If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But in the liminal world of high strangeness, the classification of things is rarely so simple.

Suppose - for example - that it looks not like a duck, but like a hooded being with glowing eyes. If you saw it emerge from a flying saucer, you'd probably classify it as an alien. If you saw it floating through a ruined monastery, you'd probably classify it as a spectral monk.

But would either classification really tell us anything about its true nature?

Even worse, suppose that it looks like a tiny squirrel, acts like a poltergeist, and claims to be an 80-yr-old mongoose. Then what is it?

Such was the problem facing the investigators of Gef the talking mongoose. Gef first took up residence at Cashen's Gap - a lonely farmstead on the Isle of Man - in autumn 1931. The farm was home to 60-yr-old Jim Irving, his wife Margaret, and their 13-yr-old daughter, Voirrey.

The first inkling the Irvings had of Gef's presence was when they heard persistent scratching and rustling sounds coming from behind the wooden panels that lined the walls of their home.

They initially thought a rat was to blame. But then the intruder began making a cacophony of unlikely noises, sometimes spitting like a ferret, sometimes growling like a dog, sometimes gurgling like a baby.

"What in the name of God can he be?" exclaimed Jim Irving in exasperation one evening. "What in the name of God could he be?" echoed a squeaky voice from behind the panelling.

The creature soon progressed from imitating what it heard to speaking for itself. It introduced itself as Gef, and claimed to be a mongoose born in New Delhi, India in 1852.

According to Voirrey (the only person to get a good look at him) Gef was the size of a small rat with yellowish fur and a big bushy tail. (Indian Mongeese are actually much larger and do not have bushy tails.)

Gef further confused the issue of what he was by making wildly contradictory claims about himself. He variously claimed to be "an extra extra clever mongoose", an "earthbound spirit" and "a ghost in the form of a weasel".

On another occasion he boasted: "I am a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me you'd faint, you'd be petrified, mummified, turned into stone or a pillar of salt!"

While Gef would initially seem to fall under the purview of Cryptozoology, the discipline as we know it scarcely existed in the 1930's. And so the job of investigating Gef fell instead to psychic researchers, who came looking not for a cryptid but for a poltergeist.

Certainly, Gef had many poltergeist-like characteristics. He had an uneven temper, threw objects at people, and made exaggerated claims about his powers.

On the other hand, he enjoyed singing along with the gramophone, reading the local newspapers, and snacking on biscuits - hardly activities normally associated with poltergeists.

The famed ghost hunter Harry Price was among those who came looking for Gef. Price was already renowned as an investigator (and sometimes debunker) of spirit mediums, and no doubt realised that the pursuit of a talking mongoose could hardly fail to generate considerable publicity for him.

But while Price was eager to meet Gef, Gef was far from eager to meet Price. "He's the man who puts the kybosh on the spirits!" he declared when told that Price would be visiting. Then he promptly vanished, only re-emerging after Price had gone home.

Another investigator spurned by Gef was Nandor Fodor. Fodor took a rather different view of poltergeists than Price, believing them to be manifestations of repressed conflicts within the unconscious mind.

"You can be sure that where Poltergeists are on the rampage, somebody is sick," he declared in a 1948 magazine article: I Psychoanalyse Ghosts. Fodor's hypothesis that poltergeist phenomena were symptomatic of mental disorder was roundly rejected by the spiritualists, who were firmly committed to the belief that poltergeists were spirits of the dead.

Fodor initially suspected that Gef was a product of Jim Irving's psyche, created in an attempt to relieve his loneliness and "mental starvation".

"There was no way to relieve it by conscious means," he theorised. "So his unconscious took care of the job and produced the strange hybrid of Gef, fitting no category of humans, animals or ghosts, yet having common features with all of them. Had Irving been a student of psychical research, the development of Gef would have proceeded, I believe, on more occult lines."

However, Fodor later revised his opinion and conceded that Gef might indeed have been "a mongoose or a similar animal that learned to talk". This was certainly the view favoured by Jim Irving himself, who assured reporters that Gef was not "from the spirit world" but was "a hybrid animal with a human mind and vocal powers".

Gef attempted to convince investigators of his existence by providing samples of his fur and making impressions of his pawprints in plasticene. Unfortunately, the fur proved identical to that of the Irvings' sheepdog, while the pawprints were dismissed as ludicrous by an expert at the Natural History Museum.

With the investigations reaching a dead end, interest in Gef waned, and the elusive mongoose subsequently seemed to gradually fade from existence. His visits to the Irvings grew fewer and farther between, and when the family left the island in 1939, he did not follow them.

While the story of the talking mongoose is still occasionally raised in discussions of Harry Price's career, it is generally dismissed as a bizarre fraud that has no relevance to 'genuine' paranormal phenomena. But is this conclusion really justified?

Perhaps the main problem with the case is not so much the quality of evidence on offer, but the difficulty involved in fitting Gef into any of the standard paranormal pigeonholes. Gef was unique - and the unique invariably defies categorisation.

Poltergeists are expected to throw objects, but not to munch biscuits. Cryptids are expected to leave strange pawprints behind, but not to sing along with gramophone records. And since Gef seems to be neither a typical poltergeist nor a typical cryptid, it is easier to conclude that there could be no such thing as Gef than to conclude that something might exist for which we have not yet invented a category.

Which in turn raises further questions. Does our need to discern predictable patterns within paranormal phenomena cause us to value the patterns above the actual phenomena? Does our need to label and categorise elements of the picture prevent us from seeing the picture as a whole? Can we really be certain that any one 'impossible thing' is any more impossible than any other 'impossible thing'? Or would we not be wiser to accept that - in an infinite universe - there may indeed be stranger things in heaven and earth than our prosaic philosophies have yet dreamt of?


Further Reading
Gef - the Eighth Wonder of the World
My website about Gef

Harry Price.com
Comprehensive website about Price's life and work.

I Psychoanalyze Ghosts
Article by Nandor Fodor.