Voirrey Irving and the Talking Mongoose (1/2)

• Winchester
• Voirrey Irving and the Talking Mongoose (2/2)

Rajitha Fernando

Voirrey Irving had, perhaps, been a typical young lady when the Talking Mongoose entered her life-bored, yes. On the remote Isle of Man in the hamlet of Dalby, it would be a challenge for a girl of her age and intellect to feel stimulated in a tiny farmhouse beside the ocean. The closest neighbor was two miles away, and the house was eight from Peel, the nearest town, as noted by Harry Price (on whom more and much soon).

In London, Voirrey could have found all the culture she needed. Instead, she had a galumphing dog named Mona, her dearest friend. And, of course, she soon had the mongoose.

Thirteen-year-old Voirrey lived with her mother, Margaret, and father, James -- called Jim in most accounts -- a former piano salesman from Canada. She had two siblings, Elsie and Gilbert, but they were grown and led their own mainland lives. This will be the last written interaction in what happened to the Irving family in the 1930s. If they ever visited their parents' home in Doarlish Cashen, Manx for Cashen's Gap, the record does not mention--and in this case, we must go by what was reported. But for a few slivers, the journals that Jim Irving kept have not been released. We may--and indeed will--speculate and extrapolate, but we cannot manufacture facts, not when the ones presented to us are already fantastic.

As much as could be said for her unusual upbringing, there is no sign that Voirrey was unusual. She indulged the natural passions of a girl in her position--candy, music, and reading, hunting rabbits as pleased her--and showed no strange proclivities. Even when the talking mongoose took up residence in her small home and befriended/besieged her, she did not devote herself to more esoteric interests. The mongoose was more than enough for her. The same cannot necessarily be said for her father, who of necessity consorted with paranormal researchers and, an intelligent man himself, began to read on poltergeists -- an action the mongoose dismissed by saying, "I'm not one of those." (We can assume that this reading was partly at the behest of the researchers, though it could have introduced a bias in what occurred.)

A vague sketch of the Dalby Spook, our Talking Mongoose, our Gef, is sufficient to get most people to check out of the conversation. On September 13, 1931, the Irving family heard grunting in their walls. Thinking that it was some varmint, Jim laid out traps and poisons to kill the pest. When this failed, out of frustration, Jim tried to bark to scare it away. The creature in the wall barked back. Jim tried other animal sounds, which the thing in the wall (the more one researches Gef, the less one feels comfortable calling him without reservations an animal) proved to be a superb mimic. He could impersonate mammals and birds with equal vigor. It came to the point that Jim needed to do nothing more than name an animal to have the wall's occupant make the appropriate sound.

This would suffice to state that something mighty peculiar was occurring, but Gef was never the type to rest on his laurels.

The creature then began to gurgle like a baby about to attempt its first words. Rather than slowly offering babbling, he soon introduced himself as Gef (pronounced Jeff). From this, he graduated with suspicious rapidity into prolixity. His story, which would have been nonsense even if it had not come from the mouth of a talking mongoose, was that he was born in New Delhi in 1852, meaning that he was at least eighty when he met the Irvings. On average, Mongooses live twenty years, though it must be said that this is the lifespan of a nonverbal mongoose. No one has yet established the longevity of one given the power of human speech, but we may assume that it is at least ninety. If your garden variety mongoose attained such an advanced age, who knows if it would imbue them with the blessing of verbal articulation?

Gef claimed that he had lived with -- not that he was owned by because no one could own him -- a hunchback, a man in a green turban, and a man named Holland. Holland was the one who took him from Egypt to England, where he invited himself into the Irving home. He implied that he had come over twenty years before when a farmer imported mongooses to help deal with the excess rabbit population (and Gef, no matter what else can be said of him, had a keenness and skill dispatching rabbits). Gef was unclear or uncharacteristically tight-lipped on all the specifics of his journeying and, if he had been one of the imported mongooses, how he had been whiling away his time for two decades. It was sure to be a story worth telling but not a tale Gef evidently wished to.

