Gef, the Talking MongooseThe annals of psychical research are littered with instances of animal ghosts. The Tower of London is said to be haunted by a phantom black bear, the appearance of which has shocked even the most hardened guards at this famously haunted fortress.
It has often been remarked that the British are a nation of dog lovers, which may be why tales of ghostly dogs abound. Although many of them appear to be the spirits of faithful companions, often sticking around after their earthly lives have ended in order to keep a watchful eye on their grieving humans, not all such hauntings are quite so nice.
Tales of supernatural black dogs such as the Barguest, the Shuck and the Shag have long been a part of the folkloric tradition, where they are said to lurk in cemeteries and prowl the coast at night. Legend has it that the appearance of these hell hounds may herald death, though it must also be pointed out that smugglers encouraged such stories as a means of keeping particular stretches of the coast clear of human interference, enabling them to engage in their illicit activities after dark. On the other hand, encounters with black phantom dogs have been reported for hundreds of years and have taken place under circumstances which have nothing to do with smuggling or any other illegal activity.
The black dogs are sometimes said to have glowing red eyes, and even more bizarrely, may shape shift into another animal form right before the astonished witness’s eyes. This subset of accounts strongly implies that, whatever these entities are, they are unlikely to be the spirit of man’s dearly departed best friend…and may be something altogether stranger.
An equally bizarre animal-centric haunting was investigated by Harry Price, he of Borley Rectory fame. Even by Price’s standards, what came to be called the haunting of Cashen’s Gap (known also as Doarlish Cashen) was unprecedented…all because of a mysterious creature named Gef the Talking Mongoose.
The Isle of Man can be found in the channel athwart the British mainland and Ireland. In 1931, it was a lonely and windswept place. Although not a part of the British Isles, its population were British citizens. Many of them made a living by farming. Such was the case with the Irving family: James Irving, his wife Margaret, and their 13-year-old daughter, Voirrey. The Irvings lived in a farmhouse situated halfway up the slope of a small mountain. They lived with a menagerie of farm animals and their faithful sheepdog, Mona. Cashen’s Gap was an isolated place, with no other houses for at least one mile in any direction. One is forced to wonder what effects this had on the mental health of the Irving family.
In the fall of 1931, a strange animal suddenly turned up at the farm. Initially, the Irvings mistook it for a weasel. At first, the creature could not speak, but the newcomer proved to be a skilled mimic, imitating the clucks, moos and screeches of the nearby farmyard animals.
According to the Irvings, the mongoose then finagled its way into the structure of the house, where it took up residence in the walls and the ceiling. The sounds of its claws skittering against wood could be heard running around the house all hours of the day and night.
Using nursery rhymes as a guide, Voirrey set about teaching the creature to speak, something at which it quickly became adept. In a shrill, high-pitched voice, the mongoose declared its name to be Gef (pronounced
Jeff, in the same way that
gif is pronounced
jiff). Gef had quite the story to tell. According to the mongoose, it had been born in India back in 1852, then traveled on to the Isle of Man aboard a ship.
1932 brought the first newspaper reporter to Cashen’s Gap. Having come a long way from the mainland in order to cover a decidedly oddball story, the reporter interviewed the Irvings and was subsequently rewarded by hearing the sound of Gef’s voice speaking from somewhere behind the walls. At that time, Gef was still being referred to as a weasel, rather than a mongoose. In order to get attention (or sometimes, apparently just for the hell of it) Gef pounded loudly on the walls and ceilings, startling the Irvings out of whatever they happened to be doing at the time.
The mongoose would sometimes up and disappear out of the blue, claiming later to have been making its rounds of the island by hitch-hiking on the vehicles of unsuspecting drivers. When it returned to the Irving household, Gef regaled them with gossip and the latest goings-on in the vicinity.
As time went on, the Irvings discovered that Gef had a most un-mongoose-like taste for human food, including the pickings from hearty fried breakfasts and sweet treats. The more Gef spoke, it showed a propensity for switching in and out of different languages at will. Even by the standards of a human being, it would have been a polymath. For a mongoose, this level of intelligence was simply unbelievable.
Presumably in an attempt to cause mischief, Gef had a penchant for throwing stones at the Irvings when they were trying to sleep. In addition to being an uninvited houseguest, it was also far from well-behaved. While the entity did hurl and smash crockery, and sometimes threatened to hurt the family, its behavior never escalated beyond the level of being a nuisance.
