The strange case of the talking mongoose

This week we've been dealing with some pretty heavy topics, so I thought today I'd lighten things up by telling you about a strange incident in the village of Dalby, on the Isle of Man, in the 1930s.

In September of 1931, the Irving family -- James and Margaret, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Voirrey -- started hearing strange noises from the walls.  At first it was just furtive scratching and rustling, but soon they could discern words.  James and Voirrey made some attempt to speak to whatever-it-was, but were alarmed one evening when James said, "What in the name of God can he be?" and heard a high-pitched, thin voice repeat those words back in a singsong fashion. 

I was immediately (and unfortunately) reminded of Brown Jenkin, the mocking, squeaky-voiced demonic familiar of the evil Keziah Mason in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "Dreams in the Witch-House."  But unlike Brown Jenkin, who would happily bite your toes off as you slept, the creature in the Irving house apparently intended them no harm.  Eventually they were able to coax out a small furry animal that was somehow sentient, and (conveniently) spoke English.  It introduced itself as Gef (pronounced "jeff"), and said -- I shit you not -- that it was a mongoose who had been born in New Delhi, India in 1852.

How he got from India to the Isle of Man was never clarified, but after all, that's hardly the only weird thing about this story.

Voirrey reported that Gef was "the size of a rat," but had yellow fur and a bushy tail.  She also claimed -- and her father backed her up -- that Gef had told them that he was "an extra extra clever mongoose," but also that he was "an earthbound spirit" and "a ghost in the form of a weasel," although it's hard to see how he could be all three simultaneously.  He also told Voirrey, "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!"

Supposedly she saw him many times, and none of those things happened to her, so I'm inclined to take his pronouncements with a grain of salt.

Once folks found out about the Irvings' claims, naturally the questions started coming.  It was nothing to worry about, James insisted; Gef had already shown himself to be helpful, doing things like warning them when strangers were on the property, waking family members when they overslept, and even once putting out the fire in the stove when it had inadvertently been left burning after the family retired for the night.  For myself, I'd have been less worried about Gef's usefulness than establishing that he actually existed, but apparently most folks in the area just shrugged and said, "Huh.  A magical talking mongoose.  How about that," and went on about their business.

A few, though, wanted more evidence (fancy that!), and the Irvings were happy to oblige.  More than one person who visited them heart Gef's voice, and some saw signs like a pair of yellow eyes staring at them from underneath a bed.  But the Irvings seemed unperturbed, and said they were perfectly happy having Gef live with them, and rewarded him by leaving out chocolate, bananas, and biscuits for him to eat.

Then, neighbors began to claim they'd actually seen Gef, too.  Two teenagers corroborated the yellow fur and bushy tail, and a villager named George Scott made a drawing of him:

What astonishes me about all this is how seriously people took it.  A few people called it out as a hoax -- one claimed that it was thirteen-year-old Voirrey's doing, that she was an accomplished ventriloquist and had hoodwinked her parents (and everyone else).  Voirrey heatedly denied this, and in fact was still denying it shortly before she died in 2005 at the age of eighty-seven.

But the reports got the attention of the psychic investigators, and that's when the story really exploded.  Harry Price got involved -- you may recall his name from my posts about the haunting of Borley Rectory and the odd story of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall -- and this brought Gef into the public eye.  Price is kind of a notorious figure in the history of psychic investigation, because even the True Believer types have to admit that his approach was a little sketchy, with veracity often taking a back seat to publicity.  And even Price was suspicious about Gef.  The house, he said, was like "one great speaking-tube, with walls like sound boards.  By speaking into one of the many apertures in the panels, it should be possible to convey the voice to various parts of the house."  Price had also made plaster casts of pawprints supposedly left behind by Gef, and sent them to zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock of the Natural History Museum, and Pocock came back with the rather unsatisfying answer that the prints may have come from a dog, but they definitely hadn't been made by a mongoose, talking or not.

The fact that the Irvings couldn't even get Price on their side was significant.  The somewhat more reliable Nandor Fodor, of the Society for Psychical Research, actually stayed in the Irving house for three weeks and saw no evidence of Gef.  He speculated that James Irving may have suffered from dissociative personality disorder, and had orchestrated the hoax, using Gef to give voice to a fragment of his psyche.

Despite all this, the Irvings stuck by their story.  Gef was real, they said, not a hoax, regardless what anyone thought.

James Irving died in 1945, and Margaret and Voirrey were forced to sell the house at a loss -- its reputation for being haunted evidently reduced its appeal to potential buyers.  The next owner, one Leslie Graham, reported that he'd shot and killed Gef, and displayed a body of a furry animal -- but it was black-and-white, and larger than Gef's reported size.

