The name of Annie Palmer may have become confused with Rosa
Palmer, the original mistress of Rose Hall who did have four husbands but was
said to be unwaveringly virtuous.
***
FULL TEXT: Montego Bay – The old Church of St. James stands
on high ground above canalized Montego River, a few blocks inland from the busy
Town Square and it stands there looking as if it were some village church In
England, though of course the tall royal palms in its yard do blur the Old
Country illusion.
As I approached the main door a man walked slowly towards me.
"You want to get inside?" said he, as if the door
weren't wide open.
"Why, yes," I said, walking in, and he with me. It
is a grand old building, in which a first service was held on Christmas Day,
1782, as a posted notice tells.
It is a grand old building, in which a first service was held
on Christmas Day, 1782, as a posted notice tells.
It is in the form of a Greek cross, end as I stood in the
middle of It. looking around for one particular memorial, my hitherto silent
attendant said "the Palmer statue Is over there."
He wasn't clairvoyant. It was Just that probably everyone
who comes wants to see the monument so Mrs. Rosa Palmer, once identified as the
White Witch or Obeah woman. Guides used to tell (some perhaps still do) the
story of this Mistress of Rose Hall, and how
She kill tree husbins
An' the fort kill she.
The memorial, which Is in the left front corner, is a
magnificent marble from the hand of John Bacon, R. A., one of the notable
London sculptors of the 1700's. Done in 1794, it shows a beautiful young woman
laying a floral garland upon an urn bearing a low-relief portrait of an older
woman, who is doubtless Mrs. Palmer.
And the inscription tells that it was erected by Hon. John
Palmer in memory of his beloved wife, a lady of "open, cheerful and agreeable
disposition" Which are odd qualities for a witch.
She wasn't one, of course. Yet guides have been known to
point to a stain on the neck of the young woman laying the floral tribute, and
tell that it appeared there in some mysterious way "because she was
strangled by her husband."
The grim, confused story of the White Witch provides a study
in the development of folk-lore.
Rose Hall I had
visited.
While I was still at the Half Moon hotel, nine miles east of
town on the North Shore road, I learned that it stood on part of the old
plantation grounds. Then Bill Thompson, the Montego representative of Colombian
National Airways, whom I'd met when I stepped off the plane from New York,
phoned to say that he had a spare hour.
Shortly we were traveling through fields of tall sugar-cane,
and in a mile or so not far, anyway I saw the tall chimney of what turned out
to be the Rose Hall sugar-works.
We turned in through the factory gate, stopped at the office
for a moment "It's all right," a, man aid, "but I wouldn't go
into the hall; it's too dangerous" and then we were going straight back
through the fields to where the ruin of the wonderful old stone Great House
stands on a hillside . . . Its roof caved in, its windows gaping; a dramatic, and,
yet beautiful thing even with the horror of decay and vandalism upon it.
Marbles from Italy, the richest of woods had been used in building it.
The plantation road swung around and climbed the rise at the
left of the hall. And where a gate barred further driving we found three or
four young men waiting to lead us on.
"One's enough," Thompson said.
Now the language spoken today by the Jamaican masses is
English with various trimmings from other sources. A shift of ac-CENT alone
will baffle the stranger. Mosquito is MOSSkito, for instance. Poor enunciation
completes the confusion.
So though our guide did his earnest best, I can report only
that he said something about Rose Hall having been the home of "a very
wee-ked woman called White Witch . . . and she had plenty slaves up here. She
keel tree bus- bins and" then I lost It. "
'Was strangled by the fourth,' " said Thompson,
interpreting.
"Name Taku," the young man added.
By then we had got up to the hall, and had mounted the great
double stair that now leads up into only thin air. There is a gap between it
and the door. But I could see enough of the ghost-filled wreck to appreciate
what must have been its palatial grandeur.
And there ARE ghosts or were one ghost, anyway. Some of the
countryfolk were so certain that the wraith of the White Witch used to appear in
the place that a lady-exorcist came two or three years ago and drove her out.
From the hall's height we looked down over the plantation
fields, and to the open Caribbean beyond them.
"She was buried over there," said the guide,
pointing to a spot over on the hillside, where there's a tomb.
"An' her husbins she bury down There ... at the
trees."
A clump of coconut palms is in the canefleld, close to the
highway.
"But there are four trees I Said. "She killed
three. . . ." He had no solution to that problem.
We walked around to the side of the hall, and looked into
the basement to see the cells in which the Mistress of Rose Hall used to
imprison slaves who displeased her and from which their anguished cries when
undergoing torment used to reach down into the slaves-cabins end chill the hearts
of the poor blacks.
