Voirrey Irving and the Talking Mongoose (2/2)

• Voirrey Irving and the Talking Mongoose (1/2)
• The Talking Mongoose Case

feuerdante

We must take the facts, as it were, as written. Though these are all speculative observations at the time and should be weighed differently based on their authors' presumed credibility, the case is too far in the past to re-adjudicate with new evidence. There are no published diaries from the Irving family that might shed new light on what happened (Jim did keep a log of the goings-on. These were at times shared with contemporary researchers and visitors, but none thought it necessary to recopy or publish these for the sake of posterity). Voirrey Irving maintained throughout her life that Gef was real--whatever "real" means in these circumstances. We must trust someone if we are to examine this situation at all. To consign them all to the trash bin because some visitors were presumptive hucksters does us a disservice as a whole. (There are always hucksters hungry for the ink. It is understood to be the nature and bane of paranormal research. If we threw out all evidence for the sake of a few charlatans, the world would be a far poorer place for it.) Enough were willing to stake their reputations on the truth of this case, which will have to suffice for our purposes. To think otherwise is sheer contrariness, taking one's ball home from the discussion, as it were.

Though it is arguably less fun, it is worth examining the evidence that this was a hoax and extending ourselves slightly in imagining the connective tissue that may not be explicit. Let us say for the sake of rhetorical imagining that Jim Irving began, consciously or not, making ventriloquial sounds into the hollowness of his walls. These seemed spooky to his family, and that attention was a jolt. It progressed into words, then a ventriloquist act using the strangest dummy he could imagine. (A talking mongoose, one must admit, is a more captivating figure than your typical Charlie McCarthy knockoff.) It could merely have been a family legend or an unremarkable bit of local color had it not attracted tabloid journalists and legitimate researchers. At this point, Jim's choices were to admit it was all fakery born out of boredom or to double down and insist there indeed was a talking mongoose menacing his daughter. People are infamous for doing whatever they can to avoid the sting of embarrassment, which would only have compounded the longer this ruse continued. Perhaps Jim was able to convince his family that Gef was real. Maybe he sat them down and explained their proxy shame if this scheme fell apart. We cannot know, but we can see that they kept it up until this defined the Irving family. Owing to Jim throwing his voice into the walls, the family would have to sell their house at a steep loss because of its reputation; rather than admitting it when it started, they were nearly ruined by it in the long term. But that is unsurprising; humans are known for their short-sightedness to consequences. Why deal with the discomfort now when the agony comes to a future you? That is his problem.

Yet, though it would have been little work to gather all the family together at once and see if Gef still spoke, there is no evidence on record that anyone ever attempted this simple act.

Gef did not help the Irvings' social or literal capital, as some have maintained when discounting the case. At one point, the family felt so terrorized by Gef (and likely those tourists turning up at their doorstep) that they "contemplate[d] being forced to leave their home altogether." Wouldn't it have been better to banish Gef from their thoughts rather than lose the farm to which they had devoted themselves?

In Voirrey's words in her final interview (about which more below), "If my mother and I had had our way, we never would have told anybody about it. But Father was sort of wrapped up in it. It was such a wonderful phenomenon that he just had to tell people about it."

Fodor did not believe there was deliberate deception in this case. Despite what the layman may think of his being the Research Officer for the International Institute for Psychical Research, he was not there to believe. He was there in his role to find evidence that this was all a hoax, to disprove the case. He proposed that Gef may exist in part as "a split-off part" of Jim's personality via complex psychology. As he put it on Gef's existence, "All the probabilities are against it, but all the evidence is for it."

Fodor, influenced by Freud, became a practicing psychoanalyst after (but not because of) the events at Doarlish Cashen. It was he who first (or most loudly) put forth the hypothesis that poltergeists are manifestations of inner conflict, something that has since formed the foundation of examining the associated phenomena.

Fodor, we must note, never saw Gef in his visit to Cashen's Gap. However, in parting, he left this letter for Gef:

Dear Gef,
I am very disappointed that you did not speak to me during the whole week which I spent here. I came from a long way and took a lot of trouble in collecting all your clever sayings ... I believe you to be a very good and generous mongoose. I brought you chocolates and biscuits and I would have been happy if you had done something for me.

Fodor noted that none of the family demonstrated anything like a psychic skill or gift. Gef himself never displays any abilities or knowledge outside the normal realm--though he said he did. Most importantly, Gef has been seen and touched.

(Jim Irving, incidentally, disagreed with this assessment, theorizing that Gef was "a spirit in animal form.")

Though poltergeists attach themselves (or manifest from) young girls, Fodor pointed at Jim, writing later:

"As I look back, as a psychologist, on my memories of Irving, one fact stands out which my story does not reveal. He was a man who failed in life and whose many passions were too strong to bear this failure with resignation."

