Gef the Talking Mongoose

Day 2 was also excellent and kicked off with Christopher Josiffe talking about Gef the Talking Mongoose. This is him above, along with a little knitted Gef (life sized) a friend made for him.

Gef is a hugely popular little mongoose in the Fortean world though I doubt he is very well known outside.

A Gef website

Gef referred to himself variously as an extra clever Mongoose, the Eighth Wonder of the World and The Fifth Dimension but chiefly manifested as a fairly run-of-the-mill poltergeist, knocking on walls, throwing things, shouting and bothering people. He lived with the family in a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Man and his activity was witnessed by visitors although, as with so many of these cases, photographs were fuzzy and indistinct, hair samples turned out to be from the family dog and activity seemed to centre round the teenage girl for whom, living as she did alone in this remote house with her relatively elderly parents, the long winter evenings can hardly have flown by... However activity was witnessed by visitors even when Voirrey was outside and although suspicion fell upon her or her father as being the perpetrator of a hoax, nothing was ever satifactorily proven. She herself always maintained that it was not a hoax.

The day continued with a talk on cursed stones by David Clarke and Andy Roberts who themselves purchased a cursed stone credited with causing illness and catastophe to its previous owners. It hasn't done either of them any harm! We also got an entertaining talk from Ted Harrison on Armageddon and when it might happen (word is, fasten your seatbelts..). We had the cult of the Mummy in modern times from the ever entertaining art historian Gail-Nina Anderson and a film by Nina Conti about the late Ken Campbell and his ventriloquist dolls. Apparently in the US there is a museum filled with dolls belonging to dead ventriloquists. And it is as scary as it sounds. Brrr.