Equally remarkable were the reports that Gef had taken to reading the newspapers whenever Mr. Irving left them lying around. By 1936, Gef had become the darling of the very same print media which it so eagerly consumed. The reality (or charlatanry) underpinning the case of the talking mongoose was the equivalent of water cooler talk. Skeptics pointed out that despite efforts to objectively investigate the case, Gef had never put in an appearance for any outside observer when they came to visit. Gef seemed to reserve that for the family with which he lived, and to whom he was a constant source of both wonder and bewilderment — or so they claimed.
Gef, Talking Mongoose, Stirs England, Has London Adither declared the Saturday November 14, 1936, edition of the
Louisville Courier Journal, shrewdly noting that:
…when the reporters swarmed down to Irving’s cottage to see the little animal, he was extremely reticent. In fact, he was completely absent, even though they waited all night so see him.” Why would such an extraordinary entity reveal its existence to the Irvings but not to the world at large? Interviewed for the same article, Mrs. Irving noted that “He has often told me he doesn’t like newspaper reporters.”
Fair enough, yet Gef apparently also had a dislike for scientists and psychic researchers, as he refused to show himself to Harry Price or Nador Fodor when they came to Cashen’s Gap to investigate the claims in person. Indeed, Gef was apparently no fan of Harry Price, telling the Irvings that the famous ghost hunter was too skeptical for its tastes, and that he should not be allowed near the house. Price came anyway. There was neither hide nor hair of the entity until he left, at which point Gef returned in full force, gleeful now that the object of its ire had gone away empty-handed.
Price had initially been reluctant to visit Cashen’s Gap in person and had sent a fellow psychic researcher to scout out the case in his stead. That researcher heard the voice of Gef talking to him inside the house (though he never saw the mongoose itself) and was impressed that the entity seemed privy to information it could not have known through conventional means. It could recount specific actions that Price’s emissary had taken while far away from the farmhouse. This had bolstered Price’s willingness to go Gef-hunting in person. Although Gef failed to put in an appearance for the great ghost hunter, Price would ultimately benefit in other ways from his involvement with the case.
1939 brought Britain’s entry into the Second World War. On the Isle of Man, the new focus on wartime life took the spotlight away from Gef. Within two years, the talking mongoose was gone — seemingly for good.
Today, almost a century after Gef made its first appearance, students of the case are left with the question: what exactly was going on in that run-down farmhouse at Cashen’s Gap? Some considered Gef to be some sort of ghost or trickster spirit, though that seems unlikely considering the fact that the creature left hairs behind for scientists to examine. When analyzed, they turned out to belong not to a mongoose, but to a dog — possibly Mona, the sheepdog.
Mr. Irving dismissed out of hand the notion that he was living in a haunted house. Yet if the powers and faculties attributed to Gef are to be believed, then how best to explain a talking mongoose which was supposedly able to read minds and learn multiple languages in a very short period of time?
Gef itself played both sides against the middle. At one point, it denied being a spirit or ghost. The mongoose attributed its precognitive abilities (knowing what was going on far outside the walls of the farmhouse) as being simply “magic.” Yet on another occasion, Gef claimed the opposite, admitting to being a spirit which haunted the Irving family. Gef’s story was nothing if not consistently inconsistent. The entity, whatever it really was, was by no means a reliable historian.
In 1945, Mr. Irving died in the farmhouse. Margaret, his widow, moved out. Gef completely ceased to speak after the remaining Irvings had moved on to pastures new, leaving the next tenants of the house undisturbed. The farmhouse was demolished in 1971, with hardly a trace left of its ever having existed. For quite some time, Doarlish Cashen had developed the reputation of being a dark and haunted place, a stigma which the house could never shake off. Locals tended to avoid it whenever possible…even some of those who dismissed the idea of a talking mongoose.
In 1947, the owner of the property trapped what he thought might have been Gef and killed it with a sharp blow to the head. Photographs of him holding up a very large, slender creature’s body were taken for posterity and published in the local newspaper. Yet the dimensions of the dead animal, which was never positively identified, did not match the Irvings’ descriptions of Gef.
Was Gef real, or simply a contrivance of the Irving family? In his written account of the case, Harry Price made note of the lonely upbringing that Voirrey Irving underwent. With the exception of school, she had little in the way of friendship from children of her own age, or anywhere close to it. Most of her formative years were spent in the company of her parents and the family dog. Not given to losing herself in books, once her chores were done, Voirrey instead occupied herself with long and regular hikes across the nearer parts of the island. Lacking attention and human interaction, who could blame her if she had made up the colorful Gef in order to draw the spotlight of the outside world upon herself and her family?
