“I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you’d faint, you’d be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!”

Gef, the Talking Mongoose

When the muted scratching behind the farmhouse’s old wooden walls turned into strange hissing and humanoid gurgling, the Irving family began doubting their early theories of wild mice and scavenging rats. So it seemed reasonable and, like, totally OK when, in 1931, a swaggering, bushy-tailed mammal sashayed out of the darkness and introduced himself, in perfect English, as Gef, “an extra, extra clever mongoose.” Over the years, Gef entertained thirteen-year-old Voirrey (the only Irving who could actually see the creature), and her parents, James and Margaret, with tales of his exotic Indian upbringing, fantastical claims of supernatural powers and even scandalous neighborhood gossip, which he claimed to obtain through extensive eavesdropping and daring spy missions. Occasionally, Gef would get rowdy and toss objects around the Irving house, or perpetrate Kutcherian japes, like the time he convinced the family that he had been poisoned, but overall, the mongoose’s seven-year stay, as documented in a journal kept by James Irving, was a pleasant one.

I came across the story of Gef while researching last week’s poltergeist posts. It seems that parapsychologist and poltergeist enthusiast Nandor Fodor, hoping that he could use Gef as an example of a case in which a human agent created sounds and manipulated objects via inadvertent psychokinesis, visited the Irvings at their home on the Isle of Mann. After staying with the family for several weeks, and interviewing numerous locals, Fodor left with the distinct impression that Gef (who the parapsychologist didn’t see or hear during his investigation) was neither a poltergeist nor a deliberate hoax, but rather some wholly unidentifiable phenomenon or entity.

Fodor wasn’t the only Mulderesque truth-seeker to make a pilgrimage to the Irving’s allegedly mongoose-prowled home – in 1937, magazine editor Rex Lambert and his close friend (and infamous paranormal investigator) Richard Price set out on a Gef-hunting expedition that led them to plasticized Gef footprints and tooth marks, and a sample of alleged Gef hair. The evidence was analyzed by Reginald Pocock of the British Natural History Museum, who concluded that the hair was definitely that of a dog, while the paw prints and teeth marks, while unclassifiable, were not made by a mongoose, and appeared suspiciously canine. In the end, Lambert’s and Price’s supernatural lark resulted in a light-hearted co-authored book titled “The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap,” and a windfall of £7,600, which Lambert won in a slander law suit after London councilman Cecil Levita publically accused the mongoose-seeking journalist of being “off his head.”

In 1937, the Irving family sold their farm – and, with it, their mischievous lodger – to a man named Leslie Graham who, 9 years later, confirmed that he had, in fact, encountered Gef in the house… and promptly shot him to death. Graham’s description of his victim, however, did not jibe with Voirrey’s descriptions of Gef, so it’s possible that the farmer murdered a different magic talking animal.

Magic talking animals. Can you believe it? Come back Wednesday and Friday for additional chatty critter stories, including Christmas Eve pet confessions, the Son of Sam murders and animal EVP.

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