"That's not Gef," Voirrey said.

Naturally, I'm inclined to think the whole thing was a hoax right from the start -- whether by James or Voirrey is unclear.  But what's striking about the case is how many people bought into it.  You would think that if somebody in your town said, "Oh, by the way, I have an eighty-year-old talking yellow mongoose living in my walls, but it's all cool because he does chores for us as long as we feed him biscuits," everyone would kind of back away slowly, not making any sudden moves, and do what they could to get the person professional help.

Oddly, that didn't happen.  After the first flurry of investigations and news articles died down, life pretty much continued the same as before.  There was some increase in tourism from people who wanted to see Gef's house, but even that waned as the years passed.  Voirrey took in stride her connection to the Case of the Talking Mongoose, and seemed, on the whole, unembarrassed by it -- and also, never admitted it was a hoax.

So that's our strange tale for the day.  Hopefully a mood-lightener after some of the darker explorations of the week.  Since finding out about Gef, I've been listening for rustling in the walls of my own house, and... nothing.  Just as well.  The last time I heard something like that it turned out to be a family of red squirrels in our attic, which took forever to get rid of.  I don't know what I'd do if we had to deal with a talking mongoose.

****************************************

The trove

If you ever think we've discovered just about everything there is out there to discover, consider the story I found out about from my eagle-eyed writer friend Gil Miller, about an excavation on the Isle of Man that has turned up over 120,000 medieval artifacts.

The Isle of Man, located in the middle of the Irish Sea between Scotland and Ireland, has such a strategic location that it has been contested for as long as we have records.  Not only did the Irish and the Scottish have settlements there, but so did the Norman English and the Norse; all of them have left their mark on the land and the people.  It's one of the places where the natives have tried like mad to hold onto their original language, a relative of Irish and Scottish Gaelic (although not mutually intelligible to either) called Manx, currently spoken as a first language by only twenty-three people (a bit over two thousand speak it as their second language, and there's currently a campaign on the island to teach it to Manx youngsters before it dies out completely).

The archaeological site Gil told me about is Rushen Abbey, a Cistercian monastery on the southeast coast of the island.  It has a very long history -- it was founded in  by Óláfr Guðrøðarson, the Norse (obviously) king of Man in the first half of the twelfth century.  By this time the erstwhile Vikings had become thoroughly Christianized, but this didn't mean peaceful; Óláfr's forty-year reign came to an abrupt end when he was assassinated by three of his nephews.  This started a war of succession, and eventually Óláfr's son Guðrøðr Óláfsson (whatever else you can say about them, they weren't very creative in the name-choosing department) triumphed, the three evil nephews got chopped into dog food, and Guðrøðr went on to rule the place (and a good chunk of the east coast of Ireland) for the next twenty years.

In any case, Óláfr and two of his sons are buried on the abbey grounds, and the place was considered a holy site from its founding until it was shut down in 1540 as part of English King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. This savage campaign ostensibly occurred because Henry didn't like the Catholics' theology (he'd appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534), but honestly had more to do with the fact that the abbeys and monasteries were filthy rich and Henry wanted to get his hands on their wealth.  At least Rushen wasn't completely demolished, as many were; it was repurposed several times, and in fact was purchased by the Manx government in 1853 with the intent of converting it to an insane asylum (the plans, fortunately, were never carried out).  Eventually its historical value was recognized and it became a Manx National Heritage Site, allowing for careful renovation -- and excavation of the grounds.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dan Karran, Rushen Abbey, CC BY-SA 2.5]

The archaeological studies at Rushen have uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts, including medieval coins, metalware, glass, and ceramic -- the last-mentioned including some long-distance imports, indicating the wealth of the place at its heyday.  Some pieces long predate the founding of the abbey, including a pewter cross dating from the fifth century C. E., indicating that the Isle of Man had at least some permanent religious settlements at a time when neighboring England was still a chaotic mess recovering from the withdrawal of the Romans and girding its loins for the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.

What the excavation of Rushen makes me wonder, though, is how much still is out there to find in other places -- what might be beneath our feet, unseen, as we walk over familiar ground each day.  It's staggering that 120,000 previously unknown artifacts could be turned up at a site that has been in continuous occupation (and a significant pilgrimage/tourist destination) for almost a thousand years, and indicates that we still have a great deal more to discover about our own past.  

I think we still have a bit more to learn, don't you?

****************************************