This is one of the neatest cause-and-effect ghost stories in the Guernsey collection, and it is only a few lines long. A tall shape haunted one corner of a St Martin's road, a little way from the pond at Sausmarez Manor where the grey figure of Le Grand Matthieu was seen. Nobody explained who it was while it walked. The answer came during road works. Widening the corner and building the Hermitage boundary wall, the men dug into a stone coffin containing unusually large bones.
The bones were carried to the churchyard, the burial service was read, and the figure stopped appearing. Island Families' modern guide retells it in the same terms, as a phantom that "never returned" once the bones were properly buried.
Stone coffins are not common finds in Guernsey, and the size of the bones was clearly part of what people remembered. Whether they were medieval, prehistoric or simply a tall man's, the sources do not say. The corner is not precisely identified in modern street terms, so the map point is approximate, near the Sausmarez end of St Martin's.
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