William Roy Sells His Method to a Newspaper
William Roy, in fact William George Holloway, was the highest-earning British medium of the forties and fifties: he named sitters' dead relatives with an accuracy that was taken as unanswerable. In 1958 he sold the Sunday Pictorial a series describing his whole business for £30,000. A microphone was hidden in the cloakroom where the sitters left their coats; an assistant listened to their conversation and fed it to Roy's earpiece down a wire run through the leg of his chair. Beyond that, Roy kept years of card files built from newspaper obituaries and parish records. He wrote that he regretted nothing except being caught, and a few years later went back into practice under another name.
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.
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