Death was in her look, they said. She was an obeah-woman who
knew the magic of Africa, and could make
a death-producing charm. But above all she was unspeakably cruel.
She charged a young house-slave named Princess with having
tried to poison her; and when the girl was convicted and hanged here in Montego
Town, Mrs. Palmer had her head carried to Rose Hall and put up on a pole as a
warning to the others.
The tale gets confused ... but in the end either a slave who
had been her lover strangled her; or when a lad attacked her, other slaves
Joined him and smothered her under a mattress.
So runs the story which you'll find novelised in "The
White Witch of Rosehall," which has gone into many editions.
Now though this is folk-tale it deals with persons and
happenings of only 125 years ago, and so must have some sound basis. Yet the
"open, cheerful, and agreeable" lady of this monument in St. James
Church seems to have been drawn into it through a confusion of identities. She
did live at Rose Hall. She did have four husbands.
But there were two Mrs. Palmers ana two John Palmers at Rose
Hall . . . and Rosa Palmer was dead probably before the While Witch was born.
Back in 1746 Henry Panning, who'd just bought the
plantation, married Rosa Kelly, a daughter of Irish-born Rev. John Kelley of
neighboring St. Elizabeth Parish.
In six months he was dead; and, to be brief, there followed
him in succession George Ash, who built Rose Hall, Hon. Norwood Witter, and
finally John Palmer, a widower with whom Rosa lived happily until her own death
In 1790.
Jump now to 1819, when Palmer's grandnephew, John Rota
Palmer comes from England to take residence, and in the next year marries Annie
Mary Patterson. He died in 1826. but she lived on to became the mad mistress of
the plantation, and to die somehow in 1833.
It Is easy to see how the tradition of the three murdered
husbands could have developed, for there must have been talk among the slaves
of Rosa Palmer's day. Then came the cruel Anna Palmer . . . and the two women
became one.
Where the "agreeable" lady's husbands are buried
I've never heard. Perhaps it is they who rest near the coconut trees that
nearly every Jamaica visitor passes in the course of island sightseeing.
[Jamaica Journey With Willard de Lue -III, “The Confusing
Tale of the White Witch,” Boston Evening Globe (Ma.), Nov. 30, 1955, p. 7]
***
Wikipedia: The White Witch is a legendary story of a haunting in Jamaica.
According to the legend, the spirit of "Annie Palmer" haunts the
grounds of Rose Hall, Montego Bay. Despite many years of speculation, modern
scholarship has shown the story to be untrue.
According to the legend, the spirit of "Annie
Palmer" haunts the grounds of Rose Hall Plantation near Montego Bay. The
story states that she was born in Haiti to an English mother and Irish father
and spent most of her life in Haiti. When her parents died of yellow fever, she
was adopted by a nanny who taught her witchcraft and voodoo. She moved to
Jamaica and married John Palmer, owner of Rose Hall Plantation. Annie murdered
Palmer along with two subsequent husbands and numerous male plantation slaves,
later being murdered herself by a slave named "Takoo". A song about
the legend called "The Ballad of Annee Palmer" was recorded by Johnny
Cash. For many years Cash owned the
nearby Cinnamon Hill Great House.
~ Investigations of the legend ~
Geoffrey S. Yates, Assistant Archivist, Jamaica Archives,
claimed that the story started with an account by Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell
of the strangling of Mrs. Palmer at the adjacent Palmyra Estate in 1830.
However the passage in Waddell's memoirs simply includes a footnote claiming
that "The estate furnished scenes and characters for Dr. Moore's novel Zeluco. The
cellars and spikes used by a lady owner therefor the necks of her slaves I have
seen, and also the bed on which she was found dead one morning, having been
strangled." However whilst the novel has an anti-slavery theme, the only
scenes set in the Caribbean are located in Cuba and feature none of the details
claimed by Waddell. Waddell, himself an abolitionist, was also writing in the
context of the Baptist War of which Waddell was a first-hand witness. He stated
that the Palmyra Estate was set on fire alongside the Kensington Estate,
located further in land as a signal for a general insurrection.
The legend was elaborated by the journalist John Castello in
1868. Castello was the owner of the local Falmouth Post when he published a
small pamphlet Legend of Rose Hall where he erroneously describes a memorial in
St. James church to "Anne Palmer".
An investigation of the legend in 2007 by Benjamin Radford
concluded that the story was fictionalized, modeled on the title character in a
famous Jamaican novel, The White Witch of Rosehall by Herbert G. de Lisser, published
in 1929. An Annie Palmer unrelated to Rose Hall did exist, and by all accounts
had no tendencies toward sadism or lechery. Rough Guide To Jamaica author Polly
Thomas writes