An Isle of Man Examiner reporter claimed that he caught Voirrey making noises and that Jim tried to convince him that he heard sounds from elsewhere in the house. Pulled so intractably into this story, if he found out that his daughter had created a hoax that had snowballed, wouldn't a father try to cover for her to the point of ridiculousness? Or, perhaps a touch more possibly, wouldn't a reporter want nothing more than to debunk this story because it would play well to his paper, even and especially at the expense of defaming a young girl? It was a rare time in history where a man chose to believe a girl if doubting her provided a more straightforward narrative.

It is a simple enough story, and we can slot enough facts in there that it seems credible. Those who were on the scene who maintained otherwise could well have been kooks--who, after all, can claim to be reputable when entertaining the thought of a talking mongoose? We can ignore their heartfelt, learned testimony without losing much sleep.

Yet, it is not satisfying. Mundane facts and cynicism bring us to the easy conclusion, the one provided to us by Occam's Razor. We know that there could not be a talking mongoose. It is an impossibility. A ghost? Those aren't real either. Poltergeist? Just fancy. We can laugh off any other explanation because its conclusion is weird.

And yet, niggling details still nestle in our minds, like vocal weasels in the corner.

The objective reality of our dear, dastardly Gef is secondary, but it is worth considering that there was only one Gef in the annals of Fortean phenomena. One can point to countless Sasquatches and their morphological kin, ghosts by the bushel, aliens by the mothership load, but Gef existed just this once. That does not provide encouragement of his existence in a way where one could give him a scratch behind the ears, much as he may have deserved it.

As Jeffery Sconce, a contemporary media scholar charged in his essay "The Talking Weasel of Doarlish Cashen," from Electronic Elsewheres, that "this 'extra extra clever mongoose' was an imaginary companion created by the Irvings' extra, extra clever daughter." He is well within his rights to state this, and it is not, we must admit, a difficult conclusion to reach. It isn't true, but it fits the most pieces together--no matter how many others it must leave on the table in doing so.

As a piece of evidence on Voirrey's behalf, a witness, MacDonald, saw a china tray and bottle thrown from the top of the staircase, followed by Gef's "derisive laugh." Voirrey was shut in her room at the time, which would acquit Voirrey of being the culprit of that event, even if it would not with other occurrences.

Gef may have resided at the Irving home, but he was not there always. He claimed to wander the island, hitching rides on buses' and cars' back axles. He would return in the evening, full of news and gossip with which he would regale the Irvings. He was also keen to read out items from the newspaper--given that he was a skilled mimic and a fluent conversational partner, it feels insulting to assume that he is illiterate. As a point of fact, one night, Gef began screaming his head off upon seeing the obituary in the Liverpool Posts of a man with his name, saying, "I see a name that makes me quake, that makes me shake!"

(It is odd to think that a spirit--or whatever Gef was claiming to be that day--would be afeared of his mortality, but it is less strange than his being a talking mongoose, so it is perhaps not worth picking at.)

Gef was aware, in his way, that he was mortal and, at that, probably not destined for a long and happy afterlife, saying of his postmortem place that he would go "To Hell, to the Land of Mist." The talking mongoose seemed to be speaking from authority on the topic. Gef's opinions on religion are worth considering as he appears to have considered himself on the wrong side of salvation. He was far from above pointing out what he perceived to be hypocrisy from others, though, having once said in seeing Jim reading, "Look at the pious old atheist reading the Bible; he will swear in a minute!"

One is not necessarily given the keys to all the puzzles Gef offered us, his curious audience decades in the future. What is one to make of "I have three spirits, and their names are Foe, Faith and Truth"? Was this more of our trickster's self-proclaimed devilment?

Though Voirrey was stuck at Cashen's Gap, Gef roamed about as he wished, far freer than a weasel without his powers of ratiocination might. He would disappear from the home for days and return home, sharing the latest gossip from the surrounding area. He would see livestock shows--a curious passion of his--and come back with all the details of who won and lost. There were reportedly accurate which, if this were the work of Voirrey, might imply that she had psychic gifts beyond the creation of a chatting weasel. Further, on May 6, 1935, Gef told the Irvings that he would go to the town of Rushen for Jubilee Day. When he returned, it was with evocative details of his adventures, including spying on broadcasters from the BBC. Shy though Voirrey was to her death, it is difficult to imagine that she didn't wish she were at Gef's side through each of these experiences. If it were not for the verifiability of his facts, it would be facile to state that this clever girl must have made these up as a wish-fulfillment. (Recall here that Price was clear that the Irvings had neither radio nor electricity.)

