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Gef The Talking Mongoose (The Dalby Spook)

The review i wrote for FT. They cut it down a bit. Here is the whole thing.

Forteana is a ripesource for film. I recall chatting to Ashley Thorpe, director andwriter of the 2017 Borley Rectory film and mentioning that I thought it was amazing that nobody had made a film about Gef the Talking Mongoose, the poster boy for forteana. He told me that he had heardthat it was 'on the cards'. Well I was excited. The Gef saga is one of the greatest cases in the annals of the weird and it would make a terrific film. And at last it rolled round and at last I saw it.

I've seen many things I love cheapened and bastardized on screen in recent years. Doctor Who,Marvel and DC comics, the Witcher books and the works of Tolkien have all been ruined, However Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose was awhole different level, as it was based, allegedly, on real events ,not that you would know it form the film itself.

Written and directed by Adam Sigal the film bares only scant relationship with the actual story. If Nandor Fodor were still alive he would sue as the film portrays his as a violent alcoholic. In scene he drunkenly invades Cashen's Gap in the wee small hours threatening to knock a barn down with a sledgehammer.

I knew things were amiss when the writer couldn't even get the Irving family dog's name right. He called her Ralph rather than Mona. But that was not the first strike. Ghost hunter harry Price is turned into an American played by Christopher Lloyd. I've always despised the way Hollywood changes British characters into Americans, even changing historic facts to place themselves from and centre.
Non-existent characters are introduced. In the film the Irvings have a farm worker called Errol (something that they could never have afforded). Another invention is pub landlord Maurice who saw Gef and heard him sing at his wife's funeral. The story of Gef is astounding enough as its is without such nonsense muddying the waters. Why couldn't Sigal just have told the story as it stands?

As for the Irvings ,they are glossed over. Margaret, whom Gef called 'the VoodooWoman'with her otherworldly aura is just a simpering housewife who bakes cakes. Vorriey is shown to be a ventriloquist but nothing more is made of her character. Fodor concluded that Gef was a 'split off part of Jim Irving's personality that had possessed a real mongoose'.But nothing is made of it. For the record I think he was a gestalt thought form created by the family.

Cashen's Gap itself is shown as a cheery place not the the dark, dilapidated, isolated atmospheric house it actually was. It wasn't even filmed in the Isle of Man. The bleak beauty of the island is sorely missing from the film.

And as for Gef himself, when he finally turns up, he is shown to be an African banded mongoose, nothing like Gef who claimed to be from India.

This was the worst kind of missed opportunity. It could have been so great, it could have told the actual story of the Dalby Spook but it is a parade of forgettable rubbish. The question is why? If you can't do it properly why do it at all?

What next, a bio-pic of Ivan.T.Sanderson where in he rums a small DIY shop in Rotherham? A film about Aleister Crowley preforming his Ritual of Abermelin the Mage at the boating lake in Wicksteed Park?

I hope dear old Gef gets a proper film or TV series one day. In the meantime I also hope the old lad nips over to Hollywood to give Adam Sigal a punch up the hooter.

0 /10
 
I've always been fascinated by Gef. From all that I've read he strikes me as a real puzzle.
Was he scary because he was a physical form and therefore able to interact with humans and yet he also showed the ability to hide and teleport like an incorporeal entity.
 
lordmongrove said:
The review i wrote for FT. They cut it down a bit. Here is the whole thing.

Forteana is a ripesource for film. I recall chatting to Ashley Thorpe, director andwriter of the 2017 Borley Rectory film and mentioning that I thought it was amazing that nobody had made a film about Gef the Talking Mongoose, the poster boy for forteana. He told me that he had heardthat it was 'on the cards'. Well I was excited. The Gef saga is one of the greatest cases in the annals of the weird and it would make a terrific film. And at last it rolled round and at last I saw it.

I've seen many things I love cheapened and bastardized on screen in recent years. Doctor Who,Marvel and DC comics, the Witcher books and the works of Tolkien have all been ruined, However Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose was awhole different level, as it was based, allegedly, on real events ,not that you would know it form the film itself.

