MacCulloch described the Tour Beauregard as the southern defence of the old walled town, important enough to be named alongside Castle Cornet in royal commissions. Nothing of it survives. According to a seventeenth-century writer quoted by Carey, it was also where suspected witches were tortured: their hands were tied behind them by the thumbs and they were hoisted up by a machine, so that "sometimes their shoulders were turned round, and sometimes their thumbs torn off". Tradition put the place of burning at the foot of the hill below.
The haunting was a winter one. Around Christmas the people of Tower Hill and the streets below heard "unearthly howlings and the clanking of heavy chains, dragged over the rough pavement". Those brave enough to look out saw "a huge uncouth animal with large flaming saucer eyes, and somewhat like a bear, or huge calf". A Sark clergyman, the Rev. J. L. V. Cachemaille, wrote in 1875 that on Sark the "Tchico" was "the old dog, the dog of the dead, the black or white beast" that walked the roads. Carey compared it to the chained dog of Bayeux and the Moddey Dhoo of Peel Castle. Modern retellings, such as Channel Eye's, add that it was believed to bring death to anyone who saw it.
The hill also had a haunted house. An old ironer told Carey that "the famous haunted house at the Tour Beauregard" had a ghost locked in a cupboard whose doors could not be forced open and from which came "the most fearful groans and dismal wailings". The worst real history of the place belongs to 1556. Catherine Cauchés and her daughters Perotine Massey and Guillemine Gilbert were first tried for theft and acquitted, then condemned for their religion and burned at the stake. Perotine gave birth in the flames. The baby was pulled out of the fire and then, by order of the authorities, thrown back in. The memorial plaque on the Tower Hill steps marks the area of their deaths. The Beast is the folklore that grew up on the same ground.
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