AP Strange: 00:22

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back my friends to the AP Strange show.

AP Strange: 01:09

I am your host, AP Strange. This is my show, and today's show is brought to you by the Jeff Talking Mongoose course on throwing bricks. Have you ever wanted to throw a brick at somebody and, you feel inhibited or just don't know how? Well, if you take the course from Jeff to talking Mongoose, you can be taught not only how to throw bricks, but small stones and neat tricks like spitting at people from inside of a wall. If you have adversaries that you think need to have something thrown at them, this is the course for you and you'll learn how to do it in an extra special, extra extra clever kind of way.

AP Strange: 01:49

So today on the show, we're going to be talking about Jeff. We're going to be possibly decoding the cipher of the talking monkeys. Although it has been noted that perhaps Jeff would not want to be decoded. And with me here to do that is Gail Fiddler, and she is hailing from the Northeast Of England, and she is a writer and researcher with the Spooky Isles. She contributes there often and has a background in folklore and the occult, and also a writer of fiction with her various titles with Legg Iron Press.

AP Strange: 02:29

On top of that, she does special effects makeup stuff and she's learning blacksmithing and she's a collector of bad taxidermy from what I understand. So this will be a very fun conversation. Welcome to the show, Gail.

Gayle Fidler: 02:43

Hello, thank you for having me. It's great to Yeah, be

AP Strange: 02:47

you're very welcome. Yeah, this, I became aware of your work because you were talking about actually visiting the Isle Of Man and investigating Jeff and alongside people from the Lancashire Anomalous Phenomena Investigation Society and the Center for Forky and Zoology. And I thought this was great just because I've loved Jeff for a long time and it's one of those cases where it seemed like it lasted a few years at Dorlish Cashion on the Irving farm and then petered out and then became kind of a historical oddity. But I'm like, Jeff seems to me to be a magical being, so why wouldn't you go investigate now? He should still be there, right?

AP Strange: 03:35

Or some kind of form of him. So I'm curious about where your interest with Jeff began, first of all. And secondly, if you agree with me on that statement, that he should still be around.

Gayle Fidler: 03:52

I hope he is still around. So I first became interested in Jeff 2019. I must have known about Geoff prior to this because of various books and things, but he didn't really of grip my interest or I didn't really know a lot about him until I was at a conference in 2019, the Weird Weekend North Conference in England, and there was a guy there called Christopher Joseph who has written a book called The Strange Tale of an Extra Special Talking Mongoose. He did a presentation at the conference about Geoff and it was absolutely fantastic. Basically he has just gone into so much detail and so much research, so if you're interested in the case definitely buy his book.

Gayle Fidler: 04:43

So we listened to him speak and afterwards a group of us went to the pub and we're just kind of mulling it over and said, Oh, this was a brilliant talk, we loved it. We just, after a pint of beer, we said, Let's go to the Isle Of Man and let's go and investigate it. So we'd planned to go the following year, which unfortunately was 2020, so the pandemic hit and that never happened. So in 2022 a group of seven of us went to the Isle Of Man to go and investigate the Geoff case, and we've been going back every year ever since. And we're continuing to do so.

Gayle Fidler: 05:17

We're going back this year. And in terms of is Jeff still around? I'd love to think so. We haven't found him yet, but we continue to look for him. Yeah,

AP Strange: 05:31

that's great because it is interesting to think of it within the realm of fourteen zoology. Being familiar with some of the work of Richard Freeman and Jonathan Downs of CFZ. The fourteen zoology is a little bit different than cryptozoology in respect to that. A lot of cryptozoologists are looking for flesh and blood animals and they're open to wider range of possibilities at CFZ. So It is funny that to me though because sometimes people do seem to think of Jeff as a cryptid.

AP Strange: 06:14

I've seen cryptozoologists like talk about him that way. Whereas traditionally it's been an object of fascination for parapsychologists like Nandor Fodor or Harry Price where it's framed more as a poltergeist or a spiritual phenomena. So which again those tend to be short lived, But think there's a case to be made that he's more of a magical entity.

Gayle Fidler: 06:45

Absolutely, and James Irving, well originally James Irving thought that he was a flesh and blood creature and was very much of the opinion that he was a flesh and blood weasel or rat in the house. And I think Nandor Fodor went down that route as well at one point to say that he was, or possibly was, a flesh and blood talking animal. He did change his mind later on, but that is one of the theories that is put forward. But yeah, you mentioned Rich Freeman. Rich comes on all of our expeditions with us, and he's a great guy to have around because his knowledge of cryptozoology is absolutely out of this world, so he's brilliant to have on the team.

AP Strange: 07:23

Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, he's he doesn't seem to be afraid of covering some of the wackier, like more mystical and woo explanations for things, you know?

Gayle Fidler: 07:35

Absolutely. Like Rich, yeah, he'll he'll, you know, he'll consider all possibilities. And it's really funny because years ago, I'd read Three Men Seeking Monsters by Nick Redfern. This was long before I ever met Richard Freeman. And I remember reading that book and thinking, oh gosh, I really wanna go on a magical expedition and have these crazy adventures and search for strange things.

Gayle Fidler: 07:59

And now I'm doing it with one of the guys in the book. So yeah, it's really exciting. It's a bit fun.

AP Strange: 08:04

It's funny how that works out. Yeah. It's it's great when you're actually meeting the people that inspired you and then getting alongside them, that's wonderful. Yeah. Well, here's something that struck me, prior to, this chat I went and revisited.

AP Strange: 08:24

It's actually a reprinting of the Harry Price and Lambert book on Geoff, the original one, which is I guess The Haunting Cash

Gayle Fidler: 08:40

and I have a copy there.

AP Strange: 08:42

Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 08:43

Do you have a do you have an actual copy? Because it's if you look on eBay, it's the reprint is really expensive now. You can't get it for, like, less than a few £100. And the original copy is ridiculously expensive.

AP Strange: 08:55

Oh, yeah. They're rare, so you can't get it. And no, I don't. That would be highly prized. It would have a very special place on my shelf if I had an original copy.

Gayle Fidler: 09:05

Yeah. We keep looking, but need a lottery win.

AP Strange: 09:09

Yeah, so what I have is the inner light reprint of it, which that was Timothy Green Beckley's kind of imprint here and he reprinted a lot of old books. So Tim Schwartz writes in it and kind of summarizes stuff. It has a couple of contributors, but the entirety of The Haunting and Cashion's Gap is included in it. That's good. At least I can read it.

Gayle Fidler: 09:35

Yeah.

AP Strange: 09:35

Even if I don't have an old copy. But one thing that struck me, it's right at the beginning and I don't think I'd ever heard anybody mention this, but Price Makes a Point or Lambert, I'm actually not sure who's writing at various points in the book because they're both, they're co authors, but somebody makes the point of mentioning that Jim Irving and his professional life had come to be acquainted with a lot of, Jewish people and it makes note of the fact that there are Jewish magical signs painted on the chicken coops there And it's written in italics in the version I have as though it's a caption to a photo, but there's no photo. And I'm

Gayle Fidler: 10:16

like There is no photo.

AP Strange: 10:17

It's very strange, but I'm just like, okay, well Hebrew magical signs, I wish we had at least a diagram or a sketch or a photo because I'm really interested in knowing what those signs were because if you really, if you think about the magical implications of what Jeff is and there's magical signs there, seems like it would be helpful to know. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Gayle Fidler: 10:44

Yeah, it's a real shame because there is no photo. I'm not aware of any photos existing We've looked at some of the photos that you can access online, Nandor Photo's photos in the Isle And Garret collection, and there is nothing online. So nobody at the minute knows what that symbol was. Unfortunately there's no buildings left when you go to where the property was, so everything's gone. I'm really interested in James Irving's background because it seems very sketchy and there's very few details about what he was doing before he came to the Isle Of Man.

Gayle Fidler: 11:24

We know that he was a piano salesman. We know that he'd travelled widely while he was doing that profession. He'd definitely been over to Canada and back. He spoke several languages. Not fluently, but he definitely had quite a good grasp of a number

AP Strange: 11:39

of

Gayle Fidler: 11:39

languages. But apart from that, there's just very little information about him, unfortunately. We know that during the first world war he was working in Liverpool. I can't remember the but he was like checking post. There's a name for the job, but he was like, to make sure like, censorship and doing that sort of thing.

