St Peter's Valley runs down the middle of Jersey, wooded and quiet, and off it climbs a narrow, steep footpath that the Jersey Evening Post identifies as Ruette à la Vioge, near Sandybrook. English speakers call it Crack Ankle Lane, and in December 2021 the name proved itself when a cameraman filming a ghost-story production there broke his ankle.
The creature of the lane is the Vioge. In the versions on Visit Jersey, in Erren Michaels' History Press article on Jersey's spookiest locations, and in a string of blogs that follow them, it is an emaciated scarecrow of a thing, sometimes a demon and sometimes simply a monster, that waits on the path, catches passers-by by the ankles, breaks them, and drags them away to a hidden lair where it has been eating human flesh for centuries. Spooky Isles adds that it sucks the bones dry. The Vioge was one of six island ghost stories picked for a Jersey Post stamp issue in 2022, and it featured in 'Ghost Stories by Candlelight' at Mont Orgueil.
The question is how old the monster is. The lane name certainly is not new, and a Jèrriais name with vioge in it would naturally invite a story. But the publisher's description of Michaels' Jersey Legends (2015) lists the Vioge of Crack Ankle Lane, alongside the Prince and Princess of Sorel Point and the Crooked Fairy, as the book's 'original tales of ancient monsters', set apart from 'the most famous of Jersey's fables'. That wording is ambiguous: it could mean newly written versions of forgotten stories, or new stories. We have not found the Vioge in older collections such as L'Amy's or Bois's, though we have not been able to check them page by page.
For now the fair summary is that the Vioge is an old lane name with a monster story whose earliest source we can find is 2015. It has already taken on a life of its own, which is how folklore has always worked, but readers should know the story may be younger than it sounds.
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