Gef, the Extra Clever Mongoose: Fake, Poltergeist or Talking Animal?

In 1931 at the Irvings' farmhouse on the Isle of Man there were poltergeist bangs, words and, then, the appearance of Gef a talking weasel-like creature with human hands, 'the extra, extra clever mongoose'. Join Simon and Chris as they attempt to be extra, extra clever about Gef who could talk, sing, report gossip from all over the island and do selfies. Expect to learn what kind of families produce poltergeists, why Harry Price was a 'conman', and whether Gef's pronouncements are teenage or frustrated adult male. And what was Gef really? A poltergeist? Folie en famille? An actual talking animal? Tulpa? A witch's familiar? Or a hoax by one or all of the Irvings, so disappointed in their lives?

Transcript

[Chris] So I understand you have a new project, Simon. Tell me all about it.

[Simon] I recently decided to enter the fast and exciting world of substacks. Do you know what a substack is, Chris?

[Chris] I would assume that it's a block under another block, so it's a lot of blocks on top of a small block, so substack.

[Simon] Well, if you had said a blog under another blog, you would have been correct. It is a modern fangled form of blog, and I have been writing a fun and dynamic essay once a week on different aspects of the British supernatural, and the substack is called British Mythology. And it would be great if some listeners here came in, not least because I cover many of the subjects that we cover, and in fact, I steal several of your ideas there. And in the most recent number of my substack, I referred to you, I like this, Chris, as my arch enemy.

[Chris] So I'm just getting all this abuse on our Facebook page and on your substack, what are people going to think?

[Simon] What are they? Well, listen, the big news on the substack is lots of people are saying, where's Chris? This is a package deal. Where's Chris? They were waiting for your comments, Chris.

[Chris] Oh, okay. Well, I'll have to get on that and show my arch enemy status.

[Simon] Exactly.

[Chris] I feel like Moriarty.

[Simon] Now, look, the shameless plug is now over. So please, everyone, remember British Mythology, particularly Chris. And with this, we move on to today's insane episode. And here, I just want to take a moment to say that Chris has been yanking my chain about this subject, not for months, but for years. Yes, it is finally time to confront Gef, the talking mongoose. Chris, give us a couple of sentences. What is this case?

[Chris] Well, this was on the Isle of Man. Towards the end of 1931, things started circulating about this remote farm, Dorlish-Cashin. It's a few miles from the small village of Dalby. And the occupants were the Irvings. It was the father, the mother, and a daughter, Voirie. They claimed that they'd been visited by a small weasel or rat-like creature that had developed the power of speech. And it had seemed to have some intelligence. It could converse. It would debate. Initially, they said it was a kind of a hostile and malevolent presence. They'd been frightened by its threats and satanic laughter. But after a few months, the weasel was perceived more benignly and became sort of a member of their family. And they claimed it lived in the house. It ran errands, kept the farm buildings free from rats. It would even catch and kill rabbits for them to eat, because they didn't have a whole lot of money. And on those occasions, when it was away from home, it would go around the neighbourhood collecting gossip and would comment on everyday goings-on in a very vulgar manner sometimes. It enjoyed singing. It enjoyed foreign languages. And it had this very high-pitched but clear voice.

[Simon] Now, dear listener, you will understand why I have fought like a forest fire Chris's desire to do this episode for so long. But I have finally ceded...

[Chris] What I want to know is why you yielded to my blandishments. Actually, I think you caved to listeners' demands, because when we put this on the Facebook page, everybody wanted to hear about Gef.

[Simon] I thought, live a little bit. You know, I thought, let's just get this out of the way. Let's flush it out of the system. Gef, live dangerously. Let's confront Gef. Let's look him in his putrid little eyes. Let's tweak his nose and let's move back to the fairies. This was my basic take on the situation.

[Chris] Okay. Well, why don't you tell me about who the Irvings were and the family who was host to this amazing animal?

[Simon] Well, while you were speaking, I remembered, as so often happens, Chris, a Tolstoy quote, where Tolstoy says, happy families are all happy in the same way. Unhappy families are unhappy in lots of different ways, or more elegant words to that effect. And I think that you could adapt that sentence to this rather unusual family and say that poltergeist families are all freaky, are all freaky in lots of different ways. If you find out that a group of students, this happened to me a couple of years ago, or a family down the road, or the vicar's menage has a poltergeist, I'm not saying the poltergeist doesn't exist, but I'm saying, believe me, that family will have issues.

[Chris] Yes, absolutely.

[Simon] So we have some consensus here. This is a very unusual family. So we have dad, James, known as Jim from now on. We have mom, Margaret, and we have three kids, but two of the kids have already got out of Dodge, quite sensibly from what I can see, and left the Isle of Man. One of them seems to be no longer on speaking terms with his parents, and the other comes back occasionally and then just seems to escape as quickly as possible. And so we're left with, let's get the pronunciation right here, Voirey, their 13-year-old daughter. 