Written and directed by Adam Sigal the film bares only scant relationship with the actual story. If Nandor Fodor were still alive he would sue as the film portrays his as a violent alcoholic. In scene he drunkenly invades Cashen's Gap in the wee small hours threatening to knock a barn down with a sledgehammer.

I knew things were amiss when the writer couldn't even get the Irving family dog's name right. He called her Ralph rather than Mona. But that was not the first strike. Ghost hunter harry Price is turned into an American played by Christopher Lloyd. I've always despised the way Hollywood changes British characters into Americans, even changing historic facts to place themselves from and centre.
Non-existent characters are introduced. In the film the Irvings have a farm worker called Errol (something that they could never have afforded). Another invention is pub landlord Maurice who saw Gef and heard him sing at his wife's funeral. The story of Gef is astounding enough as its is without such nonsense muddying the waters. Why couldn't Sigal just have told the story as it stands?

As for the Irvings ,they are glossed over. Margaret, whom Gef called 'the VoodooWoman'with her otherworldly aura is just a simpering housewife who bakes cakes. Vorriey is shown to be a ventriloquist but nothing more is made of her character. Fodor concluded that Gef was a 'split off part of Jim Irving's personality that had possessed a real mongoose'.But nothing is made of it. For the record I think he was a gestalt thought form created by the family.

Cashen's Gap itself is shown as a cheery place not the the dark, dilapidated, isolated atmospheric house it actually was. It wasn't even filmed in the Isle of Man. The bleak beauty of the island is sorely missing from the film.

And as for Gef himself, when he finally turns up, he is shown to be an African banded mongoose, nothing like Gef who claimed to be from India.

This was the worst kind of missed opportunity. It could have been so great, it could have told the actual story of the Dalby Spook but it is a parade of forgettable rubbish. The question is why? If you can't do it properly why do it at all?

What next, a bio-pic of Ivan.T.Sanderson where in he rums a small DIY shop in Rotherham? A film about Aleister Crowley preforming his Ritual of Abermelin the Mage at the boating lake in Wicksteed Park?

I hope dear old Gef gets a proper film or TV series one day. In the meantime I also hope the old lad nips over to Hollywood to give Adam Sigal a punch up the hooter.

0 /10
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Having read this fairly detailed biography of Nandor Fodor, I was quite taken aback by his obvious eccentricities.
Whilst he read and wrote English very well, he never really mastered speaking it and "his words gushed forth - indeed, splashed forth - in torrents at terrific speed, and in the whirl of sounds were many amusing mistakes." He was also prone to jumping around in excitement and shouting at a deafening level. His apparent foibles remind me of eccentric TV scientist Magnus Pyke (remember him?).
This does make me wonder why Simon Pegg didn't play up Fodor's more idiosyncratic behaviour for greater comic effect.

https://www.abc-people.com/data/fodor/bio2.htm
 
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Stormkhan said:
I've always been fascinated by Gef. From all that I've read he strikes me as a real puzzle.
Was he scary because he was a physical form and therefore able to interact with humans and yet he also showed the ability to hide and teleport like an incorporeal entity.
Click to expand...

It's partly as the idea of being stuck in a remote house half way up a mountain with an entity, who has apparently developed a fixation on you, living in the walls is bloody scary.

The fact that he chooses to manifest as a small, albeit not very cute, animal doesn't necessarily make this any more comfortable. As you say Gef is oddly corporeal, apparently eats and can carry on logical conversation with his hosts, but can also travel at impossible speeds, disappear, and claims to be a "ghost in the form of a weasel" (until he started claiming to be a 70 year old mongoose, anyway). This is all very disturbing no matter how many slightly lame comedy sayings / insults directed at Jim were recorded. The bit where the early visitor to the house sees the mongoose's eyes shining maliciously under his bed at night is pure M R James-style nightmare fuel.

