The legend is a romance as well as a curse story. Sir Richard sails from Rocquaine for Normandy after the rebellion, is captured by Moorish pirates and taken to Barbary, where the governor's wife has him guard her tower. There he meets Adèle, daughter of his old neighbour Ranulph, also a captive. With her jewels he bribes their jailers and gets her, himself and her nurse Alice away to France. Adèle marries a Norman knight, Hugh d'Estaile. But "the spirits of the Cromlech were not yet appeased". Richard never shook off his brooding and his nightmares, built two churches in Normandy for his soul's deliverance, and died "a wretched and broken-down man".
Tradition also held that the house had been a convent, and MacCulloch notes it was the only site in Guernsey besides the Franciscan friary that tradition pointed to as a religious house. After the nuns left, the house passed through many hands and "for many years it never brought good fortune to its possessors". The real house dates from around the early sixteenth century. It belonged to a family named Henry under Henry VIII and passed to the Le Marchants, bought by Joshua Le Marchant in 1674.
The same stretch of road, the Mont au Deval between La Haye du Puits and St George, was haunted by a headless funeral, though MacCulloch said neither house claimed it. La Haye du Puits is a private house.
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