Doarlish Cashen, also called Cashen’s Gap, was a small two-storey farm of Manx slate on the open hillside above Dalby, on the Isle of Man, about 725 feet up and a steep walk from the nearest road. There was no electricity. The inside walls were lined with matchboarding, with a gap of a few inches behind the wood. James Irving, a Liverpool businessman, had bought the place in 1916. He lived there with his wife, Margaret, and their daughter Voirrey, who was about thirteen when the reports began.

In the autumn of 1931 Irving wrote that an animal behind that boarding was keeping the house awake with barking, growling, spitting, and blowing. He told the Manchester Daily Dispatch, in a piece published on 10 January 1932, that he and Voirrey had first glimpsed it in October: yellow, about nine inches in the body, with a long bushy tail, something like a stoat, a ferret, or a weasel. He was calling it Jack. He said a voice began singing scraps of songs and hymns from behind the wood in about November, and he told the reporter there were no spooks in the house. The island name for the affair became the Dalby Spook. The Dispatch still had it as a man-weasel.

Irving’s own account of the speech is that he made animal calls and the voice copied them, that Voirrey tried nursery rhymes and they were repeated, and that it then held conversations. He put the voice about two octaves above a person’s, loud and clear. Other visitors called it a high screech. By March 1932 he was writing that the animal had said it was an Indian mongoose, “just a little extra, extra clever mongoose,” and that it wanted to be called Gef, spelled G-E-F and said like Geoff. When Harry Price and R. S. Lambert sat in the house on 30 July 1935, the family told them Gef had turned eighty-three on 7 June that year, which would place a birth in 1852, and that he had come from India. The same voice was also reported saying “I am the ghost of a weasel” and, to a visitor on 7 March 1932, “I am an earth-bound spirit.” Irving’s letters have it killing rabbits and leaving them for the house, taking food, throwing small objects, riding into Peel on the buses, and coming back with gossip. Those are his letters.

People outside the family said they heard it. Irving told the Isle of Man Examiner in 1932 that three young men had signed a statement and that fifteen people would vouch for what they had heard. Charles Morrison, a friend of Irving’s, said he heard a loud voice from behind the kitchen boards and knocking that moved from one end of the house to the other. Morrison’s son Arthur came on 7 March 1932 meaning to expose a joke, and wrote that the voice greeted him by name while he had all three Irvings in sight. Price’s colleague Captain Dennis made three trips. On the first, 26 February 1932, he was leaving when a shrill voice shouted “Go away! who is that man?” On a later visit he reported a packing needle thrown at a teapot, and bangs through the house while Voirrey’s bedroom door was fastened from the outside. He also said he once heard the voice indoors while Voirrey was outside at the hens. Price himself had been written to in the winter of 1932 and had held off.

In March 1935 Dennis received hairs the family said Gef had pulled from his own back and left in an ornament. Price sent them to Julian Huxley, who passed them to F. Martin Duncan of the Zoological Society. Duncan wrote that the hairs had never grown on a mongoose, nor on a rat, rabbit, hare, squirrel, or other rodent, and that they had probably come from a long-haired dog. They had been cut: he could find no root bulb. When Price later sent hairs from the Irvings’ collie, Mona, Duncan said they were absolutely identical. They had come from the same animal, the dog. After Price and Lambert had gone home, Irving sent plasticine impressions of teeth and paws. The front and rear prints did not belong together as the feet of one small animal, and they did not show the creases of a real paw. The Zoological Society could not match them to a mongoose.

Price and Lambert reached Douglas at 6:45 p.m. on 30 July 1935. Gef had not been heard for about a month. They climbed to the farm with Irving, met Margaret and Voirrey, then seventeen, and sat by the oil lamp. Price asked the walls for a word, a laugh, or a scratch. Nothing answered. They came back the next afternoon, photographed the house, and were shown the runs behind the panels and the places where dead rabbits were said to be left. They left near midnight still without a voice. Irving wrote afterward that Gef had been in the house the whole time and had stayed quiet because Lambert was a doubter. Their book, The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap, came out from Methuen in 1936. It reports the story and does not say they had met the animal.

Lambert was the editor of The Listener and a member of the British Film Institute board. In 1936 Sir Cecil Levita told Lambert’s superiors that he was unfit for that board, “off his head” over the talking mongoose. Lambert sued for slander. The BBC pressed him to drop it. He did not. On 4 November 1936 a High Court jury awarded him £7,500 and costs. The Times reported the verdict three days later. The case was about what Levita had said, not about whether an animal had spoken on the hillside.

The voice did not last out the family. Charles Morrison wrote that in the last years there was no talking. James Irving died in 1945 after a long illness. Margaret and Voirrey left, and the farm was sold. The next owner, Leslie Graham, said he had seen nothing of the sort. The house was later pulled down. In a 1970 interview in Fate, Voirrey, traced by Walter McGraw, said, “It was not a hoax and I wish it had never happened.” She said she and her mother would have kept it quiet, and that her father had been the one who had to tell people. She said callers had called her mental or a ventriloquist, and that if she could throw a voice that well she would have been earning a living at it. A childhood friend, Kathleen Green, told Manx Radio in 2001 that Voirrey had been able to throw her voice. Voirrey died in 2005 still saying a small animal had talked to them from the wainscot.