The White Witch of Jamaica
Rose Hall Plantation House
In doing some entirely unrelated research on another paranormal topic, I came across the story of Annie Palmer, better known as the White Witch of Jamaica, and the legends of her abhorrent deeds. This is one of those tales that one hopes has become drastically exaggerated over the years, because the alternative (that the stories are anywhere remotely accurate) is too horrible to stomach.
Built in the late 1700’s, Rose Hall is the name of the house that sits amid what had been a vast, 6,600 acre sugar plantation. One story holds that the home was nicknamed The Calendar House, because it was said to have 365 windows, 52 doors and 12 bedrooms. In the early part of the 1800’s, a gentleman named John Palmer owned the house and its plantation. Around 1820, John married a seventeen-year-old beauty named Annie. By some accounts, Annie was just over four feet tall, but all accounts agree she was definately under five feet tall, and was devastatingly gorgeous. Rumored to have been raised by her Hatian nanny after her parents died of yellow fever, Annie grew up practicing the dark art of voodoo, and used it to manipulate those in her life. Upon becoming mistress of the plantation, Annie used fear and cruelty to keep her 2,000 slaves in check.
Portrait of a Young Annie Palmer
By all accounts, Mrs. Palmer would qualify as a true psychopath. Each morning, she went out on to her balcony at the back of the house to give her orders of the day to the slaves assembled below. She used any and all means she could devise to keep her slaves in line, including publicly beating them, torturing them in a dungeon, and setting up bear traps around the perimeter of the plantation to snare anyone who dared try to escape. She was also not above killing a slave for any perceived insolence, real or imagined.
At some point into her marriage, young Annie Palmer began taking male slaves as lovers, supposedly using them for a few nights and then murdering them and burying them in unmarked graves. Whether her husband ever found out about this little pasttime is unknown, but one way or another, she murdered him in his bed and became the sole controller of the plantation. Jamaica, at this time, was a quite lawless place, frequented by pirates and the like, so the death of her husband likely didn’t raise many eyebrows.
Annie’s reign of terror kept up for some time, and two more husbands came and went the same way as the first: quietly murdered in bed. During this time, Annie was honing her voodoo skills and was becoming more and more powerful. Several stories about the psychopath have her killing infants and using their bones in her magical doings. But Annie’s days were numbered…
The overseer of the plantation was a slave who was also a powerful practitioner of the dark arts, a fact he had meticulously kept hidden from his mistress. The overseer’s daughter was engaged to another slave who, unfortunately for him, became the pick of the day for Annie, and she chose him to be her next lover. Breaking with tradition, Annie murdered this lover the very first night she bedded him, and the overseer quickly sought revenge. Attacking her in her bedroom, he managed to overpower her and end her life, but only at the cost of his own.
The White Witch’s Final Resting Place
Buried just outside of her own house, the slaves attempted to entomb her using rituals that would ensure the White Witch would never rise again. Something prevented them from performing the ritual properly, however, and Annie has since made her ghostly presence known at Rose Hall.
Rose Hall circa 1940
The great house fell into extreme disrepair as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, and eventually American entrepreneur John Rollins got ahold of it and began making renovations that restored it to its original grandeur. A Ritz-Carlton has also been built on the property, and the plantation now boasts three world-renowned golf courses, including one named, aptly, White Witch. Most of the original furnishings of the house were gone or unsalvagable, but there are a few pieces that survived to this day, including the portrait of Annie Palmer, and a mirror that is the focus of many ghostly photos. The house is now a museum and hosts many tourists each year.
The Sitting Room with its Ghostly Mirror
Reports of ghostly hauntings are numerous at Rose Hall. The White Witch and some of her presumed victims continually make their presences known in a number of ways. Hurried steps are often heard in the great hall, as are whispers in the dungeon, tappings on the walls, and the cries of infants. Some have claimed to see the witch herself, astride a great black horse, flaying her whip as she rides along. Occassionally, an old style of music can be heard in the house, and whatever spirits reside there seem to enjoy the addition of electricity to the property, because the lights turn off and on of their own accord on a regular basis. Tourist photos also provide entertaining paranormal fodder, because so many of them claim to show ghostly images, particularly when it comes to photos that have the original mirror involved.
According to many visitors, Rose Hall continues to house the dark and ominous aura likely installed there by its former mistress, and oppression is thick in the air. Visitors often feel they are being watched, and every creak and moan of the old house is subject to paranormal speculation. A visit to the old plantation for a scary tale or two will likely not disappoint.
Yours in this life and the next!
GhOsTwRiTeR KiM
Tags: Annie Palmer, ghosts, Jamaica, paranormal, Rose Hall, voodoo