Familiar Spirits

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Paranormal editor RICHARD HOLLAND re-examines the strange cases of Gef and the Pwca Trwyn, two weird entities who befriended farming families in remote corners of the UK.

In his book Invizi-kids, Michael Hallowell devotes a chapter to one of the most extraordinary stories in the paranormal records, that of Gef, ‘the talking mongoose’.

Gef was a kind of familiar spirit who took up residence in a farmhouse on the Isle of Man during the first half of the 1930s. Hallowell ponders whether Gef was an elaborate example of the not-so imaginary friends he discusses in his book. The story is often included among those of poltergeists but when I revisited the case, I was struck by how similar it was to old tales of fairies who attach themselves to families.

Doarlish Cashen (Cashen’s Gap) no longer stands but in the 1930s it was an isolated and rather bleak farmhouse built of slate and faced with cement. So exposed was it on a slope of Dalby Mountain that when Mr Jim Irving moved there in 1917, he constructed an inner frame of match-boarding to keep out the wind. The space between this boarding and the exterior wall is important to the story, because the ‘mongoose’ used it to run about the house and to hide behind when conversing with the family.

Irving lived at Doarlish Cashen with his wife Margaret and daughter, Voirrey. Voirrey was aged between 13 and 17 during the four years of the mystery; adolescent girls are recognised, of course, as typical attractors of poltergeist activity. Initially, Gef’s activities were similar to those of a poltergeist: taps, thumps and scratches coming from behind the match-boarding. This progressed to ‘a crack that shook the place and set the pictures swinging’. Animal sounds of barking, growling and hissing followed and then, most amazingly of all, the ghost started to speak.

You can read the rest of this article in issue 28 of Paranormal Magazine

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