bedroom window on a dangling rope, and objected. “If you’re going to do that, turn off the air conditioning,” he said. “I am not paying to cool down this whole farm.”

So he described the Great Christmas Tree Goblin to me—It was a sort of Christmas Bigfoot, the way he told it. Tall, green, and hairy (or maybe he said it was covered with pine needles; I forget.) For some reason, the Great Christmas Tree Goblin had a red rooster comb on top of its head. I recall Dad adding that detail, but I don’t know why.

Though Dad does not remember it this way, I’ve always thought he was trying to frighten me into staying indoors after dark, where it was safe. That backfired horribly—I spent a lot of time after that outside, looking for the Great Christmas Tree Goblin.

First I drew a lot of pictures of it, so I would know what to look for. Green fur, humanoid, rooster comb, check. I wore out multiple green markers drawing my prey. And then I snuck out of the house looking for it.

It must have been late fall, maybe early winter. I remember it being chilly out. And I walked outside into the tree fields, looking for the goblin.

An exhaustive search failed to turn up any trace of the goblin—I looked for almost five minutes. Nothing. I wished I’d thought to bring bait. Oh, right, Dad had told me that the Christmas Tree Goblin ate little boys. I was sufficient bait.

And then I heard something—It might have been a rabbit or a cricket or something, but at eight years old, I knew the sound of a hairy green footfall when I heard it.

So I bolted back for the house. I made it back inside just in time to avoid being devoured. Once back inside the house with every light I could reach on full-blast, I took a moment to savor my triumph. I had, at great risk to myself, discovered the Great Christmas Tree Goblin.

I wonder if he’s still out there. Now that I think of it, I wonder if my nieces and my son might be interested in searching for him. I think I’ll ask them about it. And I’ll see how much it would cost to have custom-made T-shirts that say “I believe in the Great Christmas Tree Goblin.”