Gef the talking mongoose: the Dalby Spook of Cashen's Gap

Doarlish Cashen sat on Dalby Mountain on the Isle of Man, about 4 miles from Peel. Treeless upland, about 750 ft up, reached by a steep track and facing the sea towards Ireland. It was known as Cashen's Gap. James Irving, a former piano salesman, had bought the farm in 1915. He lived there with his wife Margaret and their daughter Voirrey, who was about 13. Mongooses were no strangers to the island. They had been released there to control rabbits.

September 1931. James Irving noticed "strange sounds among the fowls". Soon the noises were inside. Behind the stained wooden match-boarding came "barking, growling, spitting, and persistent blowing", and imitations of farm animals. In October, James and Voirrey glimpsed something in the bedrooms. By November, it was speaking.

The voice was "quite two octaves above any human voice, clear and distinct". Later it came down to the range of a human voice. It called itself Gef. It said it was a mongoose born in India, and "the eighth wonder of the world". It laughed. It sang hymns and nursery rhymes. "I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint."

Those who saw it described a small body, a flat nose and a long bushy tail. Yellow, like a ferret. James put the body at about nine inches long. Voirrey once watched it run along the top of a wall "at great speed with his tail in a straight line with his body." Gef stayed close to her. He threw a large packing-case needle, and pins or stones at sceptics. He moved plates. Strangled rabbits appeared outside, with "no signs of bites".

Early 1932. A Daily Dispatch reporter heard a voice "which I should never have imagined could issue from a human throat." The press named it the "man-weasel" and the "Dalby Spook". Two teenagers, Will Cubbon and Henry Hall, saw something "yellow with a black spot on his tail". Arthur Morrison saw "a pair of yellow eyes" under his bed while Gef spoke.

In 1935 Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research came with R. S. Lambert, editor of the BBC's The Listener. Gef would not appear. Price found the house "one great speaking-tube, with walls like sound boards." Their book, The Haunting of Cashen's Gap, followed in 1936. Nandor Fodor stayed a week and saw and heard nothing. Hair passed on by Julian Huxley was identified as dog hair. At the Natural History Museum, Reginald Pocock found that none of the paw prints matched a mongoose.

Sceptics, Price among them and later Joe Nickell, pointed to ventriloquism by Voirrey. An Isle of Man Examiner reporter claimed to have caught her making noises. Others proposed an imaginary companion, a poltergeist, or Fodor's notion of "a split-off part" of James Irving's personality. The alleged photographs of Gef look, to many, like a cat. Voirrey never confessed. Late in life she still said Gef was not her creation.

The case reached the courts. Sir Cecil Levita told a friend that Lambert was "off his head" for believing in Gef. Lambert won the slander suit, with damages of £7,600, though one account gives £7,500. Every juror received a copy of the book.

A later owner, Leslie Graham, shot an animal at the farm in 1946, or 1947 by another account. It was claimed to be Gef. Voirrey was sure it was not. The farmhouse was demolished in 1971. Gef endures all the same, most recently in a 2023 film, with Simon Pegg as Fodor and Neil Gaiman as the voice in the walls.