This is before you even get onto the possibility that the volatile, rather abusive Spook was all in some way invented by the family, which is...frankly scarier.
 
I’ve just watched the Gef movie and found it rather enjoyable. Let’s face it, there’s precious few Fortean films about so it’s a bit churlish to be discouraging about new entries to the genre - especially as this has manifested on the 50th anniversary of the FT. Apart from Simon Pegg’s accent, I liked the casting - notably Paul Kaye looning it up as the boggle-brained local. As someone who watches the ‘back of television’, I thought the lighting was really good and while the sense of time and place seemed generic, I was taken by the balance of the presentation of a potentially comedic idea of a Talking Mongoose given a supernatural menace by insisting on hinting what goes on behind the veil.

More of this sort of thing I say.
 
Analogue Boy said:
I’ve just watched the Gef movie and found it rather enjoyable. Let’s face it, there’s precious few Fortean films about so it’s a bit churlish to be discouraging about new entries to the genre - especially as this has manifested on the 50th anniversary of the FT. Apart from Simon Pegg’s accent, I liked the casting - notably Paul Kaye looning it up as the boggle-brained local. As someone who watches the ‘back of television’, I thought the lighting was really good and while the sense of time and place seemed generic, I was taken by the balance of the presentation of a potentially comedic idea of a Talking Mongoose given a supernatural menace by insisting on hinting what goes on behind the veil.

More of this sort of thing I say.
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I have a Hungarian colleague and I must ask her what she thought of Pegg's accent in the movie.
To my amateur ear it didn't sound outrageously incongruous but, as I mentioned above, I was a bit surprised that Pegg played Fodor so straight, without replicating his documented eccentricities.
 
Dark Histories Podcast just did a 2 part presentation on Gef, with thoughtful and humanely insightful commentary at the end of part 2:
In the 1930s a peculiar story began filtering out from the towns and villages surrounding a small farm on the western coast of the Isle of Man. Reports of a talking animal, a local spook that could sing the Manx national anthem, engross itself in the local gossip and hunt rabbits better than any of the local poachers, . . .
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Part 1: https://www.darkhistories.com/the-dalby-spook-gef-the-talking-mongoose-part-1/
Part 2: https://www.darkhistories.com/the-dalby-spook-gef-the-talking-mongoose-part-2/
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
I was a bit surprised that Pegg played Fodor so straight, without replicating his documented eccentricities.
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Especially as I suspect the decision to make the movie was based largely on having real life events that included a character with an eccentric sounding name, in an eccentric vocation, investigating a particularly eccentric spook.

I don't think the quirky title is any accident. I suspect it's the reason for the movie.
 
It always bothered me a bit that 'Gef' would say things like "That's for me to know and for you to find out!"; just the kind of thing an adult (human) might say to a child and/or a child would repeat after hearing an adult say it.
 
Why is it that so many British extraordinary incidents lend themselves to a kind of hapless comedy, unwittingly, or are tinged with sadness? From age-old ghost stories of abandoned & betrayed lovers who took their lives, to sad family dramas like the Gef phenomena arguably is...

Is it because Britain is fundamentally 'built' on injustice, harshness, emotional strain, emotional isolation?
 
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Yes! basically...

Anyway, I quite enjoyed it. For me it was about outsiders, grief, coming to terms with loss; and the bereaved being manipulated by unscrupulous chancers. That I think it did well enough.
 
Steven said:
Why is it that so many British extraordinary incidents lend themselves to a kind of hapless comedy, unwittingly, or are tinged with sadness? From age-old ghost stories of abandoned & betrayed lovers who took their lives, to sad family dramas like the Gef phenomena arguably is...

Is it because Britain is fundamentally 'built' on injustice, harshness, emotional strain, emotional isolation?
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I think it might be at least partly because Britain, supposedly, has more ghost stories, and more ghosts, than other places (probably a result of the direction our state church took).

Ghost stories and other Forteana of this type are often really 'about' injustice or moral judgement or transgression. In this case the tale of the spurned lover or suicide expresses itself in the life of the community as that particularly British thing, a ghost story. So it's not so much that Britain is any more built on these things than anywhere else, but maybe we're more likely to generate something Fortean from them.
 
Regarding injustice: I was wondering if such stories are a kind of quiet protest, a protest against powers who would react with violence if a fully-fledged objection were voiced. In a sense, maybe such stories are a shadow-history: one that ensures victims are remembered, a material collective conscience, a small (but resonant) justice, and a lingering warning to the guilty - reminding them that their crimes won't be forgotten?
 
Steven said:
Regarding injustice: I was wondering if such stories are a kind of quiet protest, a protest against powers who would react with violence if a fully-fledged objection were voiced. In a sense, maybe such stories are a shadow-history: one that ensures victims are remembered, a material collective conscience, a small (but resonant) justice, and a lingering warning to the guilty - reminding them that their crimes won't be forgotten?
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They're certainly part of the collective conscience, though the 'justice' implied is often quite harsh, as you can imagine from the number of ghost stories connected with suicides (it's worth remembering that the whole 'burial at crossroads / parish boundary' thing was never part of the 'official' punishment for the crime of self-murder, but was community enforced). Many ghost stories function as a material reminder of things you shouldn't do according to the moral codes of past centuries (have children out of wedlock, have affairs, kill yourself, etc)
 
BS3 said:
They're certainly part of the collective conscience, though the 'justice' implied is often quite harsh, as you can imagine from the number of ghost stories connected with suicides (it's worth remembering that the whole 'burial at crossroads / parish boundary' thing was never part of the 'official' punishment for the crime of self-murder, but was community enforced). Many ghost stories function as a material reminder of things you shouldn't do according to the moral codes of past centuries (have children out of wedlock, have affairs, kill yourself, etc)
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Yes, in truth, I rather ignored that bad, judgmental side of community. And it's also true that what passed for Christian morality had its own victims - it wasn't always a case of the wicked squire seducing the serving-girl.'
 
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But to come back to the Spook, then yes I think 'hard times' are in some way bound up with his creation.

Jim Irving originally bought Doarlish Cashen as an investment, and later still ran it for a while as more of a gentleman farmer, with employees and his son overseeing the actual work. Then came the post war economic contraction and decline, with the result that the Irvings, a well travelled and educated middle-class urban family, and their youngest child, ended up living a tedious and extremely isolated existence as subsistence farmers. It was at this point that the 'Spook' appeared - which is of some relevance, I think, particularly given the odd combination of resentful anger and dependence it seemed to express towards Jim himself.

The Irvings are a classic 'status inconsistent' family, a pattern you see elsewhere in experiencers of Fortean events.
 
Thinking about it the parallels between the Spook and the 1934 story from Tarves, Aberdeenshire are pretty overwhelming. The only difference is that in the Tarves case the young girl at the centre of it, Isabella ('Bunty') Ross, confessed that she was the source of the voice.

In both cases we have:

- A young person living an isolated life with a much older couple (in Ross's case, her grandparents, the Wilkies)

- A voice coming from the walls of the house

- The voice gradually begins conversing with the family

- The voice describes itself, with an element of humour, as having a non human form (ie a weasel, mongoose, or in the Tarves case something with four legs and a "beak"). I'd note that in both cases the 'focus' seemed to possibly have a closer sympathy with animals than people (certainly in Voirrey's case; Bunty was said to be close to her cat, Topsy, in the absence of other children)

- The voice speaks in the broad local dialect, teases visitors in a slightly aggressive fashion, as well as speaking in a way that suggests a form of simple performance (singing songs, hymns, counting to 90, recitation) as well as conversing with people

- Some evidence that the voice is heard outside the house, always in the presence of the key 'suspect'

The only real difference in fact is that people claimed to have seen Gef fleetingly, although more or less only towards the start of events. And the Spook went on for much longer - but then of course nobody confessed.

Oddly in both cases there are people, both in the family and outside it, who refute the suggestion of a hoax by insisting they heard the voice when Voirrey, or Bunty, were absent. Bunty confessed to her teacher after 'unconsciously' slipping into the voice in the schoolroom, but nevertheless refused to elaborate any further or give any explanation, but the grandparents continued to insist the source was "a beastie thit wis ahin the wa’.”
 
BS3 said:
Thinking about it the parallels between the Spook and the 1934 story from Tarves, Aberdeenshire are pretty overwhelming. The only difference is that in the Tarves case the young girl at the centre of it, Isabella ('Bunty') Ross, confessed that she was the source of the voice.

In both cases we have:

- A young person living an isolated life with a much older couple (in Ross's case, her grandparents, the Wilkies)

- A voice coming from the walls of the house

- The voice gradually begins conversing with the family

- The voice describes itself, with an element of humour, as having a non human form (ie a weasel, mongoose, or in the Tarves case something with four legs and a "beak")

- The voice speaks in the broad local dialect, teases visitors in a slightly aggressive fashion, as well as speaking in a way that suggests a form of simple performance (singing songs, hymns, counting to 90, recitation) as well as conversing with people

- Some evidence that the voice is heard outside the house, always in the presence of the key 'suspect'

The only real difference in fact is that people claimed to have seen Gef fleetingly, although more or less only towards the start of events. And the Spook went on for much longer - but then of course nobody confessed.

Oddly in both cases there are people, both in the family and outside it, who refute the suggestion of a hoax by insisting they heard the voice when Voirrey, or Bunty, were absent. Bunty confessed to her teacher after 'unconsciously' slipping into the voice in the schoolroom, but nevertheless refused to elaborate any further or give any explanation, but the grandparents continued to insist the source was "a beastie thit wis ahin the wa’.”
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That's very shrewd. :cool:
 
My brand-new Alexa plays the highly enjoyable Dark Histories podcast. Strangely, it always runs the Gef episode no matter where I start it. :dunno:
 
My own theory about all this is that we might be looking at the same phenomenon here (whether that's a naturally developed 'ventriloquism' or some more unusual ability).

The difference with the Spook is that the performance seems both more malicious than the Tarves 'ghost' (possibly as the latter was simply meant to amuse the witnesses, whereas I think the Spook was focused on getting Jim's attention in a much more ambivalent way) and more sophisticated (possibly as it was a joint effort by Margaret and Voirrey).
 
Think into it for a second and you can almost feel the explanation. The Spook's personality seems largely shaped by the family's feelings about Jim, the garrulous, overprotective, controlling, pretentious father whose life choices had left them stuck with him in near poverty half way up a remote mountain on an equally remote island. Jim couldn't afford to buy Voirrey a gramophone or camera, but won't let the rest of the family get a word in edgeways and angrily refuses to let Voirrey go on a trip with Harry Price, assuming Price's motive was dishonourable.

The Spook, however, both frightens and fascinates Jim and absorbs his attentions. It needs him ("don't leave me, Jim") and hates him ("you bastard", "fat-headed gnome") in equal measure. He keeps a diary of its antics. He develops theories about it. He comes to regard it with warm affection.

It controls him, in other words, exerting a power the rest of the family otherwise lack.

The big problem, of course, was that as Voirrey put it in her later interview, her father "just had to tell people" about what was ultimately a private family drama.
 
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If Jim was, apparently, a show-off & also in need of money, is it possible that he was behind it all?
 
Steven said:
If Jim was, apparently, a show-off & also in need of money, is it possible that he was behind it all?
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I think it seems unlikely that even as a show off he would risk exposing himself to such obvious ridicule. Gef nearly always refused to put on a performance for any 'important' visitors and Price felt that Jim seemed genuinely upset about it. While it's true that what Jim 'got' from Gef was a sense of significance and importance, Jim seems to have craved respectability as well as attention and in the end the Spook bought him little except ridicule.
 
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