So far in the tale, it could pass for a marginally entertaining children's television program. Gef would teach the Irvings the importance of family or such claptrap. The latest pop idol would cover a few songs over the credits. Only small children intent on torturing their parents into sterility would watch it often.

This is, of course, if one could treat this as a legend. When word of Gef got out, he became the British tabloid star of the decade. It might be said -- and was already -- that Dalby in the 1930s may not have been the most intellectually stimulating place on God's Green Earth, and a talking mongoose did seem to be a good distraction from drudgery.

For the Isle of Man's residents, the interest in Gef might have been the most exciting thing to happen in a long while. This may not be a compliment. One may not become a farmer there if one is seeking a life of excitement -- Voirrey's father undertook his endeavor as his retirement project, though the farm never prospered.

To the isle residents, Gef attracted notice, scrutiny, and, with it, mockery.

In a boxed partition in Voirrey's room, the mongoose made himself a nest. The family soon dubbed this "Gef's Sanctum." Voirrey could see and, on occasion, touch Gef, though he was disinclined to let many others have that privilege.

Voirrey was, as noted, a lonely girl. Gef was a friend to her for a while, though a friend who often terrified and harassed her.

As paranormal researcher Harry Price, who had an established reputation for exposing fakes and hoaxes, pointed out in his and R.S. Lambert's book The Haunting of Cashen's Gap (for which this author is infinitely grateful, as it is the source of 80% of all scholarship on this case):

"the Irvings had come to the conclusion that there was some sort of nexus between Voirrey and the mongoose; a sort of mutual affection which made the animal contented with his life at the farm."

Gef enjoyed his conversations with Voirrey and her father, though he persisted in a lingering irritation or resentment with Margaret. In his own words, "I have three attractions. I follow Voirrey, Mam gives me food, and Jim answers my questions." It was never made clear why this was, but it was his way almost from the outset. In time, he grew more tolerant of Margaret, "the witch woman, the Zulu woman, the Honolulu woman," but she was never his favorite.

This is not to suggest that Voirrey and her father were thrilled with their prescribed roles. Voirrey was terrified of the mongoose when he first manifested and fixated on her. She slept one night in her parents' room to escape the inhuman sounds emitting from the mongoose. When Gef overheard them discussing this, he snapped, "I'll follow her wherever you put her." This is not reassuring to a young teenager. His efforts redoubled after her parents had barricaded the door against Gef's invasion. According to Jim, "Soon we saw the top of the door bulging in as though some terrific force were thrusting against it." (After some time, Gef softened and repented, saying, "You can let Voirrey go back to her own room. I won't hurt any of you." This may not have wholly had the effect he intended.)

Gef's likes and dislikes mirrored not only those of an adolescent girl in general but Voirrey in particular. As Price pointed out:

"Gef likes biscuits, cakes and sweets - so do young girls. Gef is interested in motorcars and aeroplanes - so is Voirrey. Gef roams around the countryside, watching parties of workmen and attending various local gatherings consonant with what we know of Voirrey. Gef's humour, Gef's wisecracks, Gef's tantrums, Gef's affections - all have the quality of raw adolescence."

That was true, at least in the beginning of his manifestation.

In Open File: Impossible Happenings Which Have Never Been Explained, Peter Brookesmith supposes that Voirrey, an avid rabbit hunter, claimed before the formal introduction of Gef to her household that her catch was brought home by her friend, a sentient mongoose. There is further speculation that the existence of Gef may also have come from Voirrey having read Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, an 1894 story in The Jungle Book of the adventures of an Indian mongoose adopted by a British family -- a story curiously familiar.

This is not to say a word against our clever Voirrey. She may well have had the cunning and the motivation to spice up her life from the certain dullness of English island existence. The Salem Witch Trials were, on some level, about little else beyond bored girls letting their stories spin murderously out of control. Though, when one reporter asked if he could come to Cashen's Gap to have a chat with the mongoose, Gef's price was that the reporter had to bring along new phonograph records or a camera for Voirrey. Perhaps he was only looking out for his favorite person, but it does throw suspicion on the endeavor.