Gef--or the girl accused of puppeteering the creature--understood the distances to local towns, both by skittering and beneath the bus. Gef kept to the Isle of Man for his time with the Irvings. Though he loved them, he never hopped a plane to his ancestral home of India, did not so much as take a boat to the mainland. Though he had no end of enticing stories of what he had been up to before finding the Irvings and gaining his power of speech, he did not strain credulity by veering too far from home again. Even when there was a lucrative offer to bring Gef over to the United States for a national tour, he declined, saying he was afraid of being "bottled."

The more famous he became, the more people visited to try to hold a conversation with him, the less frequently Gef wanted to show himself. It could be that he had become suddenly bashful or vexed at the unwelcome company. Or, of course, it could have been that the Irving family didn't wish to encourage scrutiny of their ruse, though scrutiny is what they had in spades.

The Haunting of Cashen's Gap concludes by stating that it was unlikely in their learned opinion that Gef existed at all. After they completed their investigation, Price and Lambert received several spools of film taken by Voirrey after their last visit to Doarlish Cashen, snapshots reportedly of the highly nervous mongoose out in the open "sitting at the top of one of the sod hedges near the farm." Because of Gef's anxiety, he spoiled the pictures "by leaping down or vanishing at the moment of exposure."

Once developed and printed, the results were convincing to Price and Lambert. They saw wood and stone, placed there "accidentally or on purpose," but they did not see an animal. Jim, confronted with the weakness of this evidence, "did not cease to maintain that they contained true representations of Gef." He had one enlarged and sent along a pen and ink sketch to show the viewer where one might detect the mongoose. Price concedes that "in these enlargements it is possible, without too much stretching of the imagination, to see something which might be a long furry back and tail, half concealed by the grass, and attached to a blunted head and shoulders." Jim could see Gef's ears and mouth, the latter holding wisps of grass. To Price, these photos remain unsatisfying.

Price introduced a different theory, though a less unflattering one than that Jim Irving is a liar. What if the whole Irving family were the victims of a unified hallucination? Of course, Gef doesn't exist outside their imaginations, but he was true to them. This is more convincing than a talking mongoose on the Isle of Man. The evidence against this is that it is such a long time to keep a hallucination up. Voirrey held to it even to her death. One might think she would have had a moment of lucidity about Gef sooner if he were nothing more than a family delusion of people who were otherwise intelligent and reasonable.

After his visits were so unproductive due to Gef refusing to show himself or interact, Price wrote that he wasn't sure whether he had "taken part in a farce or a tragedy."

Voirrey, though she enjoyed him in her youth when he would play games and share sweets with her, came to hate Gef. Voirrey was no longer Gef's intellectual equal, so he attached himself to Jim, which Fodor noted in 1937. "Its grasp and thirst for knowledge is simply phenomenal."

If not for Gef himself, Voirrey found her adolescent life tethered to the story of the mongoose. For a girl who wanted the typical teen mainstays for friendship and acceptance, being associated with a paranormal beast (and the skepticism thereof) nearly ruined her. She reported that other people on the isle "snubbed" her and that children would call her "the spook." She claimed, "Gef has even kept me from getting married. How could I ever tell a man's family about what happened?"

Voirrey moved to England in 1939 to work as a wartime machinist and be liberated from the shadow Gef had cast. If Gef spoke to Jim and Margaret after, it is not in a published account. Margaret left in 1945, after Jim's death from anemia. She sold the farm at a loss (for it had earned a reputation of being haunted).

In 1970, when she was 52 and after years of refusing all interview requests, Voirrey granted one to journalist Walter McGraw, printed in FATE Magazine.

McGraw spent a day with her and found her to be a fine conversationalist, though she tried to avoid answering the crucial question: "What happened to Gef?"

Simply put, she didn't know. She last saw him around the farm in 1938 or 1939. He had been vanishing for longer and longer stints, then did it for good. He made no attempt at goodbyes, but he was never a polite mongoose.

In February of 1947, a retired army lieutenant who bought the property after Jim's death, Leslie Graham, said that he had been startled by an animal with "gleaming eyes." He set a snare and, in the morning, captured something. "It snarled and spat and clawed more venomously than anything I have ever seen," he said. A reasonable man, he beat it to death with a stick. He proudly displayed the body was three feet long with black and yellow fur. Its exact genus and species were not made clear, and no one could say for certain that it was Gef, but the assumption was exactly that. It made for good copy.

McGraw showed Voirrey a picture of the dead animal. She pronounced that it looked nothing like Gef.

To her death, Voirrey maintained that Gef was not her creation. If it could have been so, she would never have met Gef. Lonely though she was and company though he provided her for a few years, he made her far more isolated in the aftermath. Her last recorded words on the talking mongoose were simply, "Yes, there was a little animal who talked and did all those other things. He said he was a mongoose and said we should call him Gef. I do wish he had left us alone."

Voirrey died in 2005. Gef has not been heard from again.

"I am a ghost in the form of a weasel, and I shall haunt you with weird noises and clanking chains."