Rose Hall

The only two times you needed to worry about Annie Palmer were when she hated you and when she loved you. Your only hope to survive her company was for her to take no notice of you at all. This was not easily accomplished if you were a slave or employee on her plantation, next to Montego Bay in Jamaica, back in the early 1800s—she felt everyone around her was at her disposal.

Better known as the White Witch of Rose Hall, Annie Palmer was as renowned for her beauty as she was for her sadistic cruelty. She tortured, mutilated, and murdered her lovers and slaves. Before she died, she vowed she would be the last mistress of Rose Hall—and its last resident. For more than 150 years, she’s kept her word. Her cruel spirit still oversees the breathtaking mansion. The ghosts of those she’s killed have been reported wandering the plantation and great house.

Rose Hall Plantation, built in 1770 at a cost of £30,000, was and still is a Caribbean island paradise. Annie Palmer not only enjoyed gorgeous ocean views, swaying palm trees, lush green lawns, white sand, and crystal blue ocean waters, she also lived in opulent luxury, surrounded by fine furnishings, servants, and slaves who worked the sugar cane plantation that kept her wealthy.

She was born Annie Mae Patterson to an Irish father and English mother, and the Patterson family moved to Haiti when Annie was very young. In Haiti, Annie learned voodoo from her Haitian nanny. Annie’s parents mysteriously died when she was 10 years old, so she was raised by the nanny until the woman died, when Annie was 18.

Annie’s ambition was to gain wealth—and in the early 19th century, a woman did that by marrying rich. Annie came to Jamaica and quickly enchanted local Englishman and plantation owner, John Palmer.

The couple were married, and Annie took her position as the mistress of the plantation. She grew hungry for more wealth and excitement, and bored with her husband, she began to take an occasional lover. Being that she slept in a separate bedroom from her husband, she would demand that some of the slave men, who she fancied, come to her chamber at night. When she grew tired of her lover, or if she feared suspicions were being raised, she would either have others murder the poor slave or do it herself.

After six years of marriage, Annie knew she would inherit all of John Palmer’s possessions should he pass on—and Annie was not one to wait around for nature to run its course. Annie killed John Palmer with poison, and she then closed off his bedroom and would not allow anyone to enter it again while she was alive.

The slaves had their suspicions of foul play, but they kept quiet for fear of the “White Witch,” as Annie Palmer was coming to be known. Annie married and murdered two more husbands, all the while taking her slave lovers on the side, acquiring the wealth of her dead husbands, and watching slaves get flogged and beaten for her own amusement. When each husband died, she completely closed off their bedrooms; three doors were to remain closed and locked as long as Annie Palmer was the mistress of the plantation.

After the three deaths, some of the slaves started talking about the house being haunted. Doors began slamming when there was no wind to blow them shut—especially when other men came calling and fell under the enchantment of Annie.

According to Beverly Gordon, a native Jamaican and the current manager of the Rose Hall Great House, Annie Palmer not only beat the slaves in daylight but she also brought them back to the mansion for further torture. Gordon said, “Where the ladies’ and gentlemen’s rooms are now, that’s what she used as her dungeon, and those two pits went 16 feet down. That’s where she kept the slaves, if they were caught trying to run away from the property. She would get them there, throw them in the pit, and then leave them there to die without food or water, and with no medical attention whatsoever. She was gruesome, awful.”

According to Gordon, the stories of the White Witch are known throughout Jamaica by many generations. She said, “Everybody knows about the Rose Hall Great House and what took place here. Children, adults, older ones, younger ones—they all know about it.”

Gordon reported that Annie Palmer had so little regard for her lovers and slaves that she would send one group of slaves to go and bury the bodies of her victims and then send a second group to murder those who buried the bodies. She wanted no traces.

In December of 1831, a dashing young gentleman named Robert Rutherford from England came to Rose Hall plantation to fill the position of bookkeeper. Annie took interest in the gentleman instantly, as did her housekeeper, Millicent.

This is where the story of Rose Hall turns into a murderous soap opera that would play itself out in only a few weeks. Millicent’s grandfather, Takoo, was a powerful voodoo witch and also an occasional lover of Annie Palmer. Robert Rutherford, far from the strict society of England, fancied both Millicent and his new employer, Annie Palmer. This infuriated Annie, who wanted Rutherford’s attentions for herself.

The White Witch of Rose Hall cast a spell on Millicent, causing her to die within nine days. Takoo was infuriated—he stormed into the mansion and strangled Annie Palmer to death in her bed. Annie was entombed in an above-ground, cement coffin that still sits in the east garden of the house. Some of her religious-minded former slaves tried to cast spells on her grave to keep her spirit locked up, but their magic didn’t work. Annie wouldn’t be stopped by death.

