Strange Things...

Gef, the Talking Mongoose

The time: Summer, 1931
The setting: An isolated farmhouse at Cashen's Gap on the west coast of the Isle of Man, owned by retired salesman James Irving

Margaret and James Irving could hear scratching, spitting, and breathing noises within the walls of their home and knew they had a rat problem. James took to sitting up late at night with a shotgun in his lap, waiting for the vermin to poke their little noses out of the woodwork. Seeing no sign of them, he made quiet chittering noises to rouse their curiosity; to his astonishment, the animal in the walls mimicked his sounds perfectly. He told his family about the remarkable critter the next morning, and his 13-year-old daughter Voirrey began singing nursery rhymes to the walls. The Irvings were stunned to hear a high, screechy voice mimicking Voirrey word for word. The voice informed them that it belonged to an "extra-clever" mongoose born in Delhi, India, on June 7, 1852 (making it 78 years old), and soon showed itself.
The talking mongoose became a family pet named Gef. He spoke not only English, but also Russian and Spanish. He seemed capable of remote viewing, describing the actions of people many miles away. When not catching rabbits he moved furniture around, sang songs, and read aloud from newspapers. But Gef was also a pest. He kept the family awake nights with his loud racket, and once pretended to have been poisoned, frightening the whole family. He could be moody, insulting, even threatening at times, once hissing at a neighbor "I'll blow his brains out with a thrupenny cartridge!" If he didn't approve of a visitor, he urinated through holes in the walls.

Word quickly spread that the Irvings claimed to own a talking mongoose, and the burden of proof rested on Voirrey, since she was the one who saw Gef most frequently. Photographs taken by Voirrey were indistinct. In 1935 Gef claimed to have plucked some of his own hair and left it on the mantelpiece; the hairs proved to be those of a long-haired dog.
That summer paranormal researcher Henry Price, accompanied by magazine editor Richard Lambert, arrived at the Irving farm to see Gef for themselves. He refused to appear. So they took some hairs from Voirrey's dog ad left after three days (the hairs were a perfect match for those left on the mantelpiece). Price and Lambert wrote The Haunting of Cashen's Gap (1936), anyway. In 1937 the Irvings abruptly left their farm, presumably taking Gef with them.