La Haye du Puits, with its tower, carriage gateway and pepper-pot turrets, looks exactly like the kind of house that should have a ghost, and MacCulloch said so. He also admitted that as far as he knew neither it nor St George next door "claims any special property" in the procession. The funeral belonged to the road between them, a stretch "in some parts thickly overshadowed with trees".
What people met there was a death procession laid out in the proper Guernsey order: parson and clerk leading, the coffin carried by bearers, the pall-bearers, then family and friends. It came down the hill without a sound. Only as it passed did the witness realise that every figure in it was headless. There were those who claimed to have met it, MacCulloch wrote, and it was "looked upon as of evil augury": a death nearby, or in the witness's family, would follow close behind.
Carey noted a very similar Breton belief, in which a man saw a funeral pass and a week later a man from his village was buried the same way. Another phantom funeral is recorded at St Martin's, coming out of an old lane south of Le Hurel, which Carey thought might have been smugglers creeping along with kegs on their shoulders. The Mont au Deval cortège has no such explanation offered. The map point is placed between La Haye du Puits and St George and is approximate.
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