The Screaming House gives 'Ghost Hill' at St Aubin in Jersey its name, and the legend behind it is set in 1685, the year the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes loosed a flood of Huguenot refugees from France. St Aubin, on Jersey's south coast, was often their first landfall, and there a man living on the slope known as Mount Arthur made himself conspicuous in his welcome — meeting the refugee boats at the quay, expressing his sympathy for their plight, and pressing the weary travellers to come and take a meal and a bed for the night under his roof.
The story
His kindness was a trap. Once his guests were soundly asleep, the host turned murderer: he cut their throats as they lay, robbed them of the few possessions they had carried into exile, and disposed of the bodies, before going down to the harbour to play the good Samaritan to the next boatload. How many he killed in this way the legend does not say, but the terror of it was such that the dreadful screams of his victims were said to ring out the length of Mount Arthur.
And the screaming did not stop when the murderer himself died. The cries of the slain continued to echo about the hill, haunting the house and the slope so persistently that the place became known as the House of Death, and Ghost Hill. Only when the accursed house was at last pulled down did the screaming cease — and tradition adds that when it was rebuilt with the same stone, the screams came back, until the second house too was levelled. The legend has made Ghost Hill one of the most famous haunted spots in the Channel Islands.