It behooves us here to take a small breath and consider the nature of poltergeists. A parapsychologist of any experience will tell you that a poltergeist is not a ghost, though it may be regarded as a spirit--this is not an arbitrary distinction. Making a poltergeist is a simple recipe: allow a girl to reach menarche, tell her she is a naughty girl for thinking dirty thoughts, punish her, bore her, make her feel disenfranchised in her life, and wait. It is not a universal outcome. More than likely, you will summon nothing more than a moody teenager who slams her bedroom door and wishes aloud that she had never been born. But in exceptional cases, the dishes will begin flying off the shelves. In short, a poltergeist is the result of a repressed girl (and, yes, we are typically dealing with young girls; boys tend to feel more in control and have other coping mechanisms beyond psychokinesis).

Pent-up, resentful young girls are not known for conjuring a thoughtform to hold sometimes polite conversations with the people who are holding them down, so the poltergeist is nearly always keen on as much destructive mischief as it can be. It is not quite discriminate--it will attack the girl who shaped it, but girls will also cut themselves by similar logic; a poltergeist is not within the girl's control. That is a crucial point: the girl made it and charged it, but she has no idea she did. The poltergeist once called forth does what it wishes. Ceremonial magicians know the power of a thoughtform let off its leash, which poltergeists show perfectly.

(Incidentally, Gef was far from a fan of ghostly talk. Stories of ghosts would send him into a frenzy. He once was reduced to screaming and sobbing when Jim ran into the living room wearing a sheet.)

In a sense, Gef's daring makes the case. It would have been a far easier thing to have him be a grunting, snarling demon, slavering to tell the unwary what their grandmother sucked in Hell. Instead, he was jocular and bizarre, proclaiming himself the Eighth Wonder of the World and saying he would split the atom. By being so strange when far less was required, he perversely becomes more credible. Someone faking it would not go to these lengths unless they were profoundly committed to the bit, making it more likely that this was a genuine personality, an actual trickster. If one wants to consider this a hoax, having your tiny monster chitter, "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!" pushes the envelope so far that it circles back to being stranger than fiction.

The term "trickster" is not used idly. Though Gef himself and talking mongooses as a whole seem only to have appeared this once, the trickster archetype is a near-constant, always hovering just out of reach. Whenever a paranormal case gets a bit too weird, we see the fingerprints of the trickster. That Gef's actual fingerprints were inconclusive (Reginald Pocock of the British Museum's Zoological Department said that they might belong to a North American raccoon), that he admitted to sending hair from the dog to be tested, are all indications of the trickster. (On the topic of the plasticine used for the prints, Gef said, "I put my foot in it, and gave it a twist, but the stuff was hard as hell.") Much like Gef, the trickster avoids being known for sure. It is difficult, if not impossible, to produce evidence of Gef's reality when he is do given to deceit. With the paranormal, it is never a matter of them walking up to you and shaking your hand; Gef did not want to be proven. It was beneath his dignity.

The hair, incidentally, was sent by Price to Julian Huxley, who passed it off to naturalist F. Martin Duncan, who declared that it was not merely dog hair but hair that had been cut, not pulled as Gef claimed. If Jim knew this would be the outcome, why would he let this experiment go forward? Why let anyone see the hair at all if he knew that it was from his family dog? As described, Gef was an inveterate prankster, the nature of tricksters, and wouldn't be bothered by making a fool of Jim. It does erode further the possibility that Gef had ever been a corporeal being.

Even a layperson would note that the paw prints sent by Irving in 1935 were wildly different sizes and shapes. Not only would this cast suspicion that they were not from a mongoose, but that they belonged to the same animal. Again, this would not be something Jim Irving would have done if he were trying to deceive people. He would instead have made the paw prints as similar as he could and ideally look like those of a mongoose, which he, by now, had to know. As Price put it, "Two of the paw marks, though discrepant with each other, are much larger than the third." Irving said that the larger belonged to Gef's front paws and the smaller the hind. Pocock noted, "that there is no mammal in which there is such disparity in size of the fore and high foot." Price submitted the tracks to an expert in fingerprints, who pointed out that the marks showed "no signs of skin texture, and therefore could not have been made by any animal."

