St Ouen's Manor, the ancient seat of the de Carteret family, stands among trees in the north-west of Jersey. The lane past it is dark at night even now.
One of the more striking fairy accounts in Dr Symons' early twentieth-century collection comes from here. A Captain Vautier was driving past the manor at about ten o'clock one night when he met a procession on the road. It was made up of little people, and they were carrying a small coffin. His horse took fright and stood stock still, and it would not budge until the whole procession had gone by. Vautier, curious, turned to follow them. They vanished.
Symons' notes are held in the Lord Coutanche Library of the Société Jersiaise; the story is summarised in Francesca Bihet's chapter on Channel Island fairies in Magical Folk (2017). We do not know Captain Vautier's first name, the year, or whether Symons heard the story from Vautier himself or at second hand.
Fairy funerals are an established type in British folklore. Bihet points to James Bowker's Goblin Tales of Lancashire (1883), where two men see a tiny funeral at midnight with bells tolling, and the younger realises the corpse in the coffin has his own face; within a month he is dead. Jersey's version has no such omen attached, as far as the record goes. It is simply a sighting, told with a named witness, which is more than most fairy stories can offer.
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