That is 13-year-old when the haunting begins in 1931. I'm going to try and give you a little pen portrait of all three of these. It's the poltergeist's dream, in a sense, because I think any one of these three could spark a haunting on their own, and the idea of putting them in the house all together is just, well, it's a sociocultural experiment that is bound to go wrong. 

So I'm going to start with the youngest member of the family, because certainly you will have expected me to start with the oldest, and I'm all about confounding expectations today. Voirey was 13 years old. It would be interesting, Chris, if we picked adjectives for the three of them. The one that I would go with with Voirey is morose. She seems quite standoffish, at least when there were guests. She also seems to be a rather self-contained young woman in some ways, quite impressive in that sense. She's used to rather a solitary life, I would say, and as often happens with children on farms, grew up quite quickly. She's getting up at 4am to feed the lambs. What adjective would you choose for Voirey?

[Chris] I would have said solitary, because she was known for wandering around the woods by herself and looking at her in the pictures, the photos of the family. I agree with morose or perhaps sullen. She obviously spent a lot of time with her parents, and she's an only child by default.

[Simon] When we see the photographs of her as a mid-teen and also in her late teens, I would say that she, to use that rather unusual word, is handsome. In other words, she has quite striking features, but it's not Barbie doll beautiful at all. Beauty like a tightened bow. 

It's quite a strong face, but clearly a striking individual, and I think with strong face this leads me on to her mum. Her mum was described by several witnesses as quite witch-like, and I think they mean by that she had a real presence, she had piercing eyes. So, I think my adjective for her would be witchy.

[Chris] Well, she was actually described as uncanny and a witch woman. What I note when I look at the photos of her, she worked as a dressmaker, so she knew all about fashion. She's got this little choker around her neck, and her hair is very tightly marcelled, and she has the look of someone who's almost imitating Queen Mary. She wants everyone to know that she has this special social standing, and she's a bit above them. That would be what I would be interpreting just looking at how she's dressed and how she's standing.

[Simon] Again, someone with presence, we can agree with this. Maybe someone seeking also to impose herself on others. Her husband, Jim, says that she's highly intuitive, and she has these, you know, the Spidey tingling, the Jedi seeing things before they happen. She seems to be a little bit in that category. The only tiny thing I'd add, and then I'll hand back to you Chris, is I found it interesting how lots of people visited. I actually seem to be quite seduced by her, as well as finding her rather intimidating, they also found her very welcoming and clearly honest. Whereas, I'm not sure that for me, intuition and honesty naturally go together.

[Chris] Anything else to add about mom? Well, as you say, she was considered very welcoming. I believe Harry Price said they did everything they could to make us comfortable. So, think a little bit about Hyacinth Bouquet saying she wants to make sure everybody knows she's a great hostess.

[Simon] With this, we come to, for me, the most interest of the three, and this is dad. This is Jim Irving. And what adjective could we use for Jim? The adjective I would choose here is misplaced. What I mean by this is, this poor guy, through his own fault, has ended up in the, well, a place he just shouldn't be. He's had this dream of the countryside, and after some economic hardships, he went to man. He was a Lancashire man, a Liverpool man, in fact. Crossed the water to the Isle of Man, where his wife was from, bought a farmstead up on High, and there he settled down into a life of drudgery that just, I don't think, was his birthright, really. He had expected to do other things in life, he had cultural pretensions, liked Gef, and this could be a heavy-handed clue, he liked languages. He was a kind of a poor cosmopolitan, in exactly the same way I should say I am. I hope this doesn't come off as patronising to him. He was fascinated by foreign cultures, and clearly intellectually lively, and yet he finds himself on top of a hill, in the Isle of Man, in a rather poor decade, and has a pretty miserable time there, I think we can say. Adjective?

[Chris] I almost want to say failure, if he's unkind.

[Simon] No, but it's better than misplaced. You're spot-on failure. Sorry, back to you.

[Chris] I'm sorry for him, because he had a very good job representing this piano company, and he got to travel, and he got to talk to people. He's obviously a very outgoing man, like some salespeople are, and then everything falls apart, because of tariffs, and the company falls apart, and he loses his job, and they lose their nice house. They had a very respectable lifestyle, and I'm like, what in the world possessed you to move to this remote farm? Well, I hadn't realised that her parents were living not far away, and told them about the farm. For a while, apparently, they did pretty well with wool and sheep farming, but it didn't last. Again, there was an economic downturn, and things were pretty terrible.

[Simon] Going back to failure, I really like this word, because lots of us in our lives might make the decision, let's say a hippie decision, of going off to live in the wilds, or opening a dressmaker shop, or doing something a little bit crazy. Nine out of ten times, it doesn't work, and that's okay. We move on, we live in free societies, it's all harvest. The really sad thing about this case, is he got trapped in this adventure, and that he finds himself in this farm, and in the end, he's not able, not least because of the blasted mongoose, but more of this in a minute, to actually sell up, and get out, and get back to the suburbs of Liverpool, and sell things.

