Not far from the English border with Scotland, there once stood a huge old house known as Allanbank. It had some three hundred years of history behind it when it was torn down in the early nineteenth century, and it was, at one time, one of Scotland’s most notoriously haunted manors. Even today, they tell the story of Pearlin Jean of Allanbank, the little French novice who haunted a false lover and his family home right up until the house was demolished.
Her story begins around 1670, with a young man called Robert Stuart—the family name of the owners of Allanbank—making the Grand Tour of Europe to finish his education. He was staying for a season in Paris in a tall old house, the upstairs windows of which overlooked the gardens of a convent. One of the girls making her novitiate there was Jeanne de la Salle, a blue-eyed, blonde, wellborn young mademoiselle who had on a whim decided to become a nun, and, equally whimsically, decided she had made a mistake when she first saw Mr. Stuart watching her from his window.
Jeanne was hardly more than a child—although, to be fair, neither was her lover—but she deserted her convent to become his mistress. And they loved each other passionately—and Jeanne possessively and jealously–for a short time. Unfortunately, Jeanne wanted to marry her Scotsman. He, in turn, grew weary of her jealousy, her possessiveness, her nagging, her weeping, and her demands for marriage. He also knew his strict family would never approve of a girl who had left the convent to be his light o’ love.
On the day he was to leave Paris to return to Allanbank, he tried to take the coward’s way out: to slip off without alerting Jeanne. She heard the carriage, though, and raced downstairs to try to stop him. She was wearing her—and, once, his—favorite dress, made of thread-lace, and she climbed up onto the front wheel of the carriage, screaming, “I tell you this, Robert Stuart—if you marry any woman but me, I WILL COME BETWEEN YOU TO THE END OF YOUR DAYS!”
Embarassed and thinking of nothing except making his escape, Stuart ordered the coachman to drive on.
Jeanne should have fallen backward off the wheel. Instead, she fell forward into its path, in a tangle of white lace and long golden hair. As the wheel rolled over her forehead, she gave one last scream. She died there in an explosion of blood as her craven lover fled.
Two weeks later, Robert Stuart’s carriage pulled up to the great gates of Allanbank, to be greeted by a figure standing atop them: a figure in a lace dress—white where it wasn’t red with blood—reaching out to him. He was driven up to the house in a dead faint.
The celebrations that had been planned for his return were cancelled, and within days, Jeanne’s ghost had infested the house. She first appeared to one of the maids, who went into violent hysterics. For some hours the girl could only say three words, over and over: “The pearlin dress! The pearlin dress!” Finally the family managed to calm her enough that she explained she had seen a bloody figure in a dress made of pearlin—Scots for thread lace. And since the closest Scots equivalent to Jeanne is Jean, the little French novice became known as Pearlin Jean.
Robert Stuart eventually married. His wife, fortunately, was a frankly unimaginative woman. She took all Jeanne’s poltergeist tricks—of which the little ghost had an arsenal—in stride, and was not impressed even when Jeanne appeared to her, one evening in a dark hallway. Stuart was so pleased with his wife—and with the birth of several children—that he had their portraits painted and hung side by side in Allanbank’s Long Gallery. This was a bad mistake, for Jeanne went wild with the jealousy that had been one of her worst traits in life. She slammed doors, she moved furniture, she smashed china, she screamed her blood-curdling dying scream, and made more appearances in all her macabre glory than ever before.
In desperation, Stuart decided on an unlikely but effective ruse: he had a portrait of a golden-haired girl in a thread-lace dress painted and hung between his and his wife’s. He reasoned that, since Jeanne’s last vow had been to come between him and whatever wife he took to the end of his days, perhaps this would be an acceptable substitute. To his surprise, it worked—for so long that he decided that the ghost must have gone on to the world beyond and took it down. The portrait was banished to the attics and left there, and neither Allanbank nor Robert Stuart knew another moment’s peace. He died comparatively early, leaving a house still haunted by his late love.
Sometime in the eighteenth century, the Stuarts lost Allanbank, but Jeanne didn’t depart with them. She continued to make her noises and occasional perambulations through the house and grounds, but she never managed to terrify subsequent owners—who after all lacked Stuart’s guilty firsthand knowledge of her—as she had him. The last written reference to her comes from the year 1790, when two visitors to Allanbank complained of the sounds of someone unseen walking across the floor of their bedroom.
Today the old Allanbank site is occupied by an inn and surrounded by gardens and orchards. Pearlin Jean, alas, no longer walks there. Perhaps, at last, she rests in peace.
I first read the story of Pearlin Jean of Allanbank in a piece by Michael and Mollie Hardwick in John Canning’s 1971 anthology FIFTY GREAT GHOST STORIES.
For some reason, this didn’t occur to me the first time I read this, but it did today when I read again about the Scots equivalent of Jeanne, and somehow it fits … at least for me.
What do you think?
Why couldn’t Stuart just leave the picture up? He deserved what he got anyway but I feel sorry for Jeanne.
I’d never heard that song before! But I agree, especially the part about the “half-dreamed dream” because, in the beginning, that’s what Jeanne was living in, in her affair with Stuart. She never thought the whole thing through–but then, do we ever?
In a way, the story reminds me of how Romeo and Juliet might have ended had one of them survived–haunted to the end of their days by a youthful–passion? Indiscretion? A bit of both, I fancy–
The explanation the Hardwicks gave in their version of the story was that Jeanne did settle down for a long while after the painting was placed between Lord and Lady Allanbank’s pictures–and he took it down not only because he thought the haunting was over, but because his children were beginning to ask awkward questions about why that lady’s picture was hanging between Da’s and Mummy’s–and who was she, anyway?
Kids say the darnedest things– 😉