Gef, the Talking Mongoose of Dalby
From 1931 the Irving family lived at the lonely farm of Cashen's Gap above Dalby on the Isle of Man with a creature that called itself Gef: not a spirit, an earthbound animal with clever hands, the eighth wonder of the world. It spoke from behind the wooden panelling, knew the gossip of neighbouring villages, sang and threw stones. Harry Price and Richard Lambert came and never saw Gef, but they were given tufts of his fur. Julian Huxley passed them to the Zoological Society, where F. Martin Duncan reported that the hair was a dog's — almost certainly the Irvings' sheepdog Mona. The voice, by every account of it, belonged to the farmer's daughter Voirrey.
The Curse of the Hope Diamond
The 45-carat blue diamond on show at the Smithsonian in Washington is famous as a stone that destroys its owners: prised from the eye of an Indian idol, it sent Marie Antoinette to the scaffold and ruined the Hope family. The Smithsonian historian Richard Kurin followed every episode through the documents and showed that the legend was assembled and sold by Pierre Cartier around 1910 to persuade Evalyn Walsh McLean to buy the stone — she had told him herself that unlucky things brought her luck. Half the victims never owned the diamond and some never existed. The stone really was cut from the French Blue of the crown jewels, but it was stolen from a storeroom in 1792, not taken from an idol.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first.