Waterworks Valley, St Lawrence Parish, is in the Channel Island of Jersey. St Lawrence, known for pleasant pastoral walkways and green lanes, is a rural parish. Its coast by St Aubin's Bay is part of a busy region, and more so, on sunny days and during the tourist season. The parish is home to Hamptonne, a restored Jersey farm complex that’s open to the public and an excellent site for educational trips. Waterworks Valley, with a walkway, is in this parish. The valley is named for the numerous numbers of reservoirs located along its length that were built and used by the Waterworks Company. Even during the daylight hours, it’s an ominous, haunting place, damp and dark – overcast by a thick layer of trees and vegetation. Innumerable people have seen it pass by and many have run away after hearing it approach. They say it is the Phantom Carriage.
Unearthly Spectral Carriage
Usually the repetitive paranormal incidents happen in the evening and start with the faint ringing of bells. The eerie music is said to sound more like wedding bells than something melancholy. Gradually, witnesses hear, mixed with ringing, another uncanny noise that starts hazily before it becomes discernible. The noise crescendos until it’s obvious that the sound is horses trotting in the valley and accompanied by the whirling, bouncing clatter of a carriage.
Witnesses see a pageant, clothed in eighteenth century costumes, emerge from the gloominess. They see the coach’s passenger is a bride in her wedding dress, but as it passes, they see the face behind the veil is the gaunt skull.
Waterworks: Legends
One legend is that, in the early eighteenth century a girl was going to be married in a St Lawrence Parish church, but she was disappointed at the altar when her fiancé didn’t appear. She committed suicide that evening. Another variation of the legend is that she committed suicide on the night before the wedding. Her specter appeared at the church the next day. When the groom lifted the veil, he saw the pale lifeless face of a cadaver beneath it.
Haunting Phantom Carriage
Many people believe that this phenomenon happens once a year, at a specific time; however there are too many sightings and vivid memories of the carriage to support the belief that the event occurs only once a year. Technically, this is a residual haunting, one that is like a videotape imprinted in time and space. There is no intelligence and the same scenario is repetitious. Many people believe that the legendary girl’s emotions created the haunting. The legend about the groom seeing her cadaverous face appears to be mere folklore. It’s a stretch of logic to think a ghost would go into a church for her wedding and appear to her groom as a corpse
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Source:
Matt Lamy, 100 Strangest Mysteries, MetroBooks, 2005.
Jill Stefko - I'd rather deal with the paranormal than human abnormal - having dealt extensively with both.