AP Strange: 12:04

Right. Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 12:05

But, yeah, he's a bit of an enigma and definitely an area of interest, and that's as much as we've been able to kind of find out about him at the minute. Yeah.

AP Strange: 12:17

I think he's an important, a really important part of the story and I think a lot of attention gets drawn to young Voiri, his daughter, and people tend to put the focus on her, which sure it's important that she's there, but Jim is the driving force behind all of it and consistently the one that Jeff wants to talk to or

Gayle Fidler: 12:47

Absolutely. Yeah. And all the communication comes via Jim. So the letters, the diaries, it's always Jim doing that communication to Price or Fodor. He's definitely the spokesperson of the family, and he's the one that seems to take the most interest in Jeff and his doings and almost became like a father figure to Jeff when you read some of the diary entries and the letters.

Gayle Fidler: 13:10

It it I think he calls him my lad. Very much has this kind of father and son relationship with him. But yeah, he's an interesting guy that we don't know a lot about.

AP Strange: 13:23

Yeah, I mean we know that he and his wife had boy later in life, So they were older and that was one one point of contention I had with the the movie with Simon Pegg, we'll I guess we'll get into at some point, but is that Jim is and his wife are portrayed as being, you know, fairly young, but they were older when Voyager

Gayle Fidler: 13:45

came out. I think 19 I think Jim was late fifties in 1931. I think he was 58 when the Jeff Jeff first started, so 1931 and Margaret was 54, I think. Yeah. Yeah, were much older in life.

AP Strange: 14:02

Right. Yeah. And they already had children that were pretty much grown by that point.

Gayle Fidler: 14:06

Yeah. They had two grown up children.

AP Strange: 14:09

Yeah. So yeah, it would definitely be more interesting to know more about Jim, and I think I've heard or read a little bit that his wife was like vaguely interested in or involved in spiritualism, but I don't know too much about that either. It seems like there's a lot of details missing.

Gayle Fidler: 14:31

Yeah, she's alleged to have had an interest. Jeff called her Maggie the witch woman.

AP Strange: 14:38

Right.

Gayle Fidler: 14:38

And she's referred to as having these very dark eyes and quite piercing stare that would look through people. So yeah, there definitely is references to her having this kind of what you could interpret as a witch kind of persona. In terms of her interests, there's not a lot again written about it other than what Geoff has said and what Jim's written in his diaries that Geoff has said about Margaret. But yeah, again we don't know a lot about her as a person.

AP Strange: 15:11

Yeah. And I mean, the family dynamic too, it's kind of funny because you had mentioned that Jim was like a father figure to Jeff, and there are instances where Margaret has gotten upset with Jeff and decided not to give him food. And then Jeff is coming crying to Jim about it and being like, hey, Jim. How about some Grubbo? I'm hungry.

Gayle Fidler: 15:34

He just makes me laugh. When you read some of the things that Jeff says, he's he's actually hilarious, and I think this is one of his charms that he's just so funny. Mean he can be really nasty and he's quite, you know, he swears sometimes and he can be quite awful, but he's hilarious. He's very charming.

AP Strange: 15:52

Yeah, in that way, I mean to me he strikes me as kind of one of these like comical figures that subverts authority, know, because especially if there's somebody there that's like a stuffed shirt, it seems like he's always the really informal kind of vulgar presence that's gonna say the things that you wouldn't say in polite

Gayle Fidler: 16:15

society. Absolutely.

AP Strange: 16:21

And I mean, to be clear, we're talking about a talking monkeys here. So this is the wildest and some of the most fun paranormal stuff to even consider. But having a background in occultism, do you think that, would you agree that that's kind of part of magic and the occult is that sometimes it's just funny and kind of absurd?

Gayle Fidler: 16:48

Absolutely, and I think if you can't have fun with it, then what is the point you'd get some of it's so crazy that absolutely yeah right yeah all

AP Strange: 17:02

right well so you visited Doors Lish Cache and I guess some of the as you had said, the the the farm is no longer there. I think in your written description you said there were just a few of the bushes left and that

Gayle Fidler: 17:18

was Yeah. About When you go up there, so the farmhouse itself has gone. That was destroyed in 1971. Nobody seems to know why, again a bit of a mystery. Potentially I've read that some of the buildings, that the farm was used to build a cattle shed, which is a bit further up.

Gayle Fidler: 17:37

The well is left and there's some gooseberry bushes which were Margaret's gooseberry bushes which we have taken seeds off and we now have Jeff gooseberry bushes over here in England. They have grown. So we have Jeff gooseberries. We have Jeff gooseberry bushes. They haven't given us any gooseberries yet, but hopefully this year.

Gayle Fidler: 17:56

But apart from that there is absolutely nothing left of it. So if you went there and you didn't know what you were looking for, wouldn't know at all that there'd been a farm there at any point unfortunately.

AP Strange: 18:06

Yeah. Because this was a remote and pretty desolate location.

Gayle Fidler: 18:11

It is very remote. So it's on the top of a hill on the Isle Of Man. It's on Dolby Mountain, and it's quite a trek to get to, so it's about a mile up a hill. There's no proper roads to it, so it is a walk, you can't get to it by car or motor vehicle. It's just in this beautiful place that overlooks the local towns.

Gayle Fidler: 18:38

There would have been no farm houses within about a mile vicinity of it. So yeah, it was relatively remote, but you could trek there and back. There's a village, as I say, about a mile away that they did walk to, and then the nearest town I think is about seven miles away. Margaret went there regularly, walking backwards and forwards to the town where her elderly parents were living at the time.

AP Strange: 19:00

Oh, okay.

Gayle Fidler: 19:01

But it's a beautiful location. On top of a hill. Yeah. Absolutely gorgeous.

AP Strange: 19:06

Yeah. I think Christ described it as like the loneliest farmhouse in the British Isles or something like that.

Gayle Fidler: 19:13

Yeah. I mean, be fair, we've only been up there in good weather. I can't imagine what it's like in the winter. It's probably pretty grim, but it's fine. Spring and summer, it's absolutely gorgeous.

AP Strange: 19:23

Yeah. Now Voirey would have been going to school in the town, right, or the village that was nearby.

Gayle Fidler: 19:29

Yes. So there is a village nearby that she did go to school to, and when she was at junior school, that was in the local church, which is still there, so you can still go into the church hall. And they do have a little bit of a Geoff display in there. They've got a tiny little exhibition downstairs with details of the surrounding area. So there is a little bit of local information about Geoff in there, but she would walk backwards and forwards down to school, and later on she got the bus to town when she went to the bigger school.

AP Strange: 20:02

Right. Yeah. Because it seems like a lot of Jeff's interests and her interests were kind of aligned. Like, they were both very interested in mechanical things.

Gayle Fidler: 20:14

Yeah.

AP Strange: 20:15

Planes and things like that and

Gayle Fidler: 20:17

Steam rollers? They they had the fascination with steam rollers, strangely, in planes and cars. Yeah. They they definitely had some very similar interests.

AP Strange: 20:27

Yeah. And it seems to me that their friendship as it were seemed pretty short lived. Like in the book it sounds like from the accounts that I've read that she helped to teach him how to talk and they were like besties for a minute, but then she basically was kinda over it and didn't wanna have anything to do with them and especially later on. I think it was a source of her being kind of ostracized and alienated by other kids, you know?

Gayle Fidler: 21:00

She was. Yeah. She she was ostracized at school. She was bullied quite badly over it. They used to call her the Dolby Spook, so Jeff is referred to as the Dolby Spook on the Isle Of Man.

AP Strange: 21:11

Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 21:11

And they would call her that and taunt her. And later on in life when she was interviewed for Fate magazine, she basically said that it ruined her life. And she never married because of Jeff because she was so embarrassed about people finding out about the case and what people might think of her. So yeah, they were only friends for a very short period of time, but when they were, they would go out catching rabbits together and wandering the countryside, and they had a really good relationship for a period of time. And then, unfortunately, it kind of fizzled out for whatever reason and kinda grew out of him, I guess, which is

AP Strange: 21:47

sad. Yeah. And one would think that it's almost counter to the narrative that you usually get with poltergeist activity being related to those kind of formative years of preadolescence where it's kind of a outward expression according to some parapsychologists with psychoanalytic backgrounds, both included, is like an outward expression of the inner turmoil of that kind of change. But it sounds like during that time it was actually just kinda pleasant for her, you know?