The trickster likes few things better than tweaking the nose of the doubters. The trickster exists in the liminal space beyond proof. If you press a trickster to show themselves before a crowd, you will find a reliable phenomenon going at once quiet. The moment the crowd has dispersed with you disgraced, the trickster will pop out from behind the rock and laugh at you. In the case of Gef, he may well throw needles and thimbles from a knothole in the wall.

Nandor Fodor of the Society for Psychical Research -- a learned man when it came to the psychological and psychic (best known outside this case for 1934's Encyclopedia of Psychic Science) -- took an interest in Gef and paid a week-long visit to Doarlish Cashen in 1937. His eventual supposition was that Gef was something like a poltergeist--though not himself a poltergeist. He wrote:

"Gef never claims to be without an animal form. He eats, drinks, and sleeps... he leaves his teeth marks in the butter in the larder and in the fat of the bacon. He catches rabbits and performs various other services for the family. Poltergeists are an unmitigated affliction. Gef is an asset."

It is difficult to say that the Irvings would wholly agree. Aside from strangling the life from some succulent rabbits for the stew and sharing gossip gained from chatty townspeople, Gef was usually just a pesky houseguest who would not be evicted--though there is no solid evidence that anyone tried or tried for long. If anyone put actual thought into an exorcism, Gef would likely have laughed them out of the room or, if that failed, substituted thrown rocks for laughter; he was where he wanted to be and had no interest in being roused.

All this said, though Gef took a particular interest in Voirrey, Fodor did not point to her as the cause of Gef--if one could properly say that Gef had a cause. Instead, Fodor looked to Jim Irving. Intelligent and bored. Stifled by life on this relatively quiet island away from the mainland.

Many people and families have been in isolation, yet decidedly few of them have summoned forth an obnoxious talking mongoose to keep them company.

Regrettably, the accounts leave out some crucial information that would better contextualize the case and satisfy the dreaded doubters. Gef was said to speak in several languages. He intoned Hebrew prayers and sang Italian songs. He used a smattering of Hindustani to prove his Indian cred - Russian for flavor. Of course, he knew Welsh and Manx. Jim had even begun to teach the mongoose rudimentary sign language with his tiny hands. There is no mention if these were all languages someone in the household spoke. If Gef jabbered intelligently in a tongue no one else knew, it means much more than if Jim Irving were also fluent in Flemish. It seems an unforgivable oversight that no researcher at the time saw cause to mention the Irvings' linguistic prowess when Gef's being a polyglot was an oft-cited quirk of the phenomenon. (Gef said, "For years, I understood all that people said, but I could not speak until you taught me.") We cannot forgive that no one thought to ask or if they did, they did not do it in front of an audience, and all write down the result.

Physiologically, Gef was not a mongoose, to no one's surprise. He did not possess the almost canine forepaws of his supposed species but tiny articulated, three-fingered (and a thumb) appendages that could manipulate items and, as occasion demanded, choke the life out of the rabbits he would gift. Mongooses lack the larynx and jaw for speech, let alone the motivation. How could he be a mongoose? Voirrey said, "I know he was a small animal about nine inches to a foot long. I know he talked to us from the wainscoting."

It also bears noting that, owing to secretions from anal glands, some mongoose species have a decidedly unpleasant odor. Researchers mention no such aroma in the case reports, and one must imagine they would have. Gef would have worn that badge proudly and would have tittered to himself at rubbing his musk on doubters.

In total, Gef's diet cannot be known, though the Irvings gave him bacon, biscuits, chocolates, and bananas, let in a saucer suspended from the ceiling. When he thought no one was watching, he could snatch and eat these. These are not items that one should feed a mongoose--they are carnivorous and insectivorous and are noted explicitly for eating cobras. Gef reported no bother with this fare, in fact asking for it. (They did one feed him a carrot, which he dramatically vomited. And he once moaned for hours that something he had eaten had poisoned him. When Jim asked him why he had done this, Gef replied, "I did it for devilment!") What else he may have munched upon is not made clear in the record, though he certainly could have snacked on earthworms and mice when no one was watching.

