On
10 April 2014, the University of London’s Senate House Library hosted a meeting
organised by Christopher Josiffe and Richard Espley, ‘“If you knew what I know, you’d know a hell of a lot!”: A symposium on
Gef the Talking Mongoose’, to examine the Isle of Man’s weirdest
personality. A good-sized crowd gathered
to hear a range of speakers explore the phenomena surrounding Gef, and to discuss
how we might make sense of the bizarre story 80 years on. The symposium was supported by displays of
items connected to the case drawn from the library’s collection.
The
first speaker was Christopher Josiffe, who has researched ‘the Dalby Spook’, to
give Gef one of his alternative names, and published a well-received article in
Fortean Times (January 2011). He started by saying that he had thought the
matter would be easy to resolve, but after a number of years finds that the
case is still enigmatic. He ran through
the events at Doarlish Cashen (Manx for Cashen’s Gap), outside the village of Dalby. These started in Autumn 1931, the family
involved comprising James Irving, his wife Margaret and their 12-year old
daughter Voirrey (the local variant of Mary).
Their house was isolated, a couple of miles away from the nearest
neighbour, with no electricity, radio or telephone. The family were incomers from England, and
were not making a go of life in the harsh terrain, Mr Irving having previously
been a commercial traveller, not a farmer.
They were in straightened circumstances and not popular in the insular
community. Against this background, the
chatty Gef – a mere 12” long, six of which were occupied by his tail – must
have come as a bit of welcome relief to the family, for all his annoying habits
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| Voirrey and her father at Doarlish Cashen |
The
following speaker, Robin Klarzynski, discussed connections between Gef and
William Burroughs in a talk that was really more about Burroughs than Gef. Klarzynski did bring in the concept of the
trickster, which seems highly relevant here, and was keen to reject a
simplistic real/hoax, either/or, binary.
Burrough’s interest in animals, particularly cats, as psychic familiar
spirits certainly chimed with Gef. The
notion of the ‘Third Mind’, which results from the meeting of two minds,
suggests that an emergent property could have been produced in the febrile
atmosphere at Doarlish Cashen, but it is a stretch to consider Gef as a dream
reality made manifest, the creature brought into existence by thought. The exercise in cutting up Gef’s statements á
la Burroughs, and putting them through google translate multiple times, did not
seem particularly illuminating of the Gef mystery.
Next
up was Alan Murdie, chair of the Society for Psychical Research’s Spontaneous Cases
Committee, who looked at the case in the context of poltergeists, particularly
the role that sex has been shown to play in them. His starting point was that poltergeists
exist as ‘social facts’, the SPR receiving large numbers of such reports from
around the world. Many of these involve
animals, or entities that resemble animals, so in that light Gef is not unique. Murdie also pointed out that while about
three-quarters of all poltergeist cases last for under a year, about a quarter (more
place- than person-centred) go on longer, sometimes considerably so. Gef-as-poltergeist should not therefore be
ruled out on the grounds that it lasted too long.
Murdie
drew on the work of psychical researcher and psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, who
linked sex and poltergeists. He spent a
week on the island investigating Gef, but unfortunately went off the rails
somewhat by reaching the conclusion that Gef really was an animal that could
talk. Murdie, taking a more plausible
line, speculated that there was an element of incest between Mr Irving and his
daughter. Voirrey later blamed Gef for
her failure to marry, but perhaps she was really blaming her father. Incest does seem to be a possible factor in a
considerable proportion of poltergeist cases.
In this scenario Gef might have been Voirrey’s way of gaining a limited measure
of control: his rudeness and bad language to Mr Irving giving her licence to be
offensive to her father while blaming Gef, a small measure of release.