[Chris] I won't say disaster after disaster, it just was a very quiet decline into a life he really didn't want.

[Simon] For me, one of the killer lines in Christopher Yossef's book, is that they didn't have a radio. Right, yes. I mean, this should be obvious, because actually, they didn't have electricity, but in the 1930s, if you're in a middle-class family in the UK, radio is everything. It's a little bit like having the internet today, and they were cut off from this aspect of life, from when they moved up to the farm, and their only contact with the outside world was visits, letters, and newspapers. This was it. Here, if I was going to choose a word for the family, I wouldn't say isolated, because they're not really, but they're cut off, which is slightly different. They've removed themselves, and these various umbilical cords with the wider world have been steadily reduced. One of the things about Gef is the lines of communication open back up, and this leads us, Chris, to Gef.

[Chris] The little extra, extra clever mongoose, as he called himself. He had this shrieking, high voice. It's just hard to understand what was actually going on. In appearance, he was supposed to be a little animal resembling a stoat, or a ferret, or a weasel. He was yellow, had yellow fur, long bushy tail that was supposedly speckled with black, and he may have had lines of darker fur running down his back and sides. Jim Irving said, his front feet resembled a human hand, and he appears to have three or four fingers and a thumb, and as he has taken hold of my fingers in his, I could tell that he possessed great strength, having due regard to the fact he's only the size of a large rat. This is just inconceivable, really. But he first claimed to be a ghost in the form of a weasel, and said he was born in India, 7 June, 1842. Now, I went looking to see who in the family might have been born. Irving's father was born in 1842, but he claimed to be an Indian mongoose. Now, I read in the book by Joseph about that the Irvings actually kept a mongoose, or mongooses, to catch and eat cockroaches. Another farmer, though, also named Irving, in 1912, apparently living not far away from the farm, also imported mongooses to control the rabbit population, and they say that there may still be some mongoose living on the island.

[Simon] Even you, Chris Woodyard, sounds quite apologetic about Gef.

[Chris] We'll get to the explanations towards the end of the podcast, but it just all sounds extremely fanciful.

[Simon] Perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. So, let me say just some things about Gef. Gef is quite witty when he speaks. His words have weight. They're quite amusing to read, even at the remove of almost a century. I remember that a couple of years ago, there was actually a Twitter account with Gef's phrases, and this speaks to Gef being a personality. So, he's not giving us any rubbish about life in the summer land, or God is love, or there's none of that, but there is this worrying material aspect of Gef that we have alleged photographs of Gef, we have alleged hair from Gef, and we have paw prints from Gef.

[Chris] Well, the first samples proved to be a dog, and maybe they were the family's dog named Mona. I love the ingenious explanation that Gef cut some fur off the dog and put the fur where Jim Irving could get it, and claimed that it was his own fur, just as a joke. Prints have been also debunked as not related to any real animal. I think there were also teeth prints, which were not those of a So, yeah, there's lots of physical evidence. The photos, as usual, are blurry, dark. The only one I've seen that's really relatively clear, again, we're coming back to fashion, looks like one of those fur neck pieces with a face and paws that ladies used to wear anytime from the 20s through the 60s, really.

[Simon] I remember one of the photographs looks to me, for all the world, like a rock on the top of a fence.

[Chris] Yeah, again, it's like all the photos of the Loch Ness Monster turn out blurry. They said it was because Voyrie was not used to the camera, or he dodged out of the way before we could get a photo, that sort of thing.

[Simon] There were also some extraordinary descriptions from the family, particularly from Jim and Margaret, both of saying that they have very much felt Gef, that Gef has held them. In a rather worrying episode, Margaret actually talks about how he takes her finger and thrusts it into his mouth, and her finger runs along his very sharp little teeth.

[Chris] He actually drew blood, from what I've read. So, oh, not only is he a talking mongoose, he's a vampire.

[Simon] He's also helpful to the family, because he kills rabbits. Yeah. And he had a special stone that he left rabbits on, and the family were grateful for this, because, of course, they could eat rabbits, they could sell rabbits. But, my goodness, let's talk about how Gef became famous now. So, essentially, everything began, as it does in Chris and my world, with newspapers. A number of local newspapers reported this talking mongoose, and then, sorry, it's just so extraordinary. And, of course, newspapers off-man on the mainland clipped the newspaper story, and gave their own twist to this, because it was a great page filler. I mean, who wouldn't want this wonderful, wonderful nonsense? And they appear, the entire family with Gef, in various British newspapers.  From there, people begin to make contact with the family. For instance, legions of spiritualists crossed the island to look for Gef, and had interesting conversations with the Irvings. And, eventually, we move on to two great personalities. For those who are listening, who don't know the name Harry Price, how could you describe Harry Price?