One possible explanation for the vocal phenomena is ventriloquism: at least one observer accused Voirrey Irving of creating Gef’s utterances herself via trickery, “throwing her voice” in the parlance of the time. However, it must be noted that Gef’s voice was heard by multiple different witnesses, and on some occasions, this happened when Voirrey was not inside the house.
While ventriloquism may seem like a reasonable hypothesis with regard to the vocal phenomena, throwing one’s voice is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced repeatedly if it is to stand a chance of fooling an audience — especially if they aren’t in on the joke. How likely is it that Voirrey Irving had the means and the opportunity to master this skill in 1931? There was no Internet, no YouTube lessons for her to study. Nor do we have any evidence to prove that somebody coached her on the art of ventriloquism. This wasn’t something she or anybody else in her circumstances would simply be good at from the outset.
There is also the matter of the pounding on the walls of the Irving home. One possible explanation is that offered up by the Fox Sisters of Hydesville, often credited as the pioneers of the Spiritualism movement in the 1920s. They claimed to have cracked their joints, primarily their toes and knuckles, in order to generate the loud knocks and raps which purportedly came from spirit communicators.
The haunting of Cashen’s Gap — if a haunting it truly was — bears many of the hallmarks of a poltergeist case. The focus would appear to be the youngest member of the Irving household, Voirrey, who, like so many poltergeist foci, was on the cusp of puberty when the phenomena began. The disembodied voices, knocking, stone throwing, and other disturbances fit the established poltergeist parameters remarkably well. The fact that no subsequent tenants of Doarlish Cashen were plagued by Gef once the Irvings moved out, is also suggestive that something about their family dynamic acted as a catalyst for the strange occurrences.
In the Enfield Poltergeist case, which is covered elsewhere in this book, the titular entity was said to be the spirit of a former resident of the house who had died of a brain hemorrhage while sitting in a chair downstairs. Could “Gef” have been something similar; the discarnate spirit of a human being who either appeared in the form of a mongoose (i.e. a psychic projection) or had somehow possessed the body of a flesh and blood animal?
Alternatively, was Gef an
egregore — a thought form created and given form at the behest of either one of the Irving family (most likely Voirrey) or the collective beliefs of them all?
While these hypotheses may sound far-fetched, it must be borne in mind that none of them is significantly stranger than the notion of a talking mongoose!
The tufts of hair which were ostensibly donated by Gef for analysis turned out to be nothing remotely like those of a mongoose, being instead of canine origin. Neither is photographic analysis helpful in determining the validity of this phenomenon. None of the photographs purporting to show Gef, two of which show some kind of animal sitting on a wooden rail fence, are of sufficient resolution to prove the identity of the creature. It could just as likely be a cat, a stoat, a weasel, or a number of other animals as a mongoose.
Even Harry Price, the consummate showman who loved nothing more than to be involved with any outlandish story that might generate publicity on his behalf, remained unconvinced of Gef’s reality. In true Price style, that didn’t stop him from cashing in by co-authoring a book on the subject. “The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap” stops short of declaring the Gef phenomenon to be truly paranormal in nature, something which Price would do in other cases, such as his works on Borley Rectory.
At the time of writing, Gef is enjoying a modest resurgence in popularity due to the release of the 2023 movie
Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose starring Simon Pegg and Minnie Driver. Gef is voiced by the author Neil Gaiman. The film is something which would almost certainly have mortified Voirrey Irving, who relocated to the British mainland and did everything she possibly could to distance herself from all things relating to Gef. Far from cashing in on her intimate connection with the case, after leaving the Isle of Man, Voirrey maintained a low profile for the rest of her life, right up until her death in 2005.
Had the Cashen’s Gap case arisen in the 21st century, it would have been an easy one to confirm or dispel. After supplying the Irvings with something as simple as a cell phone, we could have high-resolution still images and video footage of the notoriously camera-shy mongoose, and audio recordings of its voice. On the other hand, we might have absolutely nothing at all, if the so-called haunting was as fraudulent as some people were convinced it truly was.
Yet, if the whole thing was a hoax, then it should be noted that none of the Irvings ever confessed to it. So far as the record goes, not one member of the family deviated from their story to their dying day. There is no longer a farm at Cashen’s Gap to be investigated. All of the principal participants are long dead. The only thing which remains is the mystery, and the ongoing speculation which surrounds it.
Perhaps that is for the best. One suspects that Gef, for one, might have preferred it that way.