Harry
Price visited the farm in 1935 and wrote a book about what he dryly referred to
as the ‘Manx prodigy’ with R. S. Lambert (editor of The Listener), published
the following year. This was The Haunting of Cashen's Gap: A Modern
‘Miracle’ Investigated, a pair of
inverted commas that speak volumes. When
Price suggested that he take Voirrey for a ride in his car, Irving became angry
and said that Price should look for a girl elsewhere. In his interpretation of this incident, Fodor
thought that as well as protecting Voirrey, Irving probably feared that he
would lose his position centre-stage in the drama. Despite Fodor’s Freudian leanings, Murdie
suggested that he had missed the more sinister possibility that Irving feared
his daughter might spill the beans if Price was allowed to interrogate her
unsupervised. Fodor concludes in the
1953 book he co-wrote with Hereward Carrington, The Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries, in the chapter on
Gef just before that of ‘The Poltergeist Psychoanalysed’, that Gef ‘was the
missing link between the animal and human intellect…’ Gef was not a poltergeist, Fodor thought, but
he had included the case in the book as it exhibited many characteristics
associated with poltergeists.
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| James sitting firmly between Voirrey and Lambert |
Mark
Russell Bell’s paper was read in his absence by Richard Espley. Bell compared the Gef phenomena with those of
the 1817 Bell Witch case in Tennessee.
Fodor actually has a chapter on the Bell Witch immediately before that
of Gef in The Story of the Poltergeist,
in which he suggests that Betsy Bell hated her father John because he ‘had
taken sexual liberties’ with her.
Perhaps he felt on safer ground making such suggestions once the
individuals concerned were all safely dead.
Mark Bell, presumably no relation, finds parallels between Gef and
‘Kate’ in Tennessee, with strange animals featuring in the latter, a
disembodied voice, trickery and clairvoyance. (In addition to speech, Gef developed
clairvoyant abilities, picking up gossip from around the island, though despite
considering himself ‘just a little extra, extra clever mongoose’, his
information and observations tended to be mundane.) However, Kate was supposed to be the spirit
of a human, not an animal, and Kate displayed physical violence that was alien
to Gef, though he did have a verbal temper and was supposed to exhibit bad
language, though when this was raised as a question nobody could say precisely
how bad it had been.
Richard
Espley then presented his own paper. He
looked at instances of books being referred to in The
Haunting of Cashen's Gap, and noted tensions whenever this happened. Despite claims of Gef’s literacy, it was
apparent that he didn’t actually like books (the Bell Witch on the other hand
was knowledgeable about the Bible), on one occasion insisting that a book on
ghosts be destroyed. When a book is
mentioned it tends to be along the lines of ‘it was brought into the house’, as
if to disavow responsibility. It was not
the sort of household that welcomes books.
Nor was Gef happy to see Mr Irving reading a newspaper. Espley suggested that this was a preference
for orality, Irving both the teller of the tale and its servant and Gef living
through ritualised oral retellings of his story. Gef’s ability to read may have been
overstated, and the only evidence of writing that he produced was the letter
‘N’, which Fodor said was an attempt to write his first name. It is fairly obvious that ‘Gef’ had a problem
with spelling. Price and Lambert on the
other side represented a textual culture.
Reading between the lines, Espley thinks that Price and Lambert thought
Irving a bore, and Espley sees their book as documenting the uncomprehending
encounters of the various participants in the saga.
The
final speaker was Craig Wallace, a post-graduate at Queen's University Belfast. He analysed possible influences of Gef’s
story on Nigel Kneale, who lived in Douglas from 1928, when he was 6. Kneale’s work is full of the supernatural and
the idea of digging through layers of the past.
Similarly, Gef was possibly a manifestation of something older, and
Wallace mentioned a slab covering a funerary urn being found at Doarlish
Cashen. He focused on the Baby and Special Offer segments of Kneale’s 1976 series Beasts, the former revolving around Something uncategorisable found
behind the wall of a cottage, the latter featuring a cartoon creature called
‘Briteway Billy’ used as a marketing device in a shoddy supermarket. With their interspecies aspects they both
have echoes of Gef. As with Kneale’s The Stone Tape we have with Gef, as
Wallace put it, data awaiting interpretation, ‘disturbances in the grid.’ During the discussion, Mark Pilkington from
the audience said that he had once attended a BFI interview with Kneale and
Kneale had vehemently dismissed the reality of paranormal phenomena, almost too
strongly Pilkington thought. Kneale did
not refer to Gef in the conversation.