[Chris] I kind of call him a con man. He did a fair amount of good research, but he also was caught faking things, like at Borley, where he threw a brick or something. It's really hard to sort out what his contribution is. I mean, he certainly popularised psychical research. He was always trying to get in the newspapers. I think he lied about his background, trying to make himself higher in social status than he was. He was working on the Rudy Schneider case. He says he was just too busy. People kept contacting him to come out and look at Gef. And he was busy with the Rudy Schneider case, and he just didn't really want to do it. But then he started thinking, well, there's all kinds of talking animals in folklore and in fairy tales, so why shouldn't there be a talking mongoose? Let's go check it out, which I thought was a little disingenuous.

[Simon] He was a publicity magnet. He loved publicity. I would also add, though, that I think he was relatively sceptical about a lot of these cases, and don't think of him as being naive.

[Chris] No, no, not at all.

[Simon] Yeah. So he often goes into cases and debunks cases quite effectively.

[Chris] Yeah. And that was one thing I noted in The Haunting of Cashin's Gap and some of the articles that he wrote about it. He was definitely trying to be extremely diplomatic. He was sort of playing both sides of the fence about, we believe the Irvings are honest people. We're not finding any evidence of fraud, which I found quite interesting.

[Simon] Harry Price heard about the case, wrote to the family, and he sent one of his scouts out to the island to check it out. And the scout reported that there were these incredible happenings going on. He actually heard Gef speak. And this is unusual because, as we'll see, Gef was highly selective with whom he spoke. This is perhaps the only significant case of an outsider with some kind of whack, some kind of influence, actually encountering Gef in a significant way. This account was so extraordinary that Harry Price started to plan a visit to the island. He went with his friend Lambert. And when they went there, they talked extensively to the family. They looked around. They examined the house. But they found no Gef. He said, not Price. He's the one who put the kybosh on the spirits. And so he vanished. And then this happens again with a second researcher, the crazy Hungarian psychologist Nandor Fodor. Nandor was a Hungarian who'd come to live in London. He'd actually met Freud in his last years. He had a strong Freudian background. But he was interested in the parapsychology. I'm very grateful to Nandor, because he actually wrote one of the most interesting pieces on the early history of the Fairy Investigation Society. And Nandor also made the journey up to Dorlish Cashin. But unlike Harry Price and Lambert, he stayed in the house. And I think that this is the wise thing to do, however uncomfortable it might have been. Nandor wrote a letter to Gef that was read out by Jim before Nandor got there. 

He stayed in the house and brought presents for Gef, talked. And when he left the house without meeting Gef, he actually wrote a rather hurt letter to Gef. And my favourite Nandor Fodor detail is that when he left, he left a camera behind. And he left the, this is the 1930s equivalent of a selfie stick, but he left one of these long leads so you could take your own photograph. And he put it in such a way that Jim could set it up. So, get this, Gef could take a picture of himself. Geoff was not amenable to this suggestion, and all the photographs came out blank. And there was a rather tense exchange of letters between Jim and Nandor after that. And then following on from that, Harry Price finally brings out his book on Dorlish Cashin. And perhaps it's worth saying here that we're all fixated in the 2020s on Gef, but this was not one of Harry Price's big sellers. He did much better with other books. And if you want the proof of that, go on the secondhand market and try and buy one. It's a very expensive volume.

[Chris] What I saw was Harry Price talking Jim Irving out of writing his own book, saying, oh, well, you don't have the cred, the public, you know, we'll give you royalties. And then claiming we haven't sold very many. And I wondered if that was actually true or not. I would have expected that anything with Harry Price's name on it to go well, because he was such a publicity hound. Although by the time they published it, it might have just been passe, and the papers were tired of it. Although in 1936, Lambert, who came to the island with Price, Richard Stanton Lambert, had a slander case about Gef. It was said that he was unfit to serve on the board of the British Film Institute, because he was mentally unhinged about Gef. So, he brought an action for slander and won a lot of damages. And I thought that would put him back in the public eye, and that might have sold more books. I don't know.

[Simon] I find it interesting that the title of the book is The Haunting at Cashin's Gap. There's no Mongoose, no Gef. It seems to me that the phenomena had peaked, and maybe to some extent the slander case cast the whole thing just into ridicule. People stopped taking it even slightly seriously.

[Chris] That could be, yeah.

[Simon] Perhaps it's also worth adding about that book, that as is typical with Harry Price, he plays a little bit hot and cold. He wants to keep the reader interested. He's also showing his scepticism. But I think if you read it as clear, they don't take the phenomenon to be a true supernatural event. Is that fair?

[Chris] Yeah, I think that's fair. But like I said, he was trying to be diplomatic and not say anything bad about the Irvings. And that also may have been an awareness of the slander or defamation laws.

[Simon] Absolutely.

[Chris] So yeah, he was definitely tempering his analysis.

[Simon] So here we're going to go on, I hope, to the question of what on earth was happening in this small family.

