The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap

A modern ‘miracle’ investigated

Harry Price & RS Lambert

Guillemot Press 2022

Hb, 255p, £14, ISBN 9781913749217

This is a timely and very handsome reprint of Price & Lambert’s classic account of the Irving family and their curious talking house guest, Gef the mongoose. Given the price that has attached itself to the original 1936 publication this is indeed a most welcome reissue not only for those familiar with the story but also for a new generation of readers unaware of the bizarre nature of the case.

Prompted by a letter received from one Florence Milburn in February 1932, Harry Price of the Psychical Research Institute despatched a Captain Dennis to investigate the claim that a mischievous talking mongoose was resident in the household of the Irving family at Doarlish Cashen in the Isle of Man. What followed has become the stuff of legend among the poltergeist-following community and has drawn in a more critical audience, most notably in Vanished! A Video Séance

(1999) by Brian Catling and Tony Grisoni, who approach the story through psychoanalytical and postmodern discourses.

Initially written up for the Listener magazine in September 1935, edited by Lambert, the story of the Irving family and their relationship with Gef underwent syndication in the popular press and generated a formidable interest.

Exploiting the public interest in the case, Price and Lambert consolidated all of their material into Cashen’s Gap,

including Price’s own visits to the island as a guest of the Irvings, the multi-lingual pomposity and miscreancy of Gef itself, the attempts at forensic analysis of the creature and the darker subtext of poverty and isolation that underlies this gothic tale.

Price and Lambert claim in their own preface that they present no answers to the mystery but guarantee a tale both “Veracious but Unaccountable” and it is this open-endedness that Chris Josiffe (author of Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose, 2017) foregrounds in his erudite introduction. Whether the case involves notoriety and a media pay-off, he suggests, or something other, he reminds us that the whole episode remains a matrix of speculation capable of generating plural mythologies and supernatural poetics.

If you are not already aware of Gef then this is an enduring and unique story of enchantment and psychological fracture that deserves to be read, as well as a case history with a profoundly “new weird” topology. Lovingly produced, with exquisite line drawings – an excellent new edition.

Chris Hill

★★★★★