Gayle Fidler: 22:26

Absolutely, and he did help around the farm. He helped the family, so he would catch rabbits because at that point in time they didn't have much money. So he would go out and he would catch rabbits and he would leave them and they would go and sell the rabbits and make some more money for their income. So yeah, he was really helpful. He would chase rats out of the barns and kind of look after the chickens, sort of keep foxes away.

Gayle Fidler: 22:50

Oh, sorry, there isn't any foxes of the Isle Of Man, but he would kind of keep predators away from them. He would I think they'd lost a sheep on one occasion and he told Jim exactly where the sheep was, this sheep that had been injured. So yeah, he was very helpful.

AP Strange: 23:09

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you could do worse than having a talking mongoose in your house,

Gayle Fidler: 23:15

but Absolutely.

AP Strange: 23:19

He was, I guess, troublesome too because he would sometimes keep everybody up all night just making a racket in there. Unpredictable, but

Gayle Fidler: 23:28

Yeah, he was naughty as well. He was quite noisy. He liked to sing and dance.

AP Strange: 23:35

Yeah. Well, that's cool too. All right, so here's something that I thought of recently, is the kind of the spelling of the name Jeff is unusual. Because if you were to spell Jeff with a G, typically you would expect it to be like G E O F, f, right? And with the f f.

AP Strange: 23:59

And it would still be pronounced Jeff, but it's those three letters and given the musical thing with him and the fact that Jim was a piano salesman, I wonder if there's a musical code to the name.

Gayle Fidler: 24:12

Oh, there's an interesting theory. I'm not musically talented whatsoever, but if It's definitely worth looking into.

AP Strange: 24:23

Yeah, I mean, because if it's, if it were spelled with a J, there is no note that's a J, but the musical scale goes from A to G. So yeah, you would have to use just the G, the E and the F.

Gayle Fidler: 24:38

Jeff exclusive, you heard it here first.

AP Strange: 24:43

Well, is all part of decoding it. Maybe Jeff will interfere with the recording or the Internet right now just to stop

Gayle Fidler: 24:51

that. Yeah.

AP Strange: 24:53

If he doesn't, we'll know that we're we're not on we're way off course, you know.

Gayle Fidler: 24:57

Oh, so I need I need to go find someone that can play piano and play that.

AP Strange: 25:04

Well, I mean, I don't think about those three notes in succession. I didn't try it, but I don't I can kind of picture in my mind what that sounds like and it doesn't sound great. It's an odd It would be an odd melody. I'm sure there's ways you could play around with it, but it wouldn't be but yeah. And it's not a chord because E and F together would sound terrible, it would be very dissonant.

AP Strange: 25:32

So, I don't know, just a thought. Because I mean musicality does, I mean, the music and music theory does play into magic in a lot of ways, right? So, think I there's something that can be done with it. I'm not exactly sure what it is. I just wanted to run it by you.

Gayle Fidler: 25:51

Yeah. No. We'll we'll record it, and we'll next time we go there in May, we'll we'll go and play it at dollars cashing site and see what happens.

AP Strange: 26:00

Well, I mean, it's not too crazy because like in the series Hellier, they had that part where they were doing the ST's method and they had the three tones that they were singing. So you could just do the same thing with those three tones, you know? Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 26:14

We'll give it a go, definitely. So

AP Strange: 26:18

you go back there every year?

Gayle Fidler: 26:20

Yes. So we've been going back there every year since 2022. Spend, try and spend about two weeks out there, and we just absolutely love it, and we're booked to go this year, so we'll be going at the April, into May for a couple of weeks.

AP Strange: 26:36

Okay. Nice.

Gayle Fidler: 26:37

It's lovely.

AP Strange: 26:39

Yeah. So and and, it seems like, as tends to be the case when when you're looking into high strangeness that you had plenty of synchronicities along the journey when you were when you were looking into it the first time. I don't know if you wanna get into that at all. I think you had a post about it called Simon Pegg's

Gayle Fidler: 27:00

Simon Pegg's stall mongoose, yeah. So I've got a hoodie with it on actually. We have Jeff hoodie. Don't know if you can see that, but we have a Simon Pegg stole armongoose. I'm hoping he doesn't sue us at some point.

Gayle Fidler: 27:15

He knows about it. He has been sent a picture,

AP Strange: 27:17

Okay.

Gayle Fidler: 27:18

But I don't think he's responded. But yeah, so the first time I'll talk about the synchronicities about the film. So the first time we went to the Isle Of Man in 2022, and we'd said to people, family members and sort of work colleagues, etcetera, oh, we're going to the Isle Of Man to look for a talking mongoose from the 1930s, and everybody looked at us like we were completely mad. But it was a lot of fun, so we went out there. And I was really expecting when I got to the Isle Of Man that Jeff would be a celebrity over there, and I would find him on mugs and key rings and tea towels, and I'd be able to buy all this Jeff stuff, this Jeff merch, and bring it home.

Gayle Fidler: 28:08

When I got there, I was really disappointed because there was just nothing. So there's no Jeff merchandise. And when you speak to people on the Isle Of Man, they were mostly of the opinion that it was a hoax and they weren't really that interested. Which is really strange because the Isle Of Man is a very superstitious place. There is a lot of folklore ingrained on the island.

Gayle Fidler: 28:31

People are very superstitious and bring folklore into their daily life, but with regards to Geoff, they were just not interested at all. So I'd contacted the local radio station to say that we were over here if any anybody wanna do an interview, and the the episode didn't air. And I thought, oh, it's gonna air when we've gone home, which is a real shame because it's great to interview people face to

AP Strange: 28:57

face. Right.

Gayle Fidler: 28:59

And we decided to stay for an extra couple of days just because we loved the island so much. So we'd gone to the pub one day, and I was just kind of looking through social media. And I saw this post to say that Simon Pegg was making a film about Jeff the talking mongoose, and I was like, oh my god. This is so weird because Simon Pegg is quite a well known actor, and this is gonna be quite a big movie. I was really excited about it.

Gayle Fidler: 29:27

So I was like, that's a bit weird when that's happening while we're over here looking for Jeff. And up until this point, none of our normal family and friends had heard about him. And then funnily enough, the journalist from the radio station got in touch with me. Immediately the news had broken and said, Oh, we're gonna air that interview tomorrow, which was great. Nobody came forward though to talk to us, unfortunately.

Gayle Fidler: 29:49

But it was still a good interview. That was the first year. The second year, the day that we left the island after our second visit, the trailer for the film, which is Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, for anybody that has watched it. It's quite good film worth watching. So the trailer was released that day, and then the fourth year, so last year 2025, Richard and Jackie who are part of our team had been asked to go on a podcast before we were going out to the Isle Of Man about something completely different, nothing to do with Geoff at all.

Gayle Fidler: 30:33

So they went and they did an interview for this podcast, and afterwards they got on with the guys that were doing the podcast and then they decided to go for lunch together. And it turns out that one of the guys that was interviewing them from the podcast was Tim Downey who plays Jim Irving in the film Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.

AP Strange: 30:52

Oh, okay.

Gayle Fidler: 30:53

So they were like, this is a bit strange. They somehow got talking about Jeff and the film, and Tim Downey and his colleague Justin Chubb came to see Alan Mann with us last year. So we ended up with Jim Irving, essentially, joining us on the trip. So it was very strange. A Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 31:15

Lot of strange

AP Strange: 31:18

Did you have a seance with Tim Downey as well?

Gayle Fidler: 31:20

We did. We did. When we were over there, we stayed at this house called Aerie Cushlin, which is just a couple of miles from the Dawlish Cashion site. It's a very, very remote farmhouse. You can rent it as a holiday rental and it's absolutely beautiful, but it is literally in the middle of nowhere.

