Featured Purchase Your Heritage Pass
It's time to get spooky...
We’ve picked a selection of spooky drawings by Sarah Louisa Kilpack (1839-1909) featuring witches, black cats and other supernatural beings.
We have a number of her works in our art collection, but she is best known for her atmospheric landscape paintings, which often feature rough seas and stormy skies. Although not originally from Jersey, Kilpack spent a great deal of time in the Channel Islands over the course of her life.
The ink drawings shared here are taken from a large album of about 900 small drawings put together by Letitia Brooke, a close friend of Kilpack who lived in St Helier. These drawings were sent to Mrs Brooke by Kilpack in letters over the course of their long friendship and feature caricatures, scenes from literature, and seasonal and humorous sketches.
Grab your bachîn and start ringing, making as much noise as you can to drive away the evil Halloween spirits! Here’s how you do it…turn the sound ON!
If you had houseleeks (d’la jombarbe, in Jèrriais) on your roof, this was said to provide protection against lightning strikes. People also planted elder trees (du seu) close to their house for the same reason.
Hanging up wood avens (d’l’hèrbe b’nêt) in the house would protect you against witches, as would growing caper spurge (d’l’hèrbe à chorchi) in the garden.
But the most fortunate plant of all was rosemary (du romathîn) – it was considered unlucky not to grow rosemary in the garden to protect your household.
Witches Rock in the grounds of Rocqueberg, Green Island
The rocks have been associated with witches for centuries, with a 1940s guidebook saying that they used to dance on it during the Sabbath and that visitors could ask to ‘inspect the rock from close quarters and so note the footprints of dancing witches’.
The witches were said to congregate at Rocqueberg to raise storms by their songs and therefore cause wrecks of the boats of local fishermen. To try and prevent the witches from cursing them, the fishermen had to throw the 13th fish of their catch onto the rock when passing.
This postcard in our collection features an illustration of the witches gathered at the Witches Rock. In this image, they appear as young women, similar to what Hubert would have encountered in the tale, rather than as they appeared to Madelaine later on. The illustration is by Violet M. Roberts, who similarly illustrated other famous Jersey tales, such as the legend of the Prince’s Tower, and Saint Helier and the Pirates. These postcards were produced in the early 1900s.
A postcard from early 1900
You can read more about the legend of Witches Rock here.
Images of Witches Rock from the Jersey Evening Post Photo Collection.
The Black Dog of Bouley Bay
One of the best-known local stories is of a huge black dog that roamed the area around Bouley Bay, a picturesque harbour in the parish of Trinity on the north coast. This giant, black dog had glowing red and yellow eyes the size of saucers. In some versions of the tale, he had very long and extremely sharp teeth.
The Black Dog is a creature that appears in folklore worldwide. Most commonly found in England, but also in France, it may have originated in Celtic or Germanic elements of European culture. Read the full story here.
Witch Balls and Stones
In popular imagination, ‘witch balls’ were hung up in 18th and 19th-century windows to ward off evil spirits. It was believed that witches could be entrapped by their own reflection. At one time, it was also the custom for superstitious reasons to place objects in walls of buildings during construction to help ward off evil spirits.
Witches’ stones are flat stones jutting from chimneys and are a fairly common sight on old Jersey houses. According to Jersey folklore, these small ledges were used by witches to rest on as they flew around. Householders would provide these platforms to appease witches and avoid their ill-favour.
Have a listen to the two episodes of our ‘Small Island, Big Stories Sessions’ podcast below, which are dedicated to the Island’s folklore and traditions.
You can find the rest of the podcast back catalogue here or wherever you usually get your podcasts. Don’t forget to like and follow the podcast.