La Coupée is a narrow ridge high above the sea, with a sheer drop on both sides, and until German prisoners of war built the present concrete road and rails in 1945, after the Liberation, it was a narrow, crumbling path. People died there. On 4 September 1802 Elie Guille was blown off the eastern side while carrying corn for tithes. The 1875 account in the Guernsey Magazine describes visitors who "have thrown themselves flat on their face, from terror and nervousness on reaching the Coupée", others who lost their nerve halfway and hid behind rocks until someone came to lead them, and others who could only cross with eyes shut, led between two people.
The sounds added to its reputation. At night there were "strange moaning sounds or unearthly shrieks". The later explanation is the sea moving in and out of a cave in the bay below, La Caverne des Lamentes, the Cave of Lamentations, whose name shows that people had long connected the noise with that spot.
The Tchico was not only a Coupée ghost. Cachemaille described it doing regular rounds of certain places and roads, sometimes seen, often invisible, sometimes black and sometimes white. It is the same name, and the same idea, as the Tchi-cô or Bête de la Tour of St Peter Port. Sibyl Hathaway, the Dame of Sark through the Occupation, told how her donkey would not set foot on La Coupée and how islanders said it was because it sensed the Tchico there. Channel Eye's modern list calls it a demonic dog with glowing red eyes and an omen of death. The Coupée is on the public route to Little Sark and can be walked or cycled.
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