Gayle Fidler: 31:40

You have to go down a farm track through a number of locked gates to get to it, and it's got its own kind of superstition and folklore attached to the house and the land around that anyway. Geoff didn't like Aerie Cushlin at all. He told Jim he was scared of it. He called it the land of the mist. He said it was gonna where he was gonna go when he died, and it was said that local people wouldn't set foot there after night.

Gayle Fidler: 32:06

But we stay there every year and we absolutely love it, and it's a really nice house. It's just really cozy and beautifully decorated. But anyway, Tim and Justin came back to Aerie Cushland with us, and we did a Jeff's seance with Tim as Jim. We kind of just did it initially as a bit of fun really. The stuff that came through was just you could say it was gibberish, and it probably was gibberish, but we did get the words Jeff and Tim and Jim.

Gayle Fidler: 32:38

Yeah. It was a it was an interesting night. Yeah. Jeff himself didn't he didn't turn up, or maybe he did, but we didn't actually see him.

AP Strange: 32:49

Well, he was afraid of the place, but if he did die, then he would probably be there. Right? So that's more evidence for him being alive. Yeah. Whatever that means.

Gayle Fidler: 33:02

We've left him biscuits out every time we've been there, but he's not come for his biscuits yet. So but we'll try again You this never know. You never know.

AP Strange: 33:10

Well, that was kind of the funny thing about Dorlosh Cashin. And like, he would just leave for a month at a time. And Sometimes conveniently when investigators were showing up, it's like, Jeff's out in town somewhere. I'm not sure where he is. I'm sure he'll be back.

Gayle Fidler: 33:26

Yeah, he didn't like it. He didn't like people investigating him. He especially didn't like Harry Price. He would call people Harry Price is the man that puts the kibosh on the spirits, and he has his doubting cap on. So, yeah, he he didn't like being investigated.

Gayle Fidler: 33:44

So it's probably why he hides when we go and look for him. Right. Yeah.

AP Strange: 33:51

That was like the nature of the whole phenomenon though, was trying to look directly at it and figure it out and go hunting for it and it'll hide from you. You know?

Gayle Fidler: 34:00

Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think kind of the the thing about Jeff is that even though he disappeared or he vanished, as he like to say, he's still around because he's led us on this amazing adventure. I've met some fantastic people because of Jeff. You know, well, I wouldn't be here talking to you, you know?

Gayle Fidler: 34:20

Right. And yeah, he's so he's kind of he lives on, really. It's where he's taking us next.

AP Strange: 34:28

He lives on in his own way and he's always causing trouble. Absolutely. I have something pulled up here just because I found this just kind of looking at old newspaper clippings and I did a keyword search for Jeff to see what comes up. And this is like long after the events, I think, let's see, I I guess in the forties, oh no it's 1936 so it's not that far off, but there was a whole lawsuit with and trouble with the BBC because RS Lambert was suing somebody who called him mad for having investigated the or written the book.

Gayle Fidler: 35:09

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think I think there was another lawsuit as well. I can't remember who. I think there was another slander case.

Gayle Fidler: 35:18

But Geoff actually ended up getting mentioned in a government level because of this lawsuit. So he's of been there in our culture on some level and just causing trouble and mischief, and continues to do so. I think that's why people love him so much. And I've never come across another entity that brings so much kind of people have this passion for him and they just love him. They're just yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 35:47

He's he's definitely unique and one of a kind.

AP Strange: 35:50

Yeah. He he seems to typify, like I said, so much about the phenomena that is fascinating, funny, engaging, absurd, all these aspects that that a lot of

Gayle Fidler: 36:03

us can get very excited about. Absolutely. Absolutely.

AP Strange: 36:07

Which is naturally gonna be troublesome, especially to the doubters and, you know

Gayle Fidler: 36:14

Yeah.

AP Strange: 36:17

So what do you think Jeff does want? Because I mean, you had said before we started recording, perhaps he doesn't wanna be decoded. What what do you suppose he did want or does want? Because his motivations don't seem to go far beyond a little bit of grub here and then or some music to be played.

Gayle Fidler: 36:37

I think, in all honesty, I think he probably just wanted to be part of the family. When you read what Jim said about him, he just wanted to sing and dance and eat his food and talk to the family. Yeah. Just have that kind of relationship with them probably. He's quite simple in what he wanted really.

Gayle Fidler: 36:58

He didn't seem to want a lot. And he was actually, he was offered, you know, money to kind of expose himself and be seen. I think there was an American circus that had offered Jim a ridiculous amount of money if Jeff would join the circus and go to America, and James and Jeff were having none of it. Yeah, he just wanted to be part of the family.

AP Strange: 37:23

Yeah, don't know, that is funny because it's like there have been plenty of cases where phenomena expected to show up on demand for the investigator, and that's just not how any of this works. And out of necessity, sometimes people feel like they need to hoax it. And then it just gets considered a hoax overall, you know?

Gayle Fidler: 37:48

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's potentially, there is stuff that they did hoax when you look at some of the photographs. I mean, they probably are like a a fur stall or something. But then it's kind of, like you say, is it out of necessity? That hoax, however much of it was hoaxed, it doesn't really matter now because so much of it is, you know, that hoax has led to so many other things.

AP Strange: 38:13

Yeah. Well, is an interesting point too, just because in terms of hoaxing, as far as the voice goes, it's commonly thought that Voivrey was a ventriloquist, and that was one sticking point in the movie is with me, I'm like, oh, they're going that way with it, where she fully admits to being able to throw her voice, and she's I mean, Price in his book goes into a long description of what ventriloquism actually is and how it's not physically possible to throw one's voice. What you're actually doing is distracting attention away from where the sound originates and making people believe that the dummy that you're controlling is the one from whom it's coming. That was one sticking point I had with the movie. The movie was entertaining and fun to watch.

AP Strange: 39:08

Listeners, if you haven't seen it, it's still fun. But it kind of bugged me because I'm just like, oh, we're going through in the whole ventriloquist thing, So

Gayle Fidler: 39:18

Yeah. Yeah. And that's an interesting point. And there was a number of witnesses who heard Jeff in the room with them when Vori was outside feeding the chickens and could be seen through the window feeding the chickens. So, yeah, I I don't buy that whole ventral ventral can't fit.

Gayle Fidler: 39:37

Sprowing the voice thing. Edit that bit out. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, the movie did go down that a little bit.

Gayle Fidler: 39:47

But like I say to people, because there's quite a few people that have said, oh, the movie wasn't great, and they kind of detracted from the storyline. But like I said, it's not a documentary. Just a nice, me, it's just a nice feel good movie. I think Jeff potentially was too complex a storyline to use, and they should maybe look at something else. But in essence, it was a a nice kind of nice film.

Gayle Fidler: 40:15

Makes you feel happy.

AP Strange: 40:17

Yeah. Well, an anime in Simon Pegg's entertaining. It's kind of interesting to see him do an accent.

Gayle Fidler: 40:22

There's some dubious accents. Some of the accents are a bit

AP Strange: 40:25

but Well, Christopher Lloyd plays Harry Price and doesn't even attempt a British accent, which I think is very funny. Yeah. He's just Christopher Lloyd. But

Gayle Fidler: 40:38

Yeah. There's some some interesting bits there, and some people have got quite cross about it, but

AP Strange: 40:45

Yeah. Well, in order to capture adequately what the Jeff case would have been like or how why we all love it so much. I think they would have either had to amp up the comedy substantially and have it be a lot more madcap or they would have had to get really weird with it to the point where it would be surreal and would lose a lot of audiences. So they kinda went down the middle and made up their own story kind of involving some of the characters that we know, you know? And changing Yeah, them a little to just for the story.

AP Strange: 41:19

They added a dog for some reason. They added a character that I don't think exists in real life. The guy that was like worked for Jim on the farm.

Gayle Fidler: 41:29

Yeah. Yeah. I think it would be interesting to have watched it without the background knowledge of the case just to see how easy it was to follow. Because I imagine it probably wasn't very easy to follow, to be fair, if you didn't know anything about Jeff. But, yeah.

AP Strange: 41:45

Yeah. I thought it was odd that they added an extra dog, but I did like the joke about how both dogs had the same name. Because that was the kind of quirky humor that I think you would need to do a lot of if you were really gonna capture it. But yeah, was entertaining enough. The acting, the actors that are in it are good.