[Chris] Well, we can start by claiming it was a poltergeist, because there's a lot of similar cases where the thing starts out as a rapping, which is what Gef started out just banging on things. And then there's sort of an evolution from these rappings to talking, as if the creature is listening and learning. Same thing happened, I think, with the Bell Witch poltergeist case. So we could say it was that.

[Simon] We could say it's that, but would you agree, just playing along with this notion, that this is a really quite extreme case of that process, in that it's true that you often have poltergeist cases that begin with rappings, and then maybe a little bit down the road, a personality of types, forms, and then perhaps a headless badger is seen under the bed. In some senses, the family thinks that the being is beginning to materialise. And yet here, we've gone that much further down that road. Gef becomes a semi-permanent presence, and he speaks absolutely at ease. Is that fair? It would be a very extreme case of that.

[Chris] It would, because most poltergeist cases wear out in three to six months. And this went on for years. 31, 36, I think there might have been a little bit going on in 37, possibly.

But yeah, it would be a very extraordinary case of that. Now, we've talked about the Philip experiment, where a group of people created their Philip-like phenomenon. And maybe we have something similar here, a folie a trois or a folie en famille, where people were taking part in this and just caught up in the fantasy. Now, supposedly, there were other strange animals reported to be haunting that site before Gef came. And when Irving engaged a couple of guys to renovate the house, the Irvings were staying in a cottage somewhere else. The men who had planned on staying in the said the place was uncanny. So possibly there was already some sort of haunted aspect to the place. The Irvings said they didn't know anything about spiritualism. But for heaven's sakes, all the tenants, all the stories about mediums and seances were in the papers. Sikeverill Sitwell wrote in his book on poltergeists, it would be interesting to know whether a life of John Wesley was among the books at Caction's Gap, implying that they somehow copied all of the incidents that happened at the Upworth Rectory.

[Simon] Your point is a really strong one. They will have read about these things. They will have heard about them in various points, whether or not they actually had that book, even though they didn't have a radio. This stuff was in the newspapers, not day after day, but week after week. They will have come across accounts. Absolutely, absolutely. Now, none of this, of course, is to say that they're being dishonest, but it's a necessary backdrop for the rest of the discussion. Right, right.

[Chris] It was suggested that it was a financial hoax, but if it was, it was a very unsuccessful one. Irving never got to write his own book. Price and Lambert scooped the pot on that one. Maybe they lost money. The Irvings suffered losses from either damage to their property by people who were coming in to look at it, or the devaluing of the farm, because it sold when it sold for about half of its purchase price.

[Simon] This is fundamental. The house was bought for £300, but it was sold for about half of that. This is the way in which the Irvings became trapped, that because of the spook that may have been stimulating, interesting, in the end, it actually means that they're held there in that house.

[Chris] Going back to the explanations, it's been suggested that Gef was part of Jim Irving's personality, or Margaret's, or Vorry's. Much of his news was accounted for by telepathy. Now, that doesn't explain some of the incidents like Gef reporting accurately on remote places or events, or seeing into people's houses. Apparently, there was a traffic controller named Mr. Gale, and he asked Irving about Gef. Irving responded by asking Gale about a brown and yellow jumper that Mrs. Gale was knitting. Gale says, how the deuce can you know that? She only started it a few days ago. Irving says he knew nothing about Mrs. Gale, never been in their house. Irving also knew details passed to him by Gef about Captain Dennis's house in life. He was the scout sent out by Price, and he'd never been to Captain Dennis's house. So, there's some odd aspects to the knowledge that Gef had.

[Simon] But let's be clear, you're not implying that this was made up. You're implying Tulpa, forgive my Tibetan pronunciation, but this idea that in some ways, if we say it's an aspect of Jim's personality, you're suggesting it took on a real autonomy of its own. Is that fair?

[Chris] Yeah, I think that's fair. I was thinking more of the way poltergeists families, you know, project into an apparition or a knocking or a speaking creature. But Tulpa covers the facts as well. Now, Gef himself said, had a lot of ambiguous and contradictory statements about himself. He said, I am an earthbound spirit. And after 1932, he says, no, I am not a spirit. If I were a spirit, I could not kill rabbits. So, it's characteristic of trickster entities. I think of the lying entities in Joe Fisher's book, Hungry Ghosts, and unreliable narrators is how they've been described. I think that's kind of fair. Margaret thought that Gef was the spirit of a human being in the form of an animal. I guess this was local Manx folklore, but she also suggested to him that when he went outside of Dorlisch-Cashen, he was like a shapeshifter, and he would walk about in human form, then turn back into a mongoose to bring news back to the family. That just seems a little far-fetched. Nandor Fodor says that Gef was not a poltergeist, but the only class in which he fits is the familiar, like the witch familiar creature. One of them are absolutely outlandish suggestions. I love this. Nandor Fodor reported this in 1937. A Mrs. Florence Hodgkin wrote to the spiritualist publication Light about astonishing communications from a llama, Tibetan llama, about a race of people actually in existence and living on the earth at this moment of which the world has never heard. They are highly developed, cultured, and so advanced that their animals have attained speech. She says that the Irving family know all about this. Conspiracy. Yeah. Fodor says, I regret to say that the Irving family does not know. He says, I don't believe a word of it. I would not have even discussed this fairy tale, but for its psychological lessons. It shows how insatiable the instinct for the marvellous is. I approve nothing regarding the talking mongoose.

