When Rivers Run with Wine

Okay, I have to ask. Who is Gef the Talking Mongoose? I mean, I gather from his name that he is a mongoose who talks, but like, what's his story?

My friends, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about Gef the Talking Mongoose?

Our story begins in the Isle of Man in 1931. A small farm family began complaining of hauntings by some sort of small animal, making crying, scratching, and eventually talking sounds. They seem to have taken this in stride. Though they set traps for the creature, it evaded each and every one. Not only that, but gibbering sounds soon became actual speech, which then became grandiose monologues! The being revealed itself as a small furry creature resembling a mongoose, save for its humanoid hands with long fingers. (Mongooses had previously been brought to the Isle of Man- make of that what you will. It's also worth noting that, while nobody in this story ever refers to the creature as a fairy, there certainly was local folklore he would have been reminiscent of.)

Gef, as he called himself (mongooses can't spell) seemed just as confused about what he was as everyone else. He claimed to be a ghost in the form of a mongoose. He claimed to be an earthbound spirit. He also claimed to be "just an extra clever little mongoose." He claimed to be able to split the atom, sometimes invoked powers of hell, and even referred to himself as the Eight Wonder of the World (apparently after seeing a poster advertising the movie King Kong.) He also claimed to speak Hindi, which he did not.

Unable to get him to leave, the family eventually made peace with Gef, and in return for free reign of the house he performed little favors such as turning off the stove when they forgot to, warning them of any strange dogs approaching the farm, and stealing chickens from other people and delivering them, having been strangled with his creepy people hands.

Other people in the village reported seeing and hearing Gef, and in the vein of most cryptids there are a few blurry photographs that look eerie but could be anything. Eventually the family moved away, and the next man to own the farm shot a polecat which he claimed to have been Gef. The village hounded him with hatred, but the original family said that polecat didn't look like Gef. All involved maintained to their dying day that Gef was real.

There was significant press attention about Gef, even causing a fight in parliament about what the appropriate plural of "mongoose" was. ("Mongooses.") Scholars keep trying to connect Gef to the Lovecraft familiar spirit Brown Jenkin, but there's no known account of him knowing about Gef.

So, to the point- what the hell was Gef? The most obvious answer is that he was a hoax, possibly caused by the daughter figuring out ventriloquism, but if so it was a pretty pointless hoax since they never made a dime off it. It could have been a hoax perpetuated by the whole village on credulous big-city reporters, as rural locals have been known to play on horror filmmakers. It also could have been some kind of mass hallucination event; such things are complex phenomena, but they do happen. Think of the dancing plague, where a legend that saints would make sinners dance to atone for their sins spread across a country with fatal results. Might something more harmless have happened with sightings of an odd, feylike creature?

I have answers for a lot of cryptids. I think Bigfoot is a bear. I think Mothman is an owl. I think the Black Eyed Kids were invented as an early copypasta based on an X-Files Episode. But Gef? I have no idea what the hell Gef was.

I like to think Gef was real and continues to exist eternally. Why not?