The Mysterious Case of the Talking Mongoose
A supposedly talking mongoose said to live in the Irving family’s farmhouse in the 1930s.
Gef, also known as the Dalby Spook, was an intelligent creature that pretended to be a ghost in the guise of a mongoose, a tiny carnivorous mammal native to India, Africa, and Southern Europe.
Gef, who possessed the power of speech, was both a helpmate and a nuisance to Irving, his wife Margaret, and their infant daughter Voirrey, who resided in Doarlish Cashen, a centuries-old stone home near the town of Dalby on Britain’s Isle of Man.
A high-pitched disembodied voice cried out impatiently, “Read it out, you fat-headed gnome!” one morning in the early 1930s as James Irving was getting ready to open his daily newspaper. The voice wasn’t that of Margaret, Irving’s wife, or Voirrey, his teenage daughter, who were the most probable individuals to be at the isolated farmhouse, so Irving was astonished but not upset. He recognized the voice as that of a weird creature named Gef who had been residing in his family’s house for some time, mostly hidden from view.
