Beasts & cryptids

La Rue de la Bête, L'Erée

Also known as: The beast that climbed into the cart

Lane between Claire Mare and Les Rouvets, near L'Erée

Recorded 1896

This is a very short record in "Guernsey Folk Lore", tucked into a footnote listing the spectral beasts of Guernsey's lanes. The west-coast lane is the one with a story attached. In the dark, driving home, M. Vaucourt felt the cart take a weight, turned, and saw the beast in it beside him. The account does not say what shape it had, only that it was "the Bête". His fright killed him within a day.

The lane's reputation outlived him. Miss Le Pelley wrote that in her time people "will not go alone after dark", and that the Vaucourt story was still being told. The same footnote records a second Rue de la Bête at St Andrew's, near the edge of the Fief Rohais, where a prison once stood, "so that it is probably full of associations of crime and malefactors", and "La Bête de la Rue Mase" on the western edge of the town parish.

The lane cannot now be identified with certainty from the description, so the map point is placed at Les Rouvets, one of the two places named as its ends. The confidence tag reflects a single story passed through one family informant.

Country lanes near Les Rouvets and L'Erée are public roads.
Evidence
Single witness account
Access
Open ground
Location
49.456, -2.637 (Parish-level only, treat as an area)

Sources: Edgar MacCulloch, ed. Edith F. Carey, "Guernsey Folk Lore" (1903), Project Gutenberg [public-domain]

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