[Simon] But Nandor changed his mind, didn't he? When he went there, he seems to have been quite open to the idea. And in his essay on the subject, he even talks as if perhaps it is a talking animal. Yes. And yet a couple of years later, he's much more sceptical. He seems to have rode back a little bit.

[Chris] One final thing about the possible origins. I love this in Joseph's book. He brings in the Norse entity, the mischievous tattletale squirrel, Ratatoskr, who runs up and down the world tree, Yggdrasil, and he bears gossip and gets everybody riled up. So I thought that was a really interesting parallel considering the Norse presence on the island.

[Simon] When I come across a supernatural case, I feel that there is a middle ground between two extremes. On the one hand, you have the extreme where people have experiences that are incredibly stereotypical and echoed in legend. And sometimes it's a little bit worrying if the account conforms too closely to the legends that we hear in folklore.

Then on the other hand, on the other extreme, you have stories that are just so off kilter, so bizarre that I personally find it a little bit difficult to take seriously. And for me, Gef risks being in the second category. We have a boggle factor and Gef goes right through all my tripwires on this. You've seen some fairies dancing in a house outside Cornwall. I'm up for that. You have a talking mongoose and you regularly put your finger in his mouth and feel his sharp little teeth.

[Chris] Why do you boggle at one and not the other?

[Simon] Well, I'm sceptical about the fairies dancing outside the house in Cornwall, but that's different from boggling because I can absolutely take the account seriously. In other words, I can trust the sincerity of what's going on in the people's minds. And maybe there are fairies, maybe there are three cats chasing each other in a ring that was seen in the moonlight, who knows? But for me, this has a certain resonance. I can take it seriously. And to some extent, this is a problem for me, reading Josie's book on Gef. It's a lovely book, but it's just that I find it difficult even to open my mind enough to try and give the benefits of the doubt in this case.

[Chris] I'm just so pleased with the amazing amount of research. I mean, it's covered absolutely every detail. And I kept thinking, oh, I've got this great revelation on this. And it's like, no, no, he's already got that in his book. So that's what I admire. Whether the case has any real validity or not, I'm not going to make a judgement on that.

[Simon] You're not even going to let me hold a gun to your head and say, Chris, was Gef a thing? No. So you're deliberately sitting on the fence in this question, but you think that it could be a supernatural phenomenon.

[Chris] I don't think it was a supernatural phenomenon, but I can't tell you how it was done. And that's what bothers me.