AP Strange: 42:09

It's unfortunate that Neil Gaiman does the voice of Jeff. Yeah. In light of recent revelations. But when it comes to, it is interesting that he was cast that way just because of his book of American Gods and our discussion about belief in Chuck not liking people that didn't believe in him or unbelievers, Because the whole idea with American gods was these gods kind of wither and lose power when people stop worshiping them.

Gayle Fidler: 42:41

Yeah. Yeah. It's a shame but interesting choice.

AP Strange: 42:51

Well, what's your thought on that as far as belief goes? Do you think it helps to show up with a full belief in Jeff and let him know if we're going to conjure Jeff, if that were possible, you know.

Gayle Fidler: 43:05

Yeah, I think so because Jeff, there was witness as well. In some of Jim's letters, he'd said that people who didn't believe in Jeff, Jeff would refuse to show up for them.

AP Strange: 43:18

Right.

Gayle Fidler: 43:19

So but Jeff didn't need to prove that he was real to anybody because Jeff knew well, Jeff believed that he was real. So I do think if you went there with your doubting cap on, as Jeff would have said, he won't turn up. But then we've been believing in Jeff for a number of years now, and he hasn't yet shown himself. So But there's still time. There's still time.

AP Strange: 43:40

Yeah. Well, hopefully we'll get there. But so with your background in in folklore, have you looked into a lot of the Manx folklore or and from the isle there?

Gayle Fidler: 43:53

Yeah. So there is so much folklore on the Isle Of Man, and especially around that area where Dolo Chukasham was. It's it's completely rich with it. And the the Manx people, they have this real belief in, we would say the fae, but that you're not allowed to say the the fairy words. They don't like it.

Gayle Fidler: 44:14

They find it very disrespectful. So it's the good people or the little folk. And there is a lot of that belief around that that whole area. And there's lots of stories of people seeing things at night when they've been out. There is a carriage, a phantom carriage that's been seen on the road near Dawlish Cushion.

Gayle Fidler: 44:36

They have a spectral black dog at Peel Castle, the Mothy Doom. Yeah it's just absolutely rich with it and actually I'm just gonna read you this quote that I found. Let me just get it up because I just think it's beautiful. So this is from William Cashion's Manx Folklore from 1912, and it's about Dolby Mountain, and Dolby Mountain is where Darlish Cashion is. And it says, on Dolby Mountain the old Manx people used to put their ears to the earth for the sounds of infinity, to hear the sounds which were murmurs.

Gayle Fidler: 45:11

They thought these sounds came from beings in space, for in their belief, all of space is filled with invisible beings. And I just think that's absolutely beautiful. And it really kind of yeah. It really typifies kind of the the belief that the people have got. And it's so ingrained.

Gayle Fidler: 45:28

When you speak to the Manx people, it is just part of their life. They have the ferry bridge, which I don't know if you've seen pictures online of the ferry bridge on the Isle Of Man. Yeah. So it's it's a bridge on the road, and it's actually got a plaque on it saying it's the ferry bridge. But every year when they have the TT, which is the bike the motorbike race that they have out there, the TT riders will stop and say good morning to the good people or good evening to the good people for luck before and after the race.

Gayle Fidler: 46:00

When buses go over the bridge, they have an announcement to say good morning to the good people. So yeah, it's really just, as I say, part of their everyday life. I just think it's wonderful. It's a really magic liminal place. Yeah,

AP Strange: 46:17

and it seems like a very rarefied folklore on the Isle Of Man. It's a little different. It's a little different flavor than the rest of the Isles, I would think. I think there's a lot of tales of giants and things like that.

Gayle Fidler: 46:35

Yeah, they've got giants, they've got mermaids, they've got Yeah, they have a bit of everything. One dragon apparently. Apparently there's only one dragon. But they've taken So there's Celtic, they've got Vikings, they've got Norse folklore, it's kind of this amalgamation of different kind of people that have lived on the island over the centuries, all intertwined.

AP Strange: 46:59

Oh, yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 47:00

Yeah. It's really interesting.

AP Strange: 47:04

Yeah. Because, well, you mentioned the Viking folklore. This occurred to me while reading about him. I started going on this little squirrely thread because there's a famous sketch of Jeff that to me just looks like a squirrel. I think you probably know the one that I'm talking about.

AP Strange: 47:27

But the ears are kind of really perked up and they look like they're longer and a little hairier and it's got the really bushy tail and it just looks to me like a red squirrel.

Gayle Fidler: 47:36

Does he look like that? Like can you see that? He looks like that. Yeah,

AP Strange: 47:40

yeah And that kind of reminds me of Norse mythology. You have the Ratatoskr, the squirrel that runs up and down the world tree and just kind of like causes trouble between the dragon and the eagle. Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 47:56

That has somebody else has commented on that actually in the past. So yeah, there is that connection there. There are no squirrels on the Isle Of Man. And know one of the things that was put forward when you look at the famous photographs of Jeff, one of the things that was said about him, oh, it's a squirrel. And people have said he looked like a squirrel, his tail kind of over his head, but there are no squirrels.

Gayle Fidler: 48:21

That's not to say that a squirrel hadn't escaped from somewhere and

AP Strange: 48:24

yeah. Have been brought as

Gayle Fidler: 48:25

a pet. Absolutely. Yeah. But there's no native squirrels.

AP Strange: 48:29

Yeah. Well, there weren't native mongooses either, but somebody brought them there.

Gayle Fidler: 48:33

Yeah. That's very true. Oh, yeah. So Aerie Cushlin, where we stay, is the house where the mongooses were released. So in 1912, because there's no natural rabbit predators on the Isle Of Man, in 1912 there was a farmer, Arie Cushlin, who brought a load of mongooses there and released them to keep the rabbit population down, and that is the farm where we stay.

Gayle Fidler: 48:57

So yeah, whether those mongooses or ancestors of those mongooses are still there or not, who knows? But Jenny Randalls, the author, is alleged to have seen one when she was out there, and there was another sighting as well that was reported back to Christopher Joseph of a mongoose. Who knows? I've never seen one.

AP Strange: 49:18

And there was a story like I think in the 50s somebody had shot a creature that they thought might have been Jeff.

Gayle Fidler: 49:23

There was a polecat. This picture of the polecat that was shot and then there is polecats there and we've seen unfortunately one roach killed that looked like it was a polecat as well, so. Alright. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 49:41

Just interesting to think about and also, so that was the place, I guess the guy that brought the mongooses there originally was named Irvine, right?

Gayle Fidler: 49:48

He was, but no relation to Jim.

AP Strange: 49:51

Right. That's

Gayle Fidler: 49:52

all Just a weird coincidence.

AP Strange: 49:55

Yeah. Well, you know how often the How many times can things just be coincidences before they actually mean Yeah, absolutely. It is funny though because it's like Irvine and then Irving. So you're going from moving the e to a g. So there you go, the same same notes and letters that are making up the Jeff name.

Gayle Fidler: 50:18

Yeah. Yeah, I've never thought of that.

AP Strange: 50:24

Well, it seems like you have thought of various novel ways of looking into it because I understand that The Secret Cypher of the has played a bit into your investigations.

Gayle Fidler: 50:36

It has, by accident. Well, I'm gonna say by accident. So I was aware of The Secret Cypher with Youth Nods long before Kind of Hellier. I don't know how I'd come about it, but I've had a copy of the book for a long time. And I kind of used it now and again for various synchronicities, just using it as a kind of a tool just to gauge whether I was on the right lines of something.

Gayle Fidler: 51:02

And there's this really interesting story about Geoff going to this mansion on the Isle Of Man, which is about 20 miles away from Dorle De Casham, and it's called Balamore House, or it was called Balamore House. Geoff decides one day that he's going to go to this mansion. Jim Irving says that he's never been there and Vorrie's never been there. It's not somewhere that they've ever visited. But Jeff takes himself off and he comes home and tells Jim Irving all about this house.

Gayle Fidler: 51:35

He tells them about the people that live there. He describes the dogs that they keep. He describes the fireplace, and just gives lots and lots of details. And Jim goes into loads of detail about this and tells Nandor Fodor about it and is very insistent that Nandor Fodor investigates and verifies the details. So they have a visit to Balamore Mansion and they actually verify I think about 80% of the details that Geoff has said.

