137. The Gef Pilgrimage
In May of 2022 a team of forteans braved the mist-shrouded moorlands of The Isle of Man on the trail of a legend: Gef The Talking Mongoose. The group, made up of members of the Centre for Fortean Zoology and the Lancashire Anomalous Phenomena Investigation Society (LAPIS), consisted of myself, Jackie Tonks, Janet Walkey, Paul Pearson, Ben and Gayle Fiddler, Steve Jones and Dr Dan Holdsworth.
For the uninitiated, Gef was supposedly a sort of phantom mongoose that haunted a house in the south-west of the island in the 1930s. Built in the 19th century, the house was once owned by Pierre Baume, a French merchant. After his death in 1875 the house stood empty until 1916 when it was bought by Jim Irving, a piano salesman from Liverpool. He moved in with his wife Margaret, daughter Voirrey and Mona the dog. In the early 1930s, poltergeist activity broke out in the house, beginning with knocking and scratching noises. In 1931, a weird little animal with yellow fur and a bushy tail allegedly began to manifest. It used words, which became sentences, and the sentences became conversations. The creature claimed that its name was Gef and that he was the ghost of a mongoose who had been born in India in 1852. Until 1939, Gef haunted the house and enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the family. Parapsychologists such as Harry Price and Nandor Fodor investigated (see pp32-35); Price thought it a hoax, while
