Went to a photo exhibition today called 'Seeing Is Believing', which purported to be a feast of supernatural imagery, but was instead mostly a load of old toot; the front part of it was photographs 'inspired' by the paranormal, which is really missing the point. The back part was better though - it featured lots of (annoyingly small) pictures from the archive of Harry Price, a 20th century 'psychical researcher' who went and investigated odd activity all over Britain, including the hauntings at Borley Rectory and the amusingly named Crawley Poltergeist. The trouble was that there was hardly any information on the places, or what Price found out while he was there, and there were a few things that I really needed to know more about, chiefly an image of Gef, a talking mongoose who lived with a family on the Isle of Man. That's right, a talking mongoose. On the Isle of Man.
Anyway, some rudimentary research has uncovered a few things about ol' Gef: he appeared in the home of the Irving family in 1931, and shortly after, or so they claim, began giving them sass-mouth. Gef began by aping James Irving's phrases, but soon found his own voice - he claimed to be from New Delhi, and liked to sing popular songs and 'joke around' with the Irvings. On one occasion (and I have seen this written in about four different articles) the little trickster 'took things too far' by pretending to be poisoned. You'd have thought he'd gone too far when he scurried into their living room and started singing 'Danny Boy', but apparently not. There are a few theories behind who this enigmatic mongoose really was: a poltergeist, a mongoose who couldn't in fact talk, or MADE UP (one of those is mine). But the fact I have learnt is this: Gef the talking mongoose is an example of a cryptid, and...
A cryptid is an animal that does not really exist.
That's a slightly loose definition - an animal can still be a cryptid if it is later proved to actually exist, or if it has a feature that does not exist in other members of its species (in Gef's case, his fine glossy coat... and his ability to speak English). Some other examples of cryptids include dragons, unicorns, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the beasts of Bodmin and Exmoor, and the okapi, a real animal which was thought until the early 1900s to not exist. A bit like the female brain then. Anyway, the Irvings got tired of having to listen to a cryptid creature doing stand up in their front room every night, and moved out in 1937. Gef is believed to have gone out in a blaze of glory a few years later, having been gunned down by a farmer who'd had to listen to a shrill rendition of 'In The Mood' one to many times. It appears he was knocking around in the States until recently - and was even accpting e-mails here. I sent Gef a request for one of his crazy tales of mongoose life, but the e-mail address doesn't work any more. Looks like our Gef, like the littlest Hobo, just keeps movin' on...
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