Gayle Fidler: 52:05

Much to the of astonishment of the lady that the house at the time, I don't think she was very happy about having an invisible talking mongoose kind of spying on her. And she's quite cold when they visit understandably, I guess. Unfortunately, not long after this visit, she passed away and the house was sold, and it was sold to a guy called Alexander Cannon, who in himself is a really strange person, individual, and he moved in there. So I was doing this research into Alexander Cannon and Balamore Estate, and it was just one particular morning, and I just decided to run a couple of details through the cipher just to see if anything popped up, and I got the same number coming up, 171. And I thought, oh that's interesting.

Gayle Fidler: 52:58

And I'd had this really weird thing that morning because I'd come downstairs into my kitchen and on my kitchen floor there was a plastic blue spaceman. Oh, he's here actually, I've got him. I have no small children. My children are grown up, left home, but there was this blue spaceman on the kitchen floor. I was like, where's that come from?

Gayle Fidler: 53:19

And I happened to put that through the cipher as well and it came out to 171. So I thought this is really weird. And I wrote it all down, I keep a diary and I just decided to kind of look into it a little bit more and just kept getting this hit time after time with various things. And I use it with a lot of the Jeff synchronicities. That's the only number that's kind of come up time and time again.

Gayle Fidler: 53:46

But yeah, it's a line of thought that I don't think anybody else has gone down with this case. It might not lead me anywhere, but I think it's useful. A useful tool to kind of keep you on the synchronistic track really.

AP Strange: 54:01

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking I think you said as much, but I kinda understand how this applies to Greenfield now because you ended up in contact with Greenfield.

Gayle Fidler: 54:11

Yes. Not the

AP Strange: 54:12

risk of exposing something about Greenfield that maybe he doesn't want people to know. I'm not gonna mention why +1 71 is important with him.

Gayle Fidler: 54:19

Yes. I got in touch well, what happened was we'd another investigation that we go on every year is up to Chillingham Castle in Northumberland. I don't know if you've heard of Chillingham Castle. It's listed as one of the most haunted castles in England, but there's lots of haunted castles in England. It's a really interesting place and you can stay there.

Gayle Fidler: 54:44

So every year for the past quite a number of years, a group of friends have gone there. Last year when we came back, randomly Alan Greenfield started putting posts on social media about Chillingham Castle and related to Chillingham Castle. And I was like, this is really strange. Why has he started doing this when we've just got back from this place? And I just thought, need to get in touch with him.

Gayle Fidler: 55:10

It just popped into my head. I really need to speak to him about that and the Geoff case. And I did find a +1 connection, as you say. So yeah, I wrote to Alan and just thought, well, I didn't expect to get a response. And he got back to me and sent me an absolutely lovely email.

Gayle Fidler: 55:28

So, yeah, he's in

AP Strange: 55:30

Yeah. Because he had been, I guess, looking into the Isle Of Man. Had been on his radar for as a spot of

Gayle Fidler: 55:37

It had been on his radar, he said, as a, I mean, as a liminal place, high strangeness, there are a number of disused mines there that I don't think anybody's investigated. And then to be fair, I don't know whether it'd be safe to do so anyway. But he definitely mentions them as being an area of interest, and obviously because of the folklore connections as well, he's interested in it.

AP Strange: 56:00

Yeah. And I mean, there are interesting personality types. You had mentioned Cannon who I'm curious to know more about because I don't know that much about him. But also, Doerlish Cache and a lot of other properties there were owned by this kind of eccentric, they called them the French miser Pierre Baume.

Gayle Fidler: 56:20

Yes. He's a really strange guy, and I need to do some more digging on him. He has a connection with Cannon as well. So Pierre Baum owned land at Cawley Hatch Before Cannon or before Cannon had come to the Isle Of Man, he was a doctor at Corny Hatch. So there's all this really weird woven interconnections.

Gayle Fidler: 56:47

There's some strange stuff that you can find about Pierre Baum and about his beliefs and some information, because I've not looked into him in any depth, which I need to do, it's on my list, but he's definitely kind of one to look into. He seems like a very strange guy. And the island.

AP Strange: 57:07

He seems like there's a lot of conflicting opinions about him, so it would be somebody you'd really have to kind of pull threads to try to get to the heart of, you know? Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 57:15

Yeah. Absolutely. Because when he passed, he did leave quite a lot of money to various charities on the island as well. So like you said, there's a lot of conflicting opinions about him. So, yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 57:27

He's one to still do some research on.

AP Strange: 57:30

Yeah. Now as far as Canon goes, did he have the same kind of legacy of of controversy with people not being able to agree on? Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 57:40

Yeah. So Canon is really controversial, understandably. He wasn't a nice guy by all accounts. He was a medical physician. He was from Leeds in England, and then he went to work in China.

Gayle Fidler: 57:55

When he came back from China his wife divorced him for abuse, which should have finished his career, but unfortunately it didn't. He went on to become a very successful physician. As I said, he worked at Corley Hatch Hospital for a time. He set up a clinic on Harley Street and had access to the upper class who we would treat with some interesting treatments. He used hypnosis, hypnotherapy in his treatments.

Gayle Fidler: 58:29

He used electricity in his treatments. He wrote a book called The Invisible Influence, which was kind of one of the early self help books before self help And books were an actual when the managers at Corny Hatch found out about him releasing this book, he was sacked. They didn't think it was appropriate. He was treating royalty, so he was treating what was Prince Edward's at the time as one of his clients. And he had some very dubious right wing connections as well and clientele and ended up moving to the Isle Of Man and opening this clinic where he was possibly he was a German spy.

Gayle Fidler: 59:15

We don't know for definite, but he had some very, as I say, right wing connections going off. He was a a person of interest, m I five, watching him and have files on him. Yeah. The whole thing's just very strange.

AP Strange: 59:35

Well, mean, and it seemed like the Isle Of Man for some people was a place to lay low if because you weren't on the British Mainland. You know?

Gayle Fidler: 59:44

Yeah. And it seems like around that time in the thirties and forties, there was quite a few of that sort of character that were either sent over there in exile by the government or just went over there and made it their home unfortunately. So it does seem to attract those sort of people at that time period anyway.

AP Strange: 01:00:06

So during the time where he was thought to be a spy, what time period are we talking about? Is this around World Just War

Gayle Fidler: 01:00:16

before the Second World War. He went over there, I think, '40. So, yeah, it was just before. So it's just slightly after the Jeff was sort of up until about 38, '39, Jeff had started to disappear for longer, longer periods of time. But he was around that time he moved there.

AP Strange: 01:00:35

Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:00:37

Yeah and Jim died in 1945 so there is a little bit of an overlap between them, between the cases.

AP Strange: 01:00:47

I was just curious if there was any Crowley connection there since there's all this stuff about Crowley There is. With MI5 and yeah, there is, Yes.

Gayle Fidler: 01:00:56

So, Alexander Cannon was Crowley's second wife's doctor at Cawley Hatch. She was a patient at Cawley Hatch. So Cannon and Crowley did know each other. There's a great newspaper article that I've got a copy of somewhere where Cannon is doing, I think it's in London, and Cannon's doing a stage show. Crowley's in the audience, and the journalist comments that Crowley of heckles Cannon and says that, you know, questions his practices and things.

Gayle Fidler: 01:01:29

So I don't think they got on very well, to be fair.

AP Strange: 01:01:32

Oh, okay.

Gayle Fidler: 01:01:33

Crowley Crowley called him out on a number of occasions by the sounds of it.

AP Strange: 01:01:37

Oh.

Gayle Fidler: 01:01:37

They they just definitely knew each other.

AP Strange: 01:01:40

Right. Yeah. Know. Yeah. I was just curious about that just because there are the rumors and sometimes, you know, people consider it fact that Crowley was working on behalf of the British government in regards to espionage and sussing out spies and things like that.

Gayle Fidler: 01:01:59

Yeah. I found no Crowley Isle Of Man connections at the minute. If there is any, I'd love to find them, but I haven't. But as I say, definitely new canon.