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| The Irvings spend a pleasant evening at home |
The
final event of the afternoon was a screening of Vanished! A Video Seance (1999), a gallery film made by Brian
Catling and Tony Grisoni that was based on the case (‘Vanished’ was Gef’s word
for goodbye). The film consisted
entirely of close-ups of three actors playing the Irvings talking about Gef. Some
artistic licence was taken with the evidence in the monologues, but it did
convey the claustrophobia, eccentricity and emotional poverty of life in that
isolated cottage. Catling and Grisoni
had gone to the site of the house – demolished sometime in the 1980s we learned
– to record the wind, and the film began with it, before we even saw the
actors. We could hear just how exposed
it was there, and the viewer had to wonder how living in that place might
affect a person’s mental stability.
So
did the afternoon shed any new light on the Gef enigma? Was Gef a poltergeist, some kind of cryptid,
a hoax, or a combination of these? If a
hoax, was it by Voirrey alone, a cry for help; with her mother, the two women
attempting to force Mr Irving to move to somewhere more congenial; or was he
involved as well? Clearly there was some
hoaxing, as evidenced by the dubious casts of paw prints (of which it seems
only the photographs now exist) and the hair samples. Voirrey could have been engaging in
ventriloquism, possibly aided by the house’s acoustics, given the gap between
the outer walls and the wooden panelling that provided some measure of
insulation. Money does not seem to have been
a motive for hoaxing, but the psychology of the family may have provided one.
The
symposium showed how Gef has had a cultural influence and remains a popular
Fortean oddity, but we got no closer to working out what was going on in that
house. Whatever it was, Gef petered out
along with the 1930s and was gone by 1939, by which time the world had most
definitely moved on. Despite a previous
reluctance, Walter McGraw managed to interview Voirrey for Fate magazine in 1970. She wasn’t
terribly forthcoming but affirmed Gef’s reality: ‘Yes, there was a little
animal who talked and did all those other things.’ She still did not admit to it being a hoax,
which would have helped to dampen interest, and provide the peace she wanted.
I
wonder if the story would have been anything more than a curiosity if it had
not been for the involvement of Harry Price.
Was it really worth a book-length treatment, one wonders. There are other strange cases in the annals
of psychical research which have faded into obscurity, and there is no
particular reason why this one should have become so well known. But Price has retained a high profile because
of his symbiotic relationship with Borley, and his profile has lent itself,
along with Christopher Josiffe’s efforts in more recent years, to the
maintenance of interest in Gef. One of
the speakers said words to the effect that it was useful to scrutinise the
mystery from a variety of angles and that the symposium showed that a
multi-disciplinary approach would yield fresh insights. But the day seemed rather to indicate that
Gef is a limited, if entertaining, mystery that does not lend itself to deep
analysis or wide extrapolation. The
talks suggested ways of looking at Gef that go beyond Price and Lambert’s
narrative, but while the resulting suppositions and insights might be correct,
what we are left with is a fantastic story that is not amenable to a solution. Still, while we may not have come to any
conclusions, it was nice to gather in the congenial atmosphere of Senate House
Library to discuss that clever little beastie.
There
was one question which did not come up during the afternoon: Gef called himself
‘the eighth wonder of the world.’ Was he
aware that King Kong had been given that title in the 1933 film? Was it a coincidence? Perhaps Gef did read the newspapers and saw a
reference. If so, his humour went over
the Irvings’ heads, comparing his tiny body to that of the mighty Kong. There’s hubris for you.
A
possible theory of what Gef was appeared in the pages of a 1976 issue of Look and Learn. It noted that prior to the First World War a
farmer had released a number of mongooses on the island to keep down rabbits. This is true, and according to Josiffe there
are alleged sightings of these animals today.
Look and Learn speculates that
if a mongoose had mated with a weasel, ‘its descendants would almost certainly
have looked like, well, Gef.’ But would they
have had his vocabulary?
