Gorey Pier is a row of tall old houses along the harbour wall at the foot of Mont Orgueil, the medieval castle that dominates the east coast of Jersey. In 1948 one of them, No. 7, was bought by Anna Paine, wife of the artist and designer Charles Paine.
Paine had made his name in London between the wars. Born in 1895, he designed 31 posters for the London Underground in the 1920s and worked as an illustrator and teacher. He and Anna moved to Jersey after the Second World War and he lived there until his death in 1967, moving from Gorey Pier to a cottage in 1962.
The Charles Paine A.R.C.A. blog, a biographical site about the artist, tells what happened at No. 7. One night Paine was smoking by his bedroom window when he became aware of a figure standing just inside the door: a crusader in chain mail. It went out sideways. Paine, being an artist, drew it, but the sketch has since disappeared. On another occasion he followed the grey shape of a man down the stairs into the sitting room, where it vanished.
The house was busy in other ways too. The blog records a door banging at night, footsteps, smells of burning and of cooking, and one night Paine's room filling with blue light. Neighbours heard noises from the house when it was empty, and a friend who came to stay asked, unprompted, whether there was a ghost.
There is no way now to check any of this, and the account comes to us through a family-oriented biography rather than a contemporary record. But it has a named witness, a known address, a plausible date range (1948 to 1962) and a setting right under a castle with eight centuries of soldiers in it. That is more than most castle-ghost stories can manage.
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