One hopes that Gef shared his biscuits and chocolates with Voirrey.

Plainly, we can discount Gef being what he said. If he wanted to tell you what he was, he damn well would have, but he decided on being a mongoose. Even the two pictures of him -- which better resemble a blurry stuffed animal -- do not look like any mongoose most have seen. It would not have been too difficult to make a more convincing mongoose or eschew this attempt at physical evidence entirely, but this is not what occurred. Ironically for a phenomenon called Gef the Talking Mongoose, a talking mongoose can be dismissed out of hand. After all, given his intransigence, why should we believe that he was a mongoose simply because he said it? He delighted in thinking he was getting one over on doubters.

Gef, for whatever flaws he might have had, possessed a surfeit of personality. He was obstinate, gossipy, snide, funny, fond, and deceptive. He played favorites. He made allusions and statements so extreme and confident that they are genuinely amusing to imagine. (It is hard to imagine a woodland creature say, his voice an eerily high octave, "If you knew what I know, you'd know a hell of a lot!" and not snort.)

In most cases involving a cryptid -- if it is fair to call Gef even this -- one deals with an unknowable creature who keeps well away from humans when not terrifying them. Gef, however, let himself be known as much as he cared to. He was annoying, true, but he was also charming in his way. He is a rarity in the paranormal field, a likable and small imp, so long as he kept away from saying, "I am not evil. I could be if I wanted. You don't know what damage or harm I could do if I were roused. I could kill you all, but I won't." It is hard to want to sit around the fire with a skunk ape, but who wouldn't want to split a chocolate bar with ol' Gef?

The question has been rephrased by skeptics as "who wouldn't want to split a chocolate bar with young Voirrey?" They mean, of course, that this pubescent darling also happened to be a genius of deceit, and there was never a Gef. Or, if it was not Voirrey, that it was another member of the family pulling a trick that lasted years and all but ruined their lives.

If we are to dive into this theory, we must also hypothesize from our presumptive Gef the family dynamic. He did not dislike "Mam"--she, after all, gave him food--but he preferred Voirrey and Jim. In short, if Gef is anyone, it cannot be Margaret. We can acquit her of all supernatural charges from the outset. We also must weigh the reported fact that Gef did refer to Margaret as "Mam." Not exclusively, but enough. It is not a stretch to conclude that her dear daughter Voirrey was more likely to refer to Margaret as "Mam" than her husband.

One wants full vivisection of the interactions between the Irvings. Gef was attached to Voirrey, but could her mother and father say the same? Before the presence of a chatty marmot, was there stewing resentment or bucolic accordance in the household? These questions matter, or the answers would if we could find them. Alas, the only direction is reading between the lines, mere supposition and not anything concrete on which is based a case.

Now, suppose we may be forgiven for extending our armchair psychoanalyzing based on this scanty evidence. In that case, either of the remaining Irvings could reduce Margaret to being an object of food-giving resentment. It is a more forgivable attitude from a newly thirteen-year-old daughter than one's husband of some decades, but a frustrated husband with displaced mommy issues is perhaps not so rare as a talking mongoose.

Or it could just be that Gef wanted to call her Mam and that he saw her as the least fun of the Irvings. He was an odd creature. It is far from the strangest thing he ever did. No question, he would have found hilarious this fixation and theorizing based on something so simple as what he was quoted as having called Margaret.

