On the bare south-western tip of Guernsey, looking out to the Hanois reef and its lighthouse, the watch house stood alone on the cliff. It had been built as a watch station and navigation mark, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was half derelict and a well-known sight. Local people said lights moved in it at night and that noises came from inside when no one should be there. In the novel, Hugo gives it the full treatment, a house of visions that nobody approaches after dark.
Hugo also supplied the explanation himself, and the Priaulx Library agrees: the lights and noises were the work of smugglers using the empty building, who were happy for people to think it haunted. It is the same explanation Carey gave for the phantom funeral of Le Hurel and that local writers give for the werewolf of Le Variouf. The west coast had a strong smuggling trade in tobacco and spirits, and a haunted house on a lonely headland was a useful thing to have.
MacCulloch's "Guernsey Folk Lore" includes an illustration captioned "Victor Hugo's 'Haunted House' at Pleinmont", which shows how far the novel's name had stuck by 1903. The building became a tourist sight in the late nineteenth century and was photographed around 1895. It did not survive the German fortification of Pleinmont. The site is on the open cliffs west of the Table des Pions, and the map point is approximate.
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