extraordinary%20encounters

110 Gef
ple here at the farm . . . seem sane, honest and
responsible folk. . . . I find that others, too,
have had my strange experience” (Wilkins,
1952). As the publicity spread, an American
promoter offered the family fifty thousand
dollars for the right to exhibit Gef commercially.
He was refused. Other investigators
heard Gef’s voice and witnessed apparent evidence
of his activities, including stone-throwing
and knowledge of events at a distance, but
none saw him. Others, such as psychical researcher
Nandor Fodor, who spent some days
with the Irvings, could only collect testimony.
Gef tended to go into hiding when investigators
showed up. In an amusing sidelight, after
one investigator, BBC journalist R. S. Lambert,
declared that Gef might well exist, a
critic called him “crazy.” Lambert took him to
court and presented a sufficiently persuasive
case that he was awarded seven thousand
pounds in damages.
Beyond anecdotal testimony, evidence of
Gef’s physical existence was slight. Harry
Price, the famous “ghost hunter” who later
wrote a book on the case, saw liquid dripping
from the wall and was told that this was Gef
urinating. Hair said to be from Gef turned
out to be from a dog curiously like the Irvings’
sheepdog, Mona. The prints he allegedly allowed
the Irvings to preserve in clay were not
at all like a mongoose’s or, for that matter, any
known animal’s.
Over time, so the Irvings related, Gef ’s visitations
became rarer and rarer. By 1938 or so
he was heard from for the last time. By then
the whole outlandish affair had fallen into obscurity.
It was too much even for the most
sensationalistic newspapers; and parapsychologists,
who first took it to be an exotic poltergeist
case, did not know what to make of it.
The only precedent for something like Gef
was a witch’s familiar (an animal form in
which witches are sometimes said to appear),
and on the Isle of Man in the 1930s, belief in
witchcraft had largely passed.
Though investigators looked carefully for
it, only one caught the Irvings in anything
that looked like suspect activity. From the be-
ginning, skeptics wondered if “Gef” weren’t a
fiction created by skilled ventriloquism. Early
in the course of the episode, a reporter for the
Isle of Man Examiner thought he caught Viorrey
making a squeaking sound, though her father
insisted the sound was coming from the
other side of the room. Aside from this ambiguous
episode, investigators on site expressed
doubts that so complex a hoax could
be accomplished so simply, even if it were
physically possible, which struck them as almost
out of the question. Locally, the Irvings
were regarded as reliable, honest people. If
they were hoaxers, their motives were clearly
not financial. They made practically no
money from their participation in the matter.
The Irvings eventually moved away from
Doarlish Cashen and dropped into obscurity.
Skeptical theories have focused on Vi o rre
y’s role. In 1983, Melvin Harris speculated
that she had first tricked her parents with
ventriloquism. Later, even after they re a l i ze d
that they had been fooled, her parents got
caught up in the hoax and played along with
it. Harris writes, “Gef never had a personality
or existence independent of Vi o r re y. He
b rought home rabbits, as did Vi o r re y. His favorite
foods we re also Vi o r re y’s favorites. He
s h a red her strong interests in mechanical
t h i n g s . ”
In the late 1960s, after thirty years of silence,
Viorrey was located and interviewed
somewhere in England (she insisted that her
place of residence be kept confidential). She
told Walter McGraw that she despised Gef,
who she thought had ruined her life. She said
that he had caused her pain and embarrassment,
and, even at the time, she and her
mother had hated the publicity. “It was not a
hoax,” she said, “and I wish it had never happened.
. . . We were snubbed. . . . I had to
leave the Isle of Man, and I hope that no one
where I work now ever knows the story. Gef
has even kept me from getting married. How
could I ever tell a man’s family about what
happened?” She complained bitterly that Gef
“made me meet people I didn’t want to meet.
Then they said I was ‘mental’ or a ventrilo-