The house sat empty until 1905, when a family finally bought the mansion. They would not be deterred by the ghostly legends. The new owners’ maid was on the balcony cleaning when she was thrown off, to her death, by an unseen force. Folklore says Annie Palmer spent a great deal of her time on the balcony, watching slaves get whipped by the overseers she commanded. Even after death, the White Witch wouldn’t cease her murderous ways. The family abandoned the great mansion by Montego Bay, and it sat empty again until 1965.

In 1965, the Rose Hall Great House and all its land were purchased by U.S. entrepreneurs John and Michele Rollins. The couple spent $2.5 million restoring the house and turning it into a museum, pub, gift shop, and banquet hall. Bathrooms and a bar now stand where Annie Palmer’s dungeons once loomed, but the ghost stories
continue.

In 1971, a group of psychics came to Rose Hall to try and trap the spirit of Annie Palmer. Gordon said, “They tried to raise Annie, and she was giving them a hard time. She came out of the tomb, they were trying to get her back in and they could not. On her tomb, they placed three crosses on three sides. They wanted to trap her spirit back inside the tomb and they could not, so they did not put the fourth cross on. So they just left that side open.”

Trapping Annie’s ghost was not successful, and she still makes her presence felt in the Great House. Gordon said, “Sometimes the taps at the bar and in the kitchen start running. No one turns them on, and try as you might, you cannot get that pipe to turn off. It just comes on and goes off by itself.”

Doors slam, and windows close and can’t be opened no matter how hard the staff tries to push. Gordon also said that men seem to be more inclined to experience the phenomena than women. She said, “One staff member has seen a woman entering a room. He came down to ask someone who might be in there.” He was startled when he was told that no one was upstairs. When he went back to look again, the woman was gone.

Gordon says some of the female staff members have caught glimpses of things, but nothing like what the male staff member experienced. Visitors have reported seeing a woman around the house, as well as the specter of a short man. Some visitors have even claimed to capture these images in their photographs.

In 2001, Jack Slater was in Jamaica for a reggae promotion he was running for his business. On the day of his trip, the weather called for rainstorms all day, which is a rarity in Jamaica. He though it was the perfect time to visit Rose Hall—not quite a dark and stormy night, but a dark and stormy day, to be certain. On his tour of the hall, Slater took several pictures—he was trying to capture a duppy (pronounced “DUH-pee,” the Jamaican word for “ghost”) on film. Slater said, “We got up to the room that our tour guide said was Annie Palmer’s room. He said, ‘This is where she did a lot of her killing.’ He went through the story about how her various husbands and even some of the slaves at the plantation were killed. So as the tour went off into the next room, I said, ‘Okay, this is it. This is the room which is going to have all the potential duppies in it.’”

Slater clicked some pictures of the room in general then approached a mirror on the wall opposite the bed. He said, “I looked at the mirror really carefully, because I knew if you start taking pictures of mirrors, all hell breaks loose—if you take it right in front, you get your flash right back, and it won’t even come out. So my picture was taken kind of at an angle.”

When Slater’s picture was developed, the mirror had a foggy, ghostly scene within the frame. There is a very clear image of a woman in a white dress on the lower-left corner of the mirror and an almost jungle-like image of white, fog-like streaks. “I expected it to look kind of unusual,” Slater said. “But when the film came back, there was this entire scene of stuff going on.”

In a second picture he took of Annie Palmer’s bed, there is a white glow on the enameled wooden bed frame, which Slater admits was his white shirt reflecting off the shiny surface. But in the picture, there is also an outline of a man’s face looking down toward the bed.

Could it be one of Annie Palmer’s victims? Slater isn’t sure he saw a ghost that day, but he does find it interesting that he set out to try and disprove that any duppies would come out on his pictures, and instead, he had not one, but two peculiar photos.

The White Witch of Rose Hall has kept her vow of being the last mistress of the plantation. Since her death, only one other family tried to live there, but they quickly fled after the death of their maid.

This evil wretch of a woman who took so much pleasure in watching others suffer is now stuck wandering the hallways and walkways of the mansion that she once ruled over with a wicked hand. Annie Palmer is the stuff of nightmares to the children of Jamaica, and according to many witnesses, the nightmare of the White Witch is not over.

SOURCE:

The world’s most haunted places : from the secret files of ghostvillage.com –  Written by Jeff Belanger.