The story as Rachel du Port heard it from Miss Carey herself begins with a breakfast-table joke. Seeing his sister-in-law come down pale and drawn after her first night, the Seigneur teased her: "Qu'est qu'tu 'as? Non dirait qu'tu 'as veu la grand' garce" ("What's the matter with you? You look as if you'd seen the great girl"). She blamed the crossing and a headache. In fact she had locked her door as usual and woken in the night to find someone drawing aside the bed curtains, and had seen "plainly an elderly lady standing there". MacCulloch thought it was probably a vivid nightmare. She never came back to Sark.
The fuller account came through Carey's cousin, Miss E. Le Pelley, great-niece of the drowned Seigneur, who wrote down what old Caroline told her. As a girl on the Seigneurie farm, Caroline had locked her door to stop the other servants playing tricks on her in the night. She woke to see a lady at the foot of her bed, "a crossover shawl, and a beautifully gauffred white cap", shut her eyes, opened them twice to see the lady gliding away, and then felt something fall heavily on her feet "with a great thump". She stayed under the bedclothes until morning. The other servants told her she had brought it on herself by locking the door, which she never did again. The ghost, they said, was a Miss de Carteret, sister of one of the first Seigneurs, who had vanished from that room without trace. Caroline thought that if anyone had had the courage to say "In the name of the Great God what tortures you?" the poor lady could have told her trouble and rested.
The worst sighting was remembered by Mrs Le Messurier, who helped at the Seigneurie in February 1839. The night before Peter Le Pelley was due to sail to Guernsey, La Grande Garce was seen walking the passages, her high heels tapping through the house, and some said she was wringing her hands. The servants begged him not to go, with a strong south wind blowing. He went, and the boat was swamped off the Pointe du Nez with all on board lost. The de Carterets held Sark from Elizabeth I's grant of 1565 until 1730, when the Le Pelleys bought it. The Le Pelleys sold in 1852 after losses in the Little Sark silver mines. La Seigneurie's gardens are open to visitors, and the house remains the Seigneur's home.
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