‘I gave him a smack with a heavy stick and knocked him out.’
This, according to an ex-Army lieutenant speaking to the Isle of Man in Examiner in 1947, was the sorry end of a mysterious creature which had caused a media sensation a decade and a half earlier.
Gef the talking mongoose, aka the Dalby Spook, had made headlines around the world after allegedly haunting a lonely farmstead at Doarlish Cashen, Glen Maye.
The Irving family claimed a creature behind the stone walls of their home began speaking to them, introducing itself as Gef, an 80-year-old mongoose from New Delhi.
They said it spoke in a high-pitched voice and in multiple different languages, made jokes and sometimes threatened them.
Reporters and paranormal investigators flocked to the island to look into the claims. By 1936, it was concluded it was all a hoax. although the Irvings continued to stand by their story.
But the Examiner’s edition of Friday, February 21, 1947, reported that Gef had been killed.
Leslie Graham, who had acquired the Doarlish Cashen farmstead from the Irvings, said he had snared, killed and skinned a creature he believed to have been the Dalby Spook.
Speaking to the Examiner reporter and photographer who had trekked the icy track in winter from Glen Maye village to the remote farmstead, long-since demolished, he said he had at first been very sceptical about the existence of the Dalby Spook.
But then in May or June 1946 he first caught a glimpse of an animal matching its description as he walked out of the cottage.
He didn’t see it again until the October when he went out at 11pm to put his motorbike away - and it was caught in the beam of the headlight less than 20 yards away.
He said: ‘It startled me.
‘It looked up and around and I could see its eyes gleaming. Then it vanished.’
One night he set a snare but the creature had been strong enough to break loose.
The next night he set a double snare. At 5.30am he heard a commotion outside the house. He found the animal entrapped.
He said: ‘As soon as I went forward it attacked ferociously. There was nothing docile about it. It snarled and spat and clawed more venomously than anything I have ever seen.
‘I was afraid it was going to break the snares and get away, and as there seemed no chance of getting him alive as I wanted to, I gave him a smack with a heavy stick and knocked him out.
‘That was the end of ‘Gef’ - for I am certain it was the same animal.’
Some time later, Mr Graham skinned the animal, after weighing and measuring its body.
It was 37ins long and had a tail of 10ins, and it weighed 5lbs 1oz. The fur was thick and a mottled yellow and black in colour.
Mr Graham even posed for a photo with the creature’s pelt.
‘It answers to all the descriptions and looks like the blurred photos which were taken of the talking mongoose,’ Mr Graham told the reporter, adding that he didn’t place much credence in the Irvings’ claims of the animal having engaged in conversations and games.
The Examiner subsequently approached the Irvings’ daughter Voirrey who could not say whether or not this was Gef although it seemed a similar type of animal and its mainly yellow fur tallied.
