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xoxoxoBruce Tuesday Jun 26 11:20 PM June 27th, 2018: Rose Hall Mansion
♫ Where’s your husband Annie? Where’s number two and three?
♪ Are they sleeping neath the palms beside the Caribbean Sea?
♫ At night I hear you ridin’ and I hear your lovers call
♪ And still can feel your presence round the great house at Rose Hall…
–Johnny Cash
Cash was singing about Annie Palmer, Jamaica’s White Witch of Rose Hall Mansion.
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The Palmers’ nephew had inherited the estate, and found himself in search of a wife. He found a newcomer to Montego Bay, Annie Palmer, who’d lost her parents to yellow fever in Haiti and come to Jamaica in search of a rich suitor. They courted, married, and then the trouble began…
Annie was said to have been raised by her voodoo practicing nanny after her parent’s death, and acquired some pretty wicked tastes. She was extremely abusive to those around her, taking lovers on a whim and punishing them for the slightest irritancy with black magic. In fact, says the Smithsonian, it’s believed she “killed not only her first husband, but the two that followed, as well as countless slaves”.
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“She was the mistress of the plantation, she was the boss. Her word was the law,” Johnny Cash says introducing his country ballad he wrote after visiting Rose Hall. “There were about 5000 slaves on that plantation. She had her favourites and she had the ones that weren’t her favourites. Down on the sea, there are three tall palm trees waving in the breeze and they say that maybe Annie’s husbands are buried under those palm trees.”
But there are two sides to every story, and it’s believed that Annie’s violent temper was in part a product of her husband John’s neglect and abusive relationship with her. There were few paths for young Annie to go down as an orphan, and with John she thought she’d finally found security. But as things went sour with John she began taking several male slaves as lovers, sparring jealousy and even more abuse on her husband’s behalf.
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It’s said she murdered John with a mix of black magic and physical violence, and with every husband that filled his ill-fated shoes, her reputation grew more ominous and her treatment of her slaves more cruel. She finally met her match in a slave named Takoo, a powerful magician who, according to legend, murdered her using magic after she tried to curse his family.
The wicked White Witch was finally dead, no longer able to bark orders from her one-person balcony — still looming over the green lawns of Rose Hall today. A strong spell was cast over her tomb to make sure her spirit stayed locked away. Only problem is, the slaves’ ceremony was interrupted, and Annie’s spirit is said to wander to this day…
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Rose Hall is one of a handful of plantations that still exists because, even in the midst of the slave rebellion, folks feared that the grounds’ burning would fully unleash Annie’s spirit into the world of the living outside of plantation grounds. So it was left to rot for nearly 100 years, until the government decided to restore it in the 1960s.
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