Richard Lambert, Price’s colleague and co-conspirator in the Gef affair, was an influential figure. As well as being founding editor of The Listener, he held a key position on the board of the British Film Institute that, at the time, was under the auspices of the BBC. In early 1936, Lieutenant- Colonel Sir Cecil Bingham Levita, a prominent member of the London County Council, was at lunch with the assistant controller of BBC programmes and suggested that Lambert was unfit to be associated with the BFI because he believed in a talking mongoose. When the remarks reached Lambert he issued a writ for defamation of character.
The case went to the High Court on 4 November 1936 before Justice Swift and a specially convened jury. Each member of the jury was issued with a copy of The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap. Levita denied slandering Lambert, noting that he hadn’t uttered the words, and even if he had, they were fully justified. Lambert countered, claiming that the book accurately represented his views and in no way endorsed the reality of Gef or, for that matter, any other talking mongoose. In keeping with his name, Justice Swift quickly found for Lambert, and awarded him substantial damages of £7,500 (equivalent to roughly £350,000 today). At the end of the trial, Lambert triumphantly autographed the jury’s copies of his book.
The trial also had two unintended, but important, consequences. During the case it emerged that the head of Public Relations at the BBC had tried to persuade Lambert to drop the action against Levita for the good ‘of his position with the corporation’. Questions were subsequently raised in Parliament, with politicians seeing the affair as yet another example of poor management within the BBC. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin launched an inquiry, which resulted in the organization moving away from being an ‘old boys’ network’ and introduced formal job interviews and more transparent selection processes. Second, the massive media coverage of the case ensured that mongooses became popular pets
throughout Britain.
Eventually, Gef simply vanished. In 1970, writer Walter McGraw tracked down Voirrey and interviewed her about the entire affair. Though eager to keep her current location secret, Voirrey insisted that Gef had indeed existed and had chatted to her on a regular basis. She recounted how the clever mongoose had gone away for progressively longer periods of time, and then one day just never showed up again. Gef was not a positive influence on her life, said Voirrey, wistfully adding, ‘Gef has even kept me from getting married. How could I ever tell a man’s family about what happened?’ Voirrey died in 2005.
In 1937, Cashen’s Gap was sold to a Mr Graham and the Irvings returned to mainland Britain. Graham never saw or heard Gef. In 1947, the new owner of Cashen’s Gap claimed to have killed a strange animal that was neither ferret nor stoat. His claims remained unverified and the pelt was never analysed. Cashen’s Gap was demolished in the 1950s, but the mystery of Gef lives on. Gef has his own Facebook page, and one website dedicated to matters paranormal recently suggested that he may have been ‘a supernatural entity from either an alternate dimension or an entity comprised of forces we do not quite understand’.
Perhaps the final word in the whole surreal story should go to Gef. James Irving once described how he reprimanded Gef for taking too long to calculate how many pence there were in seventeen and sixpence. The self-proclaimed eighth wonder of the world responded with a suitably enigmatic reply which, for me, sums up the entire affair beautifully:
5. GHOST-HUNTING
In which we spend some quality time with an old hag, discover why poltergeist researchers once shook a house
to pieces, meet the non-existent phantom of Ratcliffe Wharf, learn how to see a ghost and explore
There is an old joke about a University lecturer who asks his class, ‘Has anyone here ever seen a ghost?’ Fifteen students put their hands in the air. Next, the lecturer says, ‘Well, who here has touched a ghost?’ This time only five hands go up. Curious, the lecturer adds, ‘OK, has anyone actually kissed a ghost?’ A young man sitting in the middle of the lecture theatre slowly raises his hand, looks around nervously and then asks, ‘I’m sorry, did you say ghost or goat?’
Thankfully, the results from national surveys have yielded more clear-cut findings. Opinion polls from the past 30 years or so have consistently shown that around 30 per cent of people believe in ghosts and that about 15 per cent claim to have actually experienced one.1 Additional questioning has revealed that these alleged ghostly encounters do not involve white-sheeted figures drifting through walls, women in black bringing death and destruction, skeletons prancing through cemeteries or headless knights clanking their chains. Despite the frequent appearance of such images in ghost stories and horror films, actual apparitions are far more mundane.
A colleague of mine, James Houran, has carried out a great deal of research into the nature of these ghostly experiences. James is an interesting fellow. During the day this mild-mannered statistician works for a well-known internet dating site creating mathematical models that help promote compatibility. By night Houran transforms into a real life ghost- buster, conducting surveys and studies that aim to solve the mystery of hauntings. A few years ago he analysed almost a thousand ghostly experiences to discover what people report when they believe that they have encountered a spirit.2
Houran’s work revealed that reports of fully fledged apparitions are very rare. In fact, they only account for 1 per cent or so of sightings and when such figures do turn up they usually appear at the foot of a bed as people are either waking up or drifting off to sleep. Such apparitions have an uncanny knack of looking like a normal person, and their ghost-like nature only becomes apparent when they do something impossible, like suddenly vanish or walk through a wall.
So if people are not seeing full apparitions when they encounter a ghost, just what do they experience? Around a third of Houran’s reports involve
rather fleeting visual phenomena, such as quick flashes of light, odd wisps of smoke or dark shadows that move furtively around the room. Another third involve strange sounds, such as footsteps from an empty room, ghostly whispering, or inexplicable bumps and knockings. The remaining third are a mixture of miscellaneous sensations, including odd odours of flowers or cigar smoke, sensing a ghostly presence, feeling a cold shiver down the spine, doors opening or closing of their own accord, clocks running especially fast or slow, and dogs being unusually noisy or quiet.
For well over a century scientists have attempted to explain these strange experiences. Some firmly believe that their investigations provide compelling evidence of life beyond the grave. Others are equally convinced that these seemingly supernatural sensations have down-to-earth explanations. Their experiments involve an odd mixture of ground-breaking dream research, camping out in haunted houses, vibrating fencing foils, sitting in the dark waiting for God, shaking entire buildings until they fall to pieces and staging large-scale hoaxes.
Our journey into this mysterious world begins with perhaps the most widely reported of all ghostly experiences.