My Favorite Monsters #1: Gef, The Talking Mongoose
Posted by Dorian in My Favorite Monsters
In 1931, on the Isle of Man, the Irving family received a strange visitor. Strange animal noises began coming from the attic, but no animal was found. Soon, the noises started to resemble words and phrases spoken by the family, in much the same way that parrots imitate human speech. In a short period of time, the source of the noises introduced himself to the family. He was a mongoose, and his name was Gef.
Gef turned out to be a very talkative houseguest for the Irving family, though very elusive. He declined to be seen, but he did once let Mrs. Irving stroke his fur. He also had a penchant for sneaking into the homes of the neighbors and reporting all the juicy bits of gossip to them. He was also not overly fond of strangers, making a habit of telling guests to the house to “go to hell.” Apparently his high, squeaky singing voice made up for his insolent behavior, and the Irvings enjoyed his renditions of popular tunes.
Gef became a minor celebrity, much to the consternation of the locals, who didn’t care for him one bit. He was also the subject of investigation by many of the leading psychic researchers of the day. Sadly, when the Irving family moved in 1937, Gef vanished as mysteriously as he arrived. In 1947 a strange creature was shot by another local farmer, but it was never conclusively proven whether or not it was Gef.
I love Gef. Gef is my favorite monster of all time. Oh sure, to a person of skeptical mind it sounds like a harmless prank thought up by a child, perhaps the daughter of the Irving family, that spiraled out of hand, with the family perhaps enjoying making fools of people with a little innocent trickery. But, c’mon…it’s a talking mongoose! How is that not the coolest thing in the world? It has to be true, it simply has to be! I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no such thing as a talking mongoose!
The Gef the Talking Mongoose Tribute Page
A heated message board discussion on the reality of Gef
This site claims Gef was just a poltergeist, a popular alternate theory to “the family made it up.” But still not as plausible as “a real live talking mongoose.”
Psychic investigator Harry Price’s account of his investigation into Gef
Gef is mentioned here as one of the many supernatural charms of the Isle of Man, as well as on this local hotel’s page.
Everything you ever wanted to know about mongeese.
The only known photo of Gef
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For my second favorite monster, we get a bit of a departure from what has gone before. For one, it’s a European beast, rather than one haunting the Americas. Two, it has an historical pedigree rather a bit more convincing than a few blurry photographs, unconvincing eyewitnesses and a dead goat here and there. There is ample historical evidence surviving from the period to indicate that there truly was some kind of animal in the County of Gevaudan that killed nearly one hundred people and was seen by dozens of eyewitnesses. There’s even a…well, we’ll get to that in a minute. Third, the Beast of Gevaudan is one of the very few monsters out there to be regarded as female. It’s La Bete to the French, and don’t you forget it.
One night, in a shack out in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, a woman was giving birth. No one was quite sure if she was a witch or not. And she’d had many children before and this was unlucky number thirteen. When the baby was born, it was a grotesquely misshapen monster, with cloven feet, bat wings, a forked tail and the head of a horse. It beat the midwife and flew away through the chimney. For a time it visited its mother every day like a dutiful child, until she got fed up with it and chased it away. Now it haunts the forests of New Jersey, letting out blood-curdling screams in the night and staring in to people’s houses with its glowing red eyes.
For about a year in the late 60s, the city of Point Pleasent in West Virginia was terrorized by a strange beast. Mostly it seemed to just chase people around in their cars or look in windows at them. It was described as a bird-like creature as tall as a man, with glowing red eyes in its chest. The incidents probably would have been largely forgotten by history as just another example of the weirdness scares that seemed to pop up regularly during the height of Cold War paranoia, except for two things. One, paranormal journalist John Keel went to investigate the sightings and became intimately involved in the events (one could almost say to the point of tainting any possibility of real research ever getting done) and two, in December 1967 the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing forty-six people, an event believed to have been “predicted” by the Mothman. The explanations for what Mothman were range from the terrestial (a mutant owl), the extra-terrestrial (Aliens!), and the other dimensional (beings from a higher plane of reality inserting themselves into our three dimensional time space continuum in order to conduct experiments on us–and, oh man, do I wish I were making that last one up).
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