Since we can’t lay around on our bums all day long, we decided to discover some of the Jamaican history at Rose Hall. Rose Hall is a Jamaican Georgian plantation house now run as a historic house museum. It is also called the ‘Haunted house’ because of the intriguing legend of Annie Palmer…As the book says, this is is the story of a people, a legend and a legacy…
The legend of the House
Annie Palmer is known as the ‘White Witch” and she was originally from England. However, she had lived the better part of her life in Haiti. She lost her parents to yellow fever and her nanny who was a practitioner of voodoo, raised Annie and introduced her to the art of witchcraft. She married John Palmer in 1820 and moved to Jamaica. John Palmer owned Rose Hall Plantation. Annie was not an easygoing woman and the plantation housed around 2000 slaves. It was also a lucrative source of income. However, Annie could not resist wielding her black magic powers to control the people living near her.
Annie lost her husband under mysterious circumstances. She later remarried twice, however, these two men too did not survive and it is commonly believed that Annie was the main cause of these unnatural deaths. She used voodoo to scare the plantation workers and often slept with the male slaves. She later killed them. When the slave uprising of the early 1930 started, Annie’s lover Takoo killed her in bed. Annie was only 29 years old when she was killed. The legend also states that Takoo took this drastic step as Annie was supposedly attracted to Takoo’s son in law. However as Annie could not win him over she then practiced voodoo on Takoo’s child and later the child succumbed within a week.
There were rumors of mass deaths at the plantations. Annie also pushed her housekeeper out of her balcony. The poor slave broke her neck and eventually died. There are rumors about Annie’s spirit still lives in the house and she roams around the plantation till date. Her portret is painted so that you have the impression that her eyes are following you everywhere…Many seances have been conducted on the premises in order to call on the spirit of Annie. She was barely five feet tall in height, however, she still plays a vital role in the history of Jamaica. The mansion is a beautiful but it is understandable that many visitors get an eariee feeling while moving around in the house. In the basements is now a cafe, but you can see pictures of the past and if you take a look at the large traps, you get a sense of how horrible the life was for the slaves. The traps surrounded the property and were used to stop the slaves trying to run away to freedom.
Rose Hall was virtually abandoned with the decline in the sugar economy until an American entrepreneur John Rollins and former Miss USA Michele bought the estate in the 1960s and restored the great house to its old grandeur. I loved the beautiful mahogany floors, the wood paneling and wooden ceilings. The rooms were decorated with silk wallpaper printed with palms and birds, ornamented with chandeliers and furnished with European and Asian antiques. The mansion is now the historic centerpiece of the vast Rose Hall Estate, but the estate encompasses three 18-hole golf courses, the Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon (with the fantastic restaurant ‘the Sugar Mill’) and the most desirable residential district of Montego Bay, Spring Farms. Also on the Rose Hall Estate, Cinnamon Hill Great House was the home of the late Johnny Cash. Johnny even wrote a song about Annie Palmer.
I love stories and if you want to learn more about the story behind the estate, you can read about it in more detail on this website: https://elsolvidatours.rezdy.com/143042/how-annie-palmer-became-known-as-the-white-witch-of-rose-hall-by-stacy-ann-gordon
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