Before St Helier spread out over it, much of the low ground north of the old town was marsh and meadow. The streets now called Hilgrove Street, Bath Street, Peter Street and Charles Street cover what was once farmland, and one of its fields had a name that caught the attention of local heritage campaigners: La Pièce à la Dame, the lady's field.
In a 2015 piece in the Jersey Evening Post about a heritage lobby's objection to a new flats scheme in the area, the campaigners set out what they knew of the site's history. The field name, they suggested, might mean a female ghost had once haunted it. The ground was wet, and at times it was lit by phosphorescence, what the article calls 'marsh gas, Willo the Wisp or Jack a Lantern'. Seeing the ground glow at night, people at the time reported ghostly apparitions.
The article is fair enough to give the other side. There was, it says, a counter-argument that the area was popular with ladies of the night, and that superstitious stories were a handy way of keeping the innocent at bay. It would not be the only red-light district to acquire a ghost.
There is a third possibility the article does not mention. In Jersey, as Francesca Bihet's study of island fairy lore points out, fairies were sometimes simply called dames, and La Rue à la Dame in St Saviour is thought to have fairy connections. Jersey Post's 2022 ghost-story stamps also included the Belenji, described as a will-o'-the-wisp figure haunting the island's marshlands. Whether the lady of this field was a ghost, a fairy, a light on the marsh or a working woman, the name is all that survives.
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