The Jersey giant cabbage, or long-stemmed cabbage, grew on stalks taller than a man, and islanders used the dried stems as walking sticks. It is an odd plant, and it features in one of the oddest ghost stories on the island.
Dr Symons, collecting folklore in the early twentieth century, was told of a house near Noirmont, the headland south-west of St Aubin, where a spectre could be seen. It was a tiny man, hanging from one of those tall cabbage stalks. The suggestion made to Symons was that this was one of 'les petits faitiaux', the little fairies of Jersey.
Francesca Bihet, who summarises the note in her chapter on Channel Island fairies, connects it with a Guernsey legend. There, the fairies once ruled L'Ancresse Common until witches invaded their happy haunts. In despair the fairies drank from a fountain of forgetfulness, and when, being fairies, it failed to work on them, they hanged themselves with blades of grass on a small dolmen known as Le Gibet des Faies, the Fairies' Gibbet, and so the fairy race ended. The image of a hanged fairy seems to have been shared between the islands.
We know nothing else: not the house, not who saw the figure, not when. It is recorded here as a single, very strange report.
Comments