The west coast round L'Erée already had the Catioroc on its doorstep, so the neighbours were ready to believe the worst when the new chapel began to glow at night. From a distance the whole interior seemed lit. Close up, the fishermen could see only a small flame in one corner that seemed to sink into the floor. The respectable gentleman who lived a mile away watched it many times from the rising ground inland and from the shore, always just after dark, whatever the moon or weather. It always vanished when anyone approached.
Some fishermen finally went right up and looked in, and what they described was the Devil himself: sparks from mouth and nostrils, horns and tail, cloven feet hidden in long boots up to the knee, "dancing and leaping with all his might and main". Local explanations were moral ones. Some said the founders had pocketed subscriptions and cheated their workmen. Others said the old man who owned the land had refused to give it to the Methodists, and that his widow, pious late in life after a frivolous youth, gave the site away as soon as he died, along with money that should have gone to his children. His angry ghost was said to haunt the place.
MacCulloch's own theory was smuggling. Coastal men carried tobacco out to English and French smuggling boats, and a chapel made a safer store than a private house. The well story is separate but belongs to the same hamlet. The Lenfestey house at Les Adams was said to have been the home of the priest who served Lihou, and a skeleton was found when a well was dug there. Mrs Savidan told MacCulloch that people drawing water at night heard a groan three times over, as if someone were dying, and that three days after she heard it, two of her Le Cras relatives drowned when their boat capsized. There is a Methodist church at Les Adams today. The sources do not show whether it is the same building as the chapel of the 1870s, so the map point is approximate.
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