Voirrey was accused of being a natural ventriloquist, having thrown her voice through the walls to perpetuate the hoax of Gef, but this is patently unlikely. (Price noted that the double walls of wooden paneling "makes the whole house one great speaking-tube, with walls like soundingboards.") There are no more natural ventriloquists than natural quantum physicists; it is a skill that must be learned and practiced. No one was teaching Voirrey. (In 2001, in an interview with Manx Radio for the program A Time to Remember, a woman named Kathleen Green, claiming to be an old friend of Voirrey's, told the interviewer, David Callister, that Voirrey could throw her voice and had hoaxed the whole thing. After all that time and publicity, she may not have been the best source of this information, particularly as she credits Voirrey's ventriloquial powers that are simply impossible. Green repeatedly refers to the "Spook" as "awful good fun" and throws Voirrey and Margaret under the bus to have it; she does not sound much like a friend.) It also is not worth overlooking that one, no matter aptitude, cannot throw one's voice. The layperson often ignores this, but the phrase is not meant to be taken literally. One's voice comes from one's mouth, even through unmoving lips, and cannot be tossed across the room at a whim, as people like Green claim. Gef was heard speaking from distinct parts of the room and house while Voirrey was stationary before researchers and curiosity seekers. To ignore this incontrovertible fact of the case is to do both oneself and the material a disservice.

As Voirrey grew older, she wanted less and less to do with even the idea of Gef and was especially reluctant to entertain interview requests, but she did grant one to TIME in the 1970s, decades before her death in 2005, where she said,

"I was shy. I still am. [Gef] made me meet people I didn't want to meet. Then they said I was 'mental' or a ventriloquist. Believe me, if I was that good, I would jolly well be making money from it now!"

Fodor agreed with the assessment at the time of his examination.

"The charge of ventriloquism is best answered by the fact that Gef has been heard when each member of the family has been alternately eliminated. It is sufficient to spend a day at Doarlish Cashen to know that, under their conditions of living, it would be impossible to carry on a ventriloquial imposition over a period of years"

This does not allow for the comfortable dismissal some give it, imagining that Voirrey or her family managed to treat their home as an enormous dummy, all managing to use the same squeaky voice.

The lack of electricity also points in the direction that Gef was a genuine phenomenon. There was no radio to conceal, no electric gramophone that could be hidden, though this would hardly be a solution. (Price did an exhaustive inventory of the house and turned up no radio at all.) However, neither of these could have been credited for Gef's ability to answer questions put to him. In the twenty-first century, manufacturing this as a hoax would be neither difficult nor expensive. Then, it would have been nearly impossible and undoubtedly inexplicable that technology played any part in what occurred with Gef.

Gef remarked that "the house suits me," the exact meaning of which leads to speculation. Was this an admission of guilt on whatever Irving was speaking as Gef? Or was it more that he liked the construction of the house, as it let him wander through the walls as he wished? His preternatural movement behind the paneling, his voice coming from one corner then the next almost too quickly for possibility, could be easily heard.

Yes, there was a gap between the paneling and wall proper so that, properly utilized, it could have amplified sounds, but it would be a trying feat. It would have been ridiculous to do in front of a series of dispassionate witnesses all looking for a means to reveal this was a hoax. There are also holes on the outside through which one could, in theory, speak into the house. With no trees or bushes near the home, this would be foolhardy exhibitionism.

But Gef was reportedly heard outside Cashen's Gap, obviating the explanation of amplifying paneling. Price invited Captain James McDonald (a pseudonym for Capt. James Dennis, though not much of one) to visit, which he did three times between 1932 and 1935. On his second visit, he claimed: "we had reached a point eighty paces away (I stepped it) when Gef called out 'coo-ee' to us." One must grant that this is not the most evocative phrase in his long list of quotes and may lead the skeptic to note that almost anything could have made this sound. Jim reported that Gef later told them that he had been only ten feet from them when he made this sound. In the few reports of Gef's voice being heard outside the home, he is far from eloquent.

When Gef called to people outside the home, it had been after dark, sometimes as late as their leaving around midnight. Even for those who knew the area well -- and the visitors would not -- it would not be impossible to mistake the night call of some indigenous animal for the sound of a talking mongoose who apparently was not well-rehearsed in the sound of a goodbye, preferring instead to shout "Vanished!" when he was done talking.

And yet, after one of these "coo-ees," Gef has reported back the exact conversation that the departing person had on the quiet path, demonstrating that he was following.