[Simon] Chris, if you allow me, I'll make the case for this being a fake, and I'm not going to give you any satisfactory explanation. I don't think I'm going to convince anyone with this, but I just want to point to some things that I find really worrying in the accounts. Carry on. So the first thing that really strikes me is that Jim, who for me is perhaps the shadiest of the in relation to Gef. At the beginning, when Gef arrives, there were lots of noises. As you said before, it's a classic poltergeist case. And then this develops and becomes this creature who gradually becomes more and more talkative. I find it absolutely extraordinary that Jim claims that Gef was a real animal, given that he'd lived through the poltergeist phase. I just cannot square that. You go through what's clearly a poltergeist phase, which is something that is very well known in our culture. And maybe my daughter is wrapping the wall when I'm not looking, but you know the topos. And then from there, this develops into a weasel that becomes a mongoose. And you claim that that is actually a real animal. I just don't find the progression convincing. I'm not talking about the phenomenon. I'm talking about what would go on in the head of Jim or any other adult. Secondly, very few people outside the family actually come into contact with Gef. Now, there seems to be a list of about nine people who do have experiences, but some of them are fairly weak. And some of them, I suspect, could be explained away. It's certainly striking that whenever Gef comes face to face with a convincing outsider, and by that, I mean someone who has a reputation for being either sceptical or getting to the bottom of things, Gef just disappears. The third point I would make is actually a reading, if I may, Chris. I'm opening Gef's book, and for me, this is the most convincing critique. Here is a letter on the subject from Mr. J. Radcliffe, Director of the Isle of Man Examiner. It was published in The Listener in 1935. So, this is the letter. I was very surprised to learn that Gef, in inverted commas, still performs as having heard nothing of the spook story since the winter of 1932. I'd assumed that Gef had died a natural death. The story in the beginning created a considerable stir in the Isle of Man, and my own experiences are well worth recording. In company with my father, who, it turns out, was the Managing Director of the Journal, and a few friends, we journeyed to Mr. Irving's cottage one glorious Sunday afternoon with keen anticipation. Our reception was most cordial, and the subsequent tale unfolded was very similar to your own experiences. This is a reference to Lambert and Price. Despite our coaxing, however, Gef refused to reveal himself or speak to us. Okay, so, so far, nothing different. Now, listen to this. Somewhat disappointed, the party left, and a Mr. Evans and myself lingered on the Irving doorstep for a few minutes, chatting to Mr. Irving. Suddenly, there was a shrill squeak from the corner of the room where, voire, the daughter was sitting, and Mr. Irving, in great excitement, gripped my arm and pointed to the opposite side of the room, whispered, he's there, did you hear him? Evans and I gazed at each other in amazement. Later in the letter, he writes, we were again conducted to the door, and the squeaks at intervals continued. Each squeak was kindly translated by Mr. Irving to mean, they don't believe, or I want to back a horse, etc. The squeak in every case was of particularly short duration, and then, for me, this is the killing detail. Mr. Irving decided to accompany us part of the way down that beautiful footpath, and invited Voire to join us. On our way down, I noted that she had a tendency to hang behind, and once again, we heard a piping squeak, with Mr. Irving again, wildly gesticulating, and pointing to the hedge, about two feet in height, and whispering, he's there, I tell you, he's there. This was really too much, for my hearing is very good, and the squeak, without doubt, was human, and came from immediately behind me. We laughed over the whole incident for days. I say laugh, because it was so badly done, that it was extremely funny. Now, that last detail sticks out in my mind, because another visitor to the farmhouse, who didn't hear anything, and was sceptical, when she was walking away with Jim, at a certain point, she hears something in the hedge, and Jim says, that's Gef. It's exactly the same protocol. If you put these three points together, I become very sceptical. I imagine that this was Jim, or maybe Jim and Voire together, or maybe all three of them, and one thing, again, that strikes me, just being the meanie here, is that in a couple of the cases, where outsiders did hear Gef, Margaret was away from the house. She'd gone to Peel, where her family lived. Is it possible that Margaret was just somewhere around, making noises? I don't know. So, I've no explanation, but I, apart from the inherent strangeness of what Gef represents, I just think there's a pretty strong case to be made, that something is up in the account.

[Chris] It also could be that it's, we've seen this in poltergeist cases, where things are actually happening, that the child, for example, the epicentre, wasn't in a position to actually do those things, but later that child is caught faking something, because they want to keep the thing going. It's like, well, it worked to begin with, but now I'm going to have to keep faking it. I wonder if that's where this went. You know, we started off with a poltergeist event, and then the family just wants to keep it going.

[Simon] I do have a sense of very lonely people, and I do take your point as well, that people want to keep things going, or the more innocent version of this, is that sometimes people feel the pressure of outsiders. This is an excuse sometimes used by spiritualists, that outsiders are so desperate to have the experience, that Jim is walking by the hedge, hears a noise, and says, oh, it must be Gef, because these people have come all the way, and the British are very polite.

[Chris] We know that Margaret would get very upset when they'd have visitors, and Gef wouldn't perform.

[Simon] She would get angry with him.

[Chris] But if it was a complete hoax, what was the point? Just to bring in extra company? To feel important?

[Simon] I think the most credible thing is to feel important. Jim, as you said, cruelly, but I'm afraid truly, a bit of a failure. He reckoned himself to be a very intelligent individual. Part of it may have been him getting the better of people running this scheme, not necessarily because he thought he was going to get financial reward for this, though he did ask in some letters about money, but more just because he wanted to show to his own satisfaction that he was able to appear in front of the world, and amaze a large public, as indeed he did. He was successful in this.

[Chris] Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

[Simon] One thing, again, we can agree upon is just the extraordinary appeal of this legend in the later 20th century, and the 21st century. This is something that honestly, I don't get. You will have gathered I'm not a Gef fan. What does so many people see in the rat?

[Chris] I think it has to do with fond childhood memories of talking animals, in both fairy tales, fiction, also television, and movies. I mean, you've got Mickey Mouse, you've got Winnie the Pooh, we got Frog and Toad, Mr. Ed on television, Peppa Pig. There's all kinds of talking animals. I was talking to a priest once about nativity scenes. There's a big collection in Dayton here at the Marion Library. He asked me and my daughter how we felt about nativity scenes where the figures were all animals. You had a cat, Virgin Mary, and a dog, Joseph. And I'm very negative about that. But he said they really do appeal to children. So it's this, I don't know what you would call it. But it's just something to do with, I think, these childhood memories of talking animals.

[Simon] One of my most vivid childhood memories when I was maybe four or five, is I had a dream where I went over the hill next to the farm where I grew up. And I was taken in by a tribe of talking animals who welcomed me into their community. And I wonder if this is just something that's always been the case.

[Chris] What kind of animals were they?

[Simon] I think they were rabbits and squirrels. Maybe my mom had started reading Beatrix Potter to me. Maybe there was something in the background. But I absolutely agree. Children go through a phase where they're especially fascinated by animals. And with boys, you see it particularly in the so-called dinosaur phase. And of course, to have animals that speak adds a whole other level to that.

[Chris] And I wonder, could we, going back to explanations, I mean, we talk about witch familiars, but what about just an imaginary playmate?

[Simon] Could we say an imaginary playmate that got out of control? Could be. Could be. So your scenario would be that Voirie had an imaginary friend. We've talked about her very solitary existence. And perhaps she began to speak for the imaginary friend. Perhaps her parents heard. Is that the idea?

[Chris] Possibly. And we know too that some children have dissociative phases where they don't realise that they're doing the talking. They just think that their imaginary friend is talking.

[Simon] I'd push back slightly on that, Chris, in that I really like Gef's sentences. I find them amusing. I can't see a 13 or 14-year-old girl saying those sentences.

[Chris] Okay. I wonder, has anybody put all of his statements in one place and analysed them in comparison to Jim Irving's or Voirie's writings? There is supposedly analytical software that can say whether things are, or predict or give a percentage of possibility that this was written or said by the same person.

[Simon] Yeah, absolutely. One thing I note, though not in this very scientific way you're suggesting, is that Jim has a very mannered way of writing. He had a far above average control of language. And personally, I think he's one of these people who's a little bit indulgent when he writes. He can't see a pun without extending it out. But he's not your average postcard writer, went to the beach, had an ice cream, see you soon, mom. No, there were long sentences, things are stretched out. And it's quite different really from how Gef talks. But it gives me a sense of someone of well above average intelligence, which is what Gef also is. Now, again, I don't want to slander Voirie here. Voirie is clearly an intelligent person. But when you listen to the things that she said in later years, the way she writes, she's quite a sparse person. She's to the point. Gef is anything but that.

[Chris] That's true. That's true. But I also found it interesting that Gef was drawing from popular culture. Like he said, I'm the eighth wonder of the world. And that arose from the publicity for King Kong movie that had just come out. He also talks about splitting the atom, which also was in the news. So I found those to be sort of telling.

[Simon] If we accept that Gef was a human being, it was a human being who read a lot of newspaper. Because in that house, as we've said, there was no radio. It had to be someone who was reading the newspaper, even in the house or elsewhere. Now, when I was 13, I used to read the newspaper in our pre-Internet age, though I'm not sure I was able to absorb it in a completely adult way. And again, I'm not suggesting that Voirie wasn't a highly intelligent person, but she was young. There's a kind of wicked maturity in Gef. No one could think that Gef is a teenager.

[Chris] Okay. Not even a snarky teenager.

[Simon] Snarky, yes, I agree. But not a teenager. There's something about the wittiness and the shortness, which for me is very adult.

[Chris] I'm not sure. I find some of it juvenile myself. But I think of his phrase, I'm 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.

[Simon] For me, that's an adult, Chris. Would you say that's a teenager? 

[Chris] I don't know. 

[Simon] Look, I'm a freak teenager completely. I've got big hands. Okay. Could be a teenager. But then it gets into this tiresome rhetorical game of trotting out these various words. I think the person who was speaking Gef did a lot of crossword puzzles. Okay. We can now turn to the question of final readings. Now, I know Chris has been incredibly busy, but in the worst passive aggressive way, I sent her emails trying to get her to write a poem on Gef. Because I think had she done that, that would have been for the ages. But my fear is that Chris, you were just too busy.

[Chris] Yeah, I'm sorry. I simply wasn't inspired. It just didn't work. But maybe in the future, we'll see. But this reading comes from Nandor Fodor. So I'm always happy to use his quotes about this case, because he wrote so much about it. I can definitely state that Gef is not a poltergeist, that he is not an earthbound spirit, and that he is not a ghost. I am also positive that no psychic contribution on the part of the Irving family is responsible for the extraordinary happenings at Dorlish-Cashin. I can see only one explanation which covers all the facts. This is the same which is given by Gef himself, that he is an animal, an extra extra clever little mongoose, who for years understood the human language, but could not speak it until Mr. Irving taught him. But could he not be a familiar, a survival from dark mediaeval days? Gef does perform the services of familiar. He finds stray sheep, chases out the rats, finds lost objects, and pays for his lodgings and food by catching rabbits for the family. But he cannot penetrate closed doors. He cannot be in two places at once, and he has no supernormal knowledge. But he has no ties with the ghost world and is afraid of spooks. If we can bring ourselves to the admission of the stupendous fact that an animal can learn to talk like a human being, the mystery of Gef immediately evaporates. If Rolf, the wonder dog of Mannheim, could show the intelligence of a child, if Black Bear the Briarcliff Pony could possess powers of clairvoyance, if birds can speak and associate definite ideas with definite words, why not a talking mongoose?