AP Strange: 01:02:09

Right right interesting yeah well I'm you know sometimes I think there tends to be like ways for people to think of of any particular case and phenomena and entity within within the broad scope of Fortiana and wanna apply a label to it. Right? And with Jeff, I'm kind of like leaning towards maybe he was a conjured entity of some kind. Do you think that's possible? I mean, it's just we don't know enough about Jim, which is unfortunate, but he could possibly have When you talk about somebody that sells pianos for a living, he probably was dealing with a lot of wealthy people who may have had occult connections and may have been, I mean the arts in London in the early part of the twentieth century had a lot of overlap with like the Golden Dawn and things like that.

AP Strange: 01:03:11

You know?

Gayle Fidler: 01:03:11

Absolutely. And I I really wish that we knew more about Jim's background. I wish something would turn up just to kind of get that before he went to the Isle Of Man because I think it would I think Jim is the key to it. I really do. But I just can't find any evidence of it, unfortunately.

Gayle Fidler: 01:03:31

And I've kind of, like, played around with lots of different thoughts about Jeff and Jim, even down to sort of some weird remote viewing experiment. You know? Yeah. But, yeah, I just I really don't know. And I guess unless we find some sort of signed documentation from Jim, we're never gonna know.

Gayle Fidler: 01:03:51

But I don't know. Unfortunate. It is. It's a mystery. But I yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:03:58

Like I say, Jim's definitely the yeah. Some sort of key.

AP Strange: 01:04:04

Yeah. Just because I don't know I've heard Jeff described as possibly a poltergeist like we were saying some kind of like fairy type entity or some kind of ghost or some kind of weird creature, and I'm like, at a certain point it's just like, well, he's a talking mongoose. That's what he is. Isn't that enough?

Gayle Fidler: 01:04:28

Absolutely. And I think I've played with all of those ideas in the past, know. Originally it was always kind of the poltergeist thing like you said because that's the most common one I guess. And then I went down the fairy route and Geoff has got a lot of fairy type behaviours. There's a lot of fairy connections there.

Gayle Fidler: 01:04:51

But like you said, I don't even know what those things are. So I don't know what a poltergeist is. I don't know what a fairy is. Talking mongoose, I don't know. Jeff himself didn't well, whether he knew what he was or he didn't wanna say what he was, he was a ghost and he wasn't a ghost.

Gayle Fidler: 01:05:10

He was dead, he was alive.

AP Strange: 01:05:13

Yeah. Well, the fact that he has a birthday too is interesting to me. Yes.

Gayle Fidler: 01:05:22

Yes. He has, it's the 06/07/1852, he says was his birthday.

AP Strange: 01:05:28

Yeah. Near Delhi in India.

Gayle Fidler: 01:05:29

Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:05:30

Yeah. Which means he would have been in his eighties during the Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:05:36

Well, he said that he'd been at Dawlish Kashan for at least twenty years before 1931, so he told Jim that he'd been around for at least twenty years prior to that.

AP Strange: 01:05:46

Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:05:46

So yeah. And there is tales when you read, look into the folklore, is tales of, you could call it like poltergeist activity at the house prior to the Irvings moving in. So they had some workmen staying there and they heard noises in the night and they refused to stay there. There's a couple of burials up around that area. There was another house nearby that had what was described as poltergeist activity.

Gayle Fidler: 01:06:17

And I think there's at least two accounts where people have said, oh yeah, strange things happened in that house before the Irvings moved in, but they said, oh it wasn't Jeff, was something else. So, yeah, there was something around there for a long time prior the Irvings discovering him.

AP Strange: 01:06:39

Interesting. Well, I mean, I got on a little sidetracked at the risk of mentioning something that I don't know what I'm talking about on the show. I didn't have time to dig into it too deeply, but I came across reference to somebody having discovered a human skeleton somewhere near or on Valdeo Mountain that had Viking remains, guess. It was like a broadsword and an axe and other things, and they just kind of covered it back up.

Gayle Fidler: 01:07:08

I know there's a Viking burial not too far, or allegedly a Viking burial not too far, and there was also an urn with some ashes in it that was found that was put when they'd found the urn, or the guy that had found the urn allegedly, felt something push him, and so he buried it straight away. But I'm not sure about the axe and that, but I don't know what was found in the burial. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:07:33

Oh, wow. Okay.

Gayle Fidler: 01:07:35

I'll have to look into that one.

AP Strange: 01:07:37

Yeah, I mean, when you look at the cumulative history and the folklore and all the various kinds of people that have moved and lived on the Isle Of Man over the years and take into account the fact that eccentrics and rich people will sometimes go there to hide almost, know, and then the variety of different kinds of phenomena. I wonder if, you know, I've been thinking lately that there are, every case has its own individual cause that these broad categories only kind of help to sketch out but don't describe completely. Like I feel like, especially with extraordinary ones like this, it may be just be an amalgam of the different forces at play. Just all those variables came together in just such a way to create eighth wonder of the world that is Jeff.

Gayle Fidler: 01:08:36

And you wrote an article about Sam, sundown clown. And when you made reference to the Isle of Wight festival, and I was reading that and I was like, oh, that's really interesting because I'd never thought about that before about kind of that having an influence on the the Sam case. So maybe you've you've got something there about the the Isle Of Man. Like you say, it's this liminal place with these strange people going backwards and forwards.

AP Strange: 01:09:00

Yeah. Because I mean, with the Viking burial and like I said with the Ratatoskr thing and having him look sort of squirrel like and the presence of mongooses and then you do have Voiry, it's a pre adolescent girl, but then you have this mysterious Jim with his piano salesman background, but other than that we don't know much. It's like all of these things go together to just create an entity that will live a very short and colorful life in the public imagination and then carry on in some way.

Gayle Fidler: 01:09:35

He's an absolute trickster character. No doubt about it. He is absolutely a trickster archetype, whatever he is. So.

AP Strange: 01:09:47

Well, I mean and then there's like eerie aspects to it too. Because like one of the things in the movie that happens is he recites a poem that's by Yates and then it's revealed that when he recited the poem, Yates hadn't yet published it. So there's the, you know, he had predicted it, but that didn't happen in real life, like that whole thing was invented. But it is interesting when you, like, consider things like the Jeff activity kind of tapered off right before World War II started, and one of the many quotes that people pull from him is, I'll split the atom.

Gayle Fidler: 01:10:27

That is one of the things that I've picked up on. It's a really interesting quote and it just came out of nowhere. And then obviously we've got that happening. There's definitely something to unpack with that. Don't know what, there is.

AP Strange: 01:10:49

Yeah, well it means something I would think. That's a very random non sequitur. Like, don't just hang out with friends and talking about, like, the football game last night and then just throw in, oh, by the way, I'm gonna split the atom. Anyway, what do you like for Saturday?

Gayle Fidler: 01:11:11

Yeah, that one's always sat with me. I've always thought that's it. Yeah, it needs unpicking.

AP Strange: 01:11:17

Yeah, I mean especially the fact that I mean because I think sometimes people pointed out and they're like well was that even in the public imagination back then? That's like yeah, I mean, people since the QREs knew about atoms and physics and the idea theoretically that you could split the atom, know, like that's not just because it was before the atom bomb or nuclear power doesn't mean that people didn't know about it, but it is a strange thing for an eight year old mongoose to bring up.

Gayle Fidler: 01:11:48

But then Jim was very well read, so he could have been reading. We just don't know. So he could have been having that conversation with Jim or it could be something that Jim had been reading and Jeff's picked up on. But

AP Strange: 01:12:03

Yeah. Yeah. Jeff seemed to like to read over Jim's shoulder, which people can take any way they want. I think people tend to take that to mean that, you know, whatever voices were supplied by Jim's knowledge, that Jeff didn't seem to know anything that Jim didn't already know. You

Gayle Fidler: 01:12:21

know? Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:12:24

So, but yeah, I mean, Jim was already seemed to keep up with the news and science and all of that, so.

Gayle Fidler: 01:12:35

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:12:40

Well, let's see. Do you have any favorite stories of the Isle Of Man from your travels there that we didn't cover already?

Gayle Fidler: 01:12:51

I'm just trying to think.

AP Strange: 01:12:54

Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:12:55

Not really. I think we've kind of pretty much covered all the the stories and has kind of had a little bit of a dig into the folklore. Yeah. As I say, it's just this really magical place for anybody that hasn't ever visited. And if you're interested in folklore, just go.

Gayle Fidler: 01:13:18

It's like, I can't. It's really difficult to describe, but it's so magical. And it's it's definitely got this otherworldly feel quality about it.

AP Strange: 01:13:29

Yeah. Well, and as I said before, can tell from your photos, the photos you include in your your articles about it, and especially the fog. Like, the fog is crazy there.

Gayle Fidler: 01:13:38

Yeah. The mist just rolls in. You'll wake up. Some mornings, you'll wake up and you can see Ireland from your bedroom window, and then the next morning you'll wake up and the whole place is just covered in mist. But that is one of the kind of the folkloric things about the Isle Of Man is Mananan who was know king of the fae would shroud the island in the mist to hide it from invaders.

Gayle Fidler: 01:14:02

So they call it Mananan's cloak and it's I've never seen anything like it. It's absolutely it's like mind blowing when you see it just cover coming in over the mountains and covering the trees.

AP Strange: 01:14:15

Well maybe that's why Jeff was afraid of the land of the mists because if he's part of this kingdom or subject to it in some way, maybe he's doing stuff he shouldn't be doing.

Gayle Fidler: 01:14:30

Maybe. He's gonna get called back.

AP Strange: 01:14:34

Right. Yeah. Well, wherever Jeff is now, I hope he's doing well. That's all I can say. He seems seems like a lovely sort.

Gayle Fidler: 01:14:48

He does. He does. He's just we're just so affectionate about him. He's like a little extension of our team and we do talk to him and of write him little notes and leave little offerings out for him. Yeah,

AP Strange: 01:15:03

and play some of the songs he likes you know?

Gayle Fidler: 01:15:05

Yeah. Yeah. We did that actually once. We took a tape recorder up to Daulish Cashion and played some music for him and Yeah. Whether he was listening or not, I don't know.

AP Strange: 01:15:21

Shit, I was gonna say something, lost it. Oh no, think it was something good too, oh no. Oh, yeah, one further synchronicity is that I guess there was some kind of zoo on the Isle Of Man and they had a mongoose that escaped in recent years too.

Gayle Fidler: 01:15:42

Yeah. That was this year. Last year, it was not long after we'd got back actually. And we'd been to see photographs of that mongoose somewhere. But yeah, it escaped from the zoo and they named it Jeff.

Gayle Fidler: 01:15:55

And I think they found it in a brewery, if I remember correctly, a few days later. And it had gone a long way. It had travelled this huge distance. So, yeah, that was really funny. Bless him.

AP Strange: 01:16:10

So Jeff went to get himself a pint.

Gayle Fidler: 01:16:12

Yeah. Jeff went for a beer. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:16:18

Excellent. Well, Jeff lives.

Gayle Fidler: 01:16:20

He does.

AP Strange: 01:16:20

As far as I'm concerned, he does,

Gayle Fidler: 01:16:22

so yeah. Absolutely.

AP Strange: 01:16:26

Alright. Well, do you have future plans in the works or you got anything that you're working on now that you're gonna get into in the near future?

Gayle Fidler: 01:16:35

Just getting back to back there. Right? Yeah. We're we're going back at the April and kind of we come back every year with all these plans that, right, we're gonna go away and investigate this and this and this, and then we just don't do as much as we should. So I'm desperately kind of reading stuff and just pulling all the stuff about Alexander Cannon because I feel like I'm missing something there together.

Gayle Fidler: 01:17:02

And then going back, as I say, in April, we've kind of stopped making plans for what we do when we get over there because we just find that it never works out how we intend it to anyway, and we just kind of go with it and whatever happens happens. Whoever we meet, we meet. And we have some crazy adventures and yeah. We'll be back there in April. It's very exciting.

Gayle Fidler: 01:17:26

They have a big fire festival for Beltane that we went to last year and they're very the Manx people are really, really friendly, and they encourage visitors to take part in the festival and carry fire. It's on the beach in Peel, and it's it's wonderful. So we'll be taking part in that again. It's a lot of fun.

AP Strange: 01:17:42

No. It sounds great. Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:17:44

It is. Fantastic.

AP Strange: 01:17:46

Yeah. Yeah. And do you have any non Jeff related stuff coming up? Any fiction or or writings for Spooky Isles or anything like that?

Gayle Fidler: 01:17:57

I'm really I'm a really lazy writer, and I really need to get back into it and do something, But I'm just like, yeah, probably loads of stuff that I should be writing, and I'm not actually doing anything. So I don't have any plans at the moment. I don't tend to plan things. Things will just pop into my head, I'll go, oh, that's really interesting. I should probably look into that and write about it, and then do an article.

Gayle Fidler: 01:18:24

Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:18:24

Yeah. I'm very similar, so I understand. Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:18:28

I think I have to I I don't I don't ever wanna see writing as a chore. So it's gotta be something that just kind of an idea just comes, and then I have to go with it rather than if I sit down at the laptop and go, I'm gonna write this today. I know that I won't do it. Or if I do do it, won't enjoy it. So there's no point, is there?

AP Strange: 01:18:47

Yeah. Yeah. You don't want it to be a slog. It's nice when it's just inspiration hits you and you can just off to the races, you know?

Gayle Fidler: 01:18:54

Yeah. A 100%. I keep saying, oh, I'd love to just be a writer for the rest of my life and get paid to do it, but I probably wouldn't make any money at all because I wouldn't do anything. I'd just sit there and do nothing. Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:19:07

Right. We should see what happens. We're going up to Chillingham Castle in a few weeks' just have a few nights there to see what happens because that's one of our other favorite places. So something might, you know, crop up on our investigations of Northumberland, which is another area that Alan Greenfield mentioned actually, Northumberland for its strange liminal place. We'll see what happens when we're up there.

AP Strange: 01:19:32

Yeah. I'd like to check that out. I mean, I'd like to check out everywhere in England because every time I hear about stuff, just wanna I I would go see it.

Gayle Fidler: 01:19:41

Yeah. You need to come over. And, yeah, I'm going to Pulaskin House in April for their gala opening. I've supported the foundation for years. So we got tickets to go to that, which I'm very excited about.

Gayle Fidler: 01:19:59

Be a lovely weekend.

AP Strange: 01:20:02

May see one of my former guests there. Oh. Caitlin Fitzgerald is an artist I had on a while ago. She designed a light fixture, kind of like a leaded glass kind of window for the restoration, and I think she's gonna be there for the opening. She works for their social media team too.

Gayle Fidler: 01:20:24

Wow. Oh, that's brilliant. I'm very excited about it. I've never been to the house, and I've always just felt this kind of weird, I don't know you're saying maybe attachment to it, and when it burnt down the first time I was absolutely devastated and then obviously the second time. So I was so glad when it was bought and the foundation was set up.

Gayle Fidler: 01:20:46

So yeah, I'm really excited to go and see what they've done with it and just spend time at Loch Ness because it's somewhere that I've never actually been to the Loch. So I'm going to look for Nessie while I'm there. Be that pops up.

AP Strange: 01:21:00

Maybe that's where Jeff would, you know? Maybe. Know, two birds with one stone in

Gayle Fidler: 01:21:04

there, and

AP Strange: 01:21:04

you'll see him swimming around in the loft.

Gayle Fidler: 01:21:07

Together, yeah. Can you imagine? Like Nessie and Jeff, and I'll, you know, I'll see them, and then nobody would believe me, would they? It'd be like, yeah, whatever.

AP Strange: 01:21:15

Yeah.

Gayle Fidler: 01:21:16

What have you been drinking?

AP Strange: 01:21:18

I'll believe you. You can tell me.

Gayle Fidler: 01:21:22

I keep saying this, you know, if we ever do actually see Jeff, nobody's gonna believe us.

AP Strange: 01:21:27

Right. Yeah. Well, wonderful. This has been an absolute blast. Thank you so much for coming on, Gail, and taking your time to sit down and talk with me about this stuff.

Gayle Fidler: 01:21:40

Yeah. Thank you.

AP Strange: 01:21:42

Alright. We'll talk soon. Cool.

Gayle Fidler: 01:21:43

Yeah. Thank you very much. Yep. Bye.