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One strong memory I have from childhood is when a ferret turned up at our house, having clearly escaped from someone out rabbiting. It hung around for a few hours sort-of interacting with us before moving on.

I have wondered if the initial phase of interaction with the "Spook" was caused by a similar animal slipping away from its owner and temporarily taking up residence at the Irvings' farm, where there were chickens, lots of food, and of course that panelling to hide in. The descriptions given were a bit like a yellowish coloured ferret, albeit more weasel sized.

The trick of giving Voirrey's new "pet" a voice, whoever was doing it and whoever it was done to amuse, could then have developed over time - the animal might then have moved on, possibly even before the 'story' left the confines of the family home, leaving - well, a mystery. Voirrey would still, however, be able to truthfully insist to McGraw decades later that there really was a small animal who appeared at Doarlish Cashen.
 
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There are feral ferrets on the IOM

Indeed, and polecats too (or were in the '30s). That thing that the farmer supposedly killed in the 1940s looked polecat like to me. However I do think an escaped domesticated ferret would be more likely to take up residence in a house.
 
Indeed, and polecats too (or were in the '30s). That thing that the farmer supposedly killed in the 1940s looked polecat like to me. However I do think an escaped domesticated ferret would be more likely to take up residence in a house.
Agree, and calling the ferret a mongoose would appeal to a child's imagination, drawing on a creature from Africa which was at that time a far away and mysterious place
 
Agree, and calling the ferret a mongoose would appeal to a child's imagination, drawing on a creature from Africa which was at that time a far away and mysterious place

Quite, when combined with, perhaps, elements of Kipling's stories, plus the paintings of exotic locales that were on the Irvings' parlour wall, and the possible import of mongooses by D. M. Irvine at Eary Cushlin 20 years before, it all adds up to a sense of escape from an extremely isolated, parochial (not to mention patriarchal) situation.

But then, of course, her intellectually frustrated father started taking it all very seriously. Perhaps this was the source of some of her obvious regret decades later?
 
Have to admit I have not read up on the Get case for quite sometime. I found this nugget of information on a blog hosted by forum member Gralien:

"A neighbouring farmer had actually imported Mongeese to the island 20 years earlier, hoping to curb the local rabbit population.)"

https://gefmongoose.blogspot.com/p/the-story-of-gef.html

Also from this excellent blog:

"The strange saga of Gef the talking mongoose began in Autumn 1931 in an isolated hilltop farmstead on the Isle of Man known as Doarlish Cashen (Manx for 'Cashen's Gap'). The farm was home to 60-yr-old Jim Irving, his wife Margaret, and their 12-yr old daughter Voirrey.
Doarlish Cashen

Jim had been a travelling salesman before taking up farming in his retirement. The farm was not a success. Productivity was dropping and the family struggled to make ends meet. They had no electricity, no phone and no radio. Their nearest neighbours lived over a mile away."

Have to say I am inclined to think it was an innovative father voicing Gef to distract his daughter from the scurrying rats and also add some colour to her dreary childhood. That there used to be Mongeese on the island so recently made them a recent but somewhat exotic memory, or were there still some remaining Mongeese, stragglers hiding out in their remote part fo the island...?
 
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The animals were supposedly released at Eary Cushlin, which is now a spectacular-looking holiday let.

The Spook first described itself as a "ghost in the form of a weasel", and was reported in the local press as a "man-weasel", which accords a bit more with the small-sized animal described by the Irvings. It was only a bit later it began to describe itself as a mongoose - I believe after a letter to the local press mentioning the mongooses supposedly released at Eary Cushlin 20 years and more earlier, and other correspondence discussing the intelligence and trainability of mongooses. Of course Irving had been on the island long enough to have probably heard about the Eary Cushlin animals anyway.
 
A domestic ferret could make quite a nice living off rats, in an enclosed environment, and might have stayed there for quite some time.
 
A domestic ferret could make quite a nice living off rats, in an enclosed environment, and might have stayed there for quite some time.

I agree, I think a ferret gives a reasonably good match for an animal that could turn up, inspire the visual descriptions, and stick around just long enough to give rise to both the 'personality' of the Spook (whoever was behind it) and the idea of it as a physical animal.

One of the strangest aspects of the whole story is the two instances the Spook is supposed to have appeared as a cat, including once as an anomalously large, brindled tailless cat (interestingly described by Irving as "bulldog" headed, given Di Francis' later identification of a "mastiff headed" anomalous big cat in Britain).
 
I agree, I think a ferret gives a reasonably good match for an animal that could turn up, inspire the visual descriptions, and stick around just long enough to give rise to both the 'personality' of the Spook (whoever was behind it) and the idea of it as a physical animal.

One of the strangest aspects of the whole story is the two instances the Spook is supposed to have appeared as a cat, including once as an anomalously large, brindled tailless cat (interestingly described by Irving as "bulldog" headed, given Di Francis' later identification of a "mastiff headed" anomalous big cat in Britain).
Although, to be fair a big Manx tomcat may well fit the bill for that description (apart from the anomalous size). They are tailless and I know a lot of feral toms (especially allowing for inbreeding) can have a practically square head. Size...well, that's a little ambiguous and very much 'in the eye of the beholder'.
 
Although, to be fair a big Manx tomcat may well fit the bill for that description (apart from the anomalous size). They are tailless and I know a lot of feral toms (especially allowing for inbreeding) can have a practically square head. Size...well, that's a little ambiguous and very much 'in the eye of the beholder'.
It sounds exactly like a Manx cat, something the young girl may never have previously encountered in that remote location and thus got woven into the story by her creative father. What became of this lonely young girl later in life...?
 
It sounds exactly like a Manx cat, something the young girl may never have previously encountered in that remote location and thus got woven into the story by her creative father. What became of this lonely young girl later in life...?

The Manx cat was actually seen by Jim Irving as well as Voirrey. Here's how he described it in a letter:

Early in 1932, my daughter and I were alone in the house, broad daylight, and I chanced to look through the window of the room we were in, and I saw, to my surprise, a very large cat, striped like a tiger […] We ourselves did not possess a cat and I called Voirrey to come to the window to look at it. She did so, and remarked on the size of the cat, but, more especially the unusually large bull dog head it had. The cat then walked away from the door of the outbuilding, where it was standing (40 to 50 feet away from us), and I then saw it was a Manx tailless cat, and I was then a little more surprised, as the pure Manx cat is usually smaller than the English […] I thought this is no ordinary cat, so I slipped a cartridge into my single-barrel gun, and took “go” after him. Personally, I am very fond of a cat, and do not kill for killing’s sake. The cat was a little ahead of me, but easily within range, and it turned through an open gate way […] into a grass field. I was there a few seconds behind, and fully expected to see the cat, but no cat could be seen, look as I liked, the field was level, and there was not a bush or any roughness where he could have hidden, and the hedges were all earth, or sod hedges, as they are called here.… I detailed my experiences to my wife on her return that night, when Gef called out “It was me you saw, Jim.Further explanation is beyond me.

As for what became of Voirrey herself - we know she went on to work in an aircraft factory during the war and later went on to live in the mainland (I think). At least three interviewers tracked her down: Cohen, McGraw and Catling / Grisoni (the latter in the process of writing a play about the Spook).

The McGraw interview suggests that she never married partly as she could not bring herself to explain the events of her childhood to anyone: "Gef has even kept me from getting married. How could I ever tell a man's family about what happened?" However I have seen at least one other statement that she did get married, so...who knows. As she quite clearly didn't want to be disturbed, she may have been trying to avoid identifying herself.
 
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I think Voirrey made it all up. She was probably bored out of her skull by living in such an isolated place and she discovered that she could seem to throw her voice, using the acoustic properties of the house. So she did it to gain attention.
 
I think Voirrey made it all up. She was probably bored out of her skull by living in such an isolated place and she discovered that she could seem to throw her voice, using the acoustic properties of the house. So she did it to gain attention.

Well, that's the most likely and obvious solution, and seemed to be the one Harry Price was hinting at in The Haunting of Cashen's Gap. He pointed out the overlap between Voirrey's interests and those of the Spook for example (libel laws being what they are in the UK probably made him unwilling to go further). The fact that Voirrey continued to insist the Spook was in some sense real, including to Catling and Grisoni as late as the 1990s, seems odd when admission of the hoax could have put the whole thing to bed immediately, but I suppose isn't unheard of with hoaxers.

The extremely unusual vehicle of a (largely, but not entirely unseen) talking animal may have been suggested by the initial presence of an actual animal and perhaps by certain interests of Voirrey's.

The big 'but' in all of this is the involvement of Jim Irving, however. He wrote that he heard the mongoose 'speak' when Voirrey was absent, for example, which means that either he was actively lying, was being fooled by his family, or was directly involved himself. So was Voirrey the Spook, was Jim, or was it both of them in some way? My own feeling is that it was a private game that Jim came to believe was in some way real, or perhaps an attempt to get one over on Jim by the rest of the family which he believed and in which became completely invested.
 
Well, that's the most likely and obvious solution, and seemed to be the one Harry Price was hinting at in The Haunting of Cashen's Gap. He pointed out the overlap between Voirrey's interests and those of the Spook for example (libel laws being what they are in the UK probably made him unwilling to go further). The fact that Voirrey continued to insist the Spook was in some sense real, including to Catling and Grisoni as late as the 1990s, seems odd when admission of the hoax could have put the whole thing to bed immediately, but I suppose isn't unheard of with hoaxers.

The extremely unusual vehicle of a (largely, but not entirely unseen) talking animal may have been suggested by the initial presence of an actual animal and perhaps by certain interests of Voirrey's.

The big 'but' in all of this is the involvement of Jim Irving, however. He wrote that he heard the mongoose 'speak' when Voirrey was absent, for example, which means that either he was actively lying, was being fooled by his family, or was directly involved himself. So was Voirrey the Spook, was Jim, or was it both of them in some way? My own feeling is that it was a private game that Jim came to believe was in some way real, or perhaps an attempt to get one over on Jim by the rest of the family which he believed and in which became completely invested.
I do feel that people are very liable to self deception under certain circumstances. I wonder if Voirrey really was absent when he heard Gef talk, or whether he misremembered the occasion in a kind of cognitive dissembling.
 
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I do feel that people are very liable to self deception under certain circumstances. I wonder if Voirrey really was absent when he heard Gef talk, or whether he misremembered the occasion in a kind of cognitive dissembling.

I'm not sure and this is one of the stranger parts of the whole thing. For all the discussion at the time of events being 'centred' on Voirrey, there were also suggestions (eg by Price and Fodor) they were equally centred on Jim, a man in his own way as frustrated as his daughter.

I do think some of the phrases used about Jim by Gef ("turn your head, you bastard! I cannot stand your eyes!”) seem to suggest anger towards a parent
 
The other possibility is that the lead figure in the creation of the Spook was actually Margaret. There have been suggestions that Voirrey and her mother did it together as an exercise to persuade Jim to sell up and leave (if this was the case it was spectacularly unsuccessful) but I think most people have still focused on Voirrey as the main figure. I think this was partly due to the belief in the 'spiritualist' milieu of the time that these events tended to centre on angsty teenagers.

But what if it was really her mother leading things? Did she start doing it to amuse her daughter and (perhaps partly) to let off a bit of steam at a husband whose decisions had left them in this situation? Those insults flung at Jim could also have come from the mouth of an angry spouse. Indeed, if you subscribe to the theory that the Spook was in part a way of shielding Voirrey against a controlling, overprotective and possibly abusive father, might it not naturally have been the creation of a mother denied much other leverage over her spouse?

The slightly pitiful suggestion of the Spook that Voirrey should be purchased a camera or gramophone also sounds to me to be as much down to a concerned parent as Voirrey herself. More to the point, the distinctly Manx flavour of Gef - in terms of his dialect, his cultural context as a 'spook', etc - points to Margaret, who had roots on the island, as much as it did Voirrey.

It also might explain why earlier visitors found the Spook a bit more convincing. Early on, it was Margaret's performance, but later Voirrey might have tried to less skilfully continue the phenomenona in a misguided attempt to please her father, who had come to regard the Spook as quite real.
 
Interestingly having spent quite a bit of time on the Isle of Man (my missis is Manx) I find that most Manx inhabitants dismiss the whole thing as 'total rubbish' and refuse to talk about it.

They did even at the time, I think, judging by the tone of the local newspaper articles.

This is one of the things that makes me think Jim Irving didn't have a hand in the Spook: as others have pointed out, it's an awful lot of effort to go to for something that brought only inconvenience and ridicule. Also if he was one of the fakers then I'm pretty sure he would have ensured Gef would have put in an appearance for Price or Fodor.

No, I think it was Mags.
 
Great find, some clear parallels and a lonely young girl at the heart of both

Absolutely. I was struck by both this comment from a reporter:

She told me she had a cat, a black one, and its name was Topsy, but this was her only playmate. There was no schoolfellow who came to share her romps. She spent all her spare time with the old couple

and her grandparents' refusal to believe she was responsible: "“Bunty hid naething tae dee wi’t,” Mr Wilkie told Castel. “I tell ye it wis a beastie thit wis ahin the wa’.” "
 
This seems to be the location of Gateside, where the family lived.
 
For context, Doarlish Cashen from the 1:50,000 OS map:

Doarlish-Cashen-Gef-mongoose-Fortean.jpg


Near centre of image, east of Dalby

Context, from Google Earth (Dalby Road running N > S at left of image):

Doarlish-Cashen-01.jpg


Closer view of the area:

Doarlish-Cashen-02.jpg


maximus otter
 
It does look very isolated. Probably very lonely, in that respect, if that was a factor in conjuring Gef.
 
I can't bring up any links right now, but I've just heard Simon Pegg and Minnie Driver are to star in Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, described as a dark comedy film.

IMDB page

I'm glad they've got Nandor Fodor's name in the title. Too good a name not to take advantage of it.
 
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I can't bring up any links right now, but I've just heard Simon Pegg and Minnie Driver are to star in Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, described as a dark comedy film.

IMDB page

I'm glad they've got Nandor Fodor's name in the title. Too good a name not to take advantage of it.

Please, not a "dark comedy"!

Having said that, I did have to chuckle when I saw in the IMDB blurb that they describe the Irvings as an "average British family".
 
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