The Bizarre, True Story of Gef the Talking Mongoose
31.08.2023 - 20:08
/ atlasobscura.com
Sometime around 1933, two teenage cousins, Harry Hall and Will Cubbon, paid a visit to a new friend of theirs named Gef. Gef lived in a remote, windswept farmhouse on the Isle of Man. He was very shy, and the cousins could hear and talk to him, but never saw their new friend. From behind a wall, Gef would guess heads-or-tails when a coin was flipped or play catch with a rubber ball through a hole in the attic ceiling.
But soon, Gef began misbehaving: spitting and threatening the boys that he would “wet on [their] head!” Gef, it turns out, was no normal boy—he was a poltergeist in the form of a talking mongoose.
Doarlish Cashen, the farmhouse where Gef resided, was in many ways the stereotypical haunted house. It was an ancient farmstead on a notoriously fairy-filled, desolate isle, situated some 725 feet above sea level in the cold, gray waters between England and Ireland.
In 1917, married couple James and Margaret Irving moved into Doarlish Cashen, where they were soon joined by baby daughter Voirrey. After several years of peace, Gef suddenly appeared.
One fateful evening in September 1931, following an outbreak of strange tapping sounds, a creature let out a series of growls from the upstairs attic. The Irving family went to investigate. The growls soon turned to “gurgling sounds,” as James Irving would later recall in a 1937 interview, like those of a baby learning to talk.
Fascinated, Irving taught the creature English, saying words out loud for Gef to repeat parrot-fashion. Gef was grateful. In a letter Irving wrote in 1934, Irving recounted Gef saying, “For years, I could understand all that was said. I tried to talk, but couldn’t, until you taught me.”
With his newfound language skills, Gef told Irving he was a ghost of a mongoose. He had been born in Delhi, India, on Monday, June 7, 1852. “And I shall haunt you with weird noises and clanking chains,” Irving recalled Gef declaring in the same 1937 interview.
In his book Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose, librarian Christopher Josiffe compares Gef to a Victorian music hall comedian. Gef’s fondness for playing pranks and making, what Josiffe calls, “outspoken and irreverent comments,” are a central part of Gef’s “enduring appeal.”
The Talking Mongoose “repeatedly lampooned [the Irvings], comparing [James Irving] to a Dickens character or saying his head resembled an onion,” says Josiffe.
But Gef also had a mean streak, says Josiffe. When Gef once spied Margaret “disrobing before bed, he called out the name of each item of clothing or underclothing as she removed them.”
All this was odd enough, but things got even stranger when, in February 1937, Hungarian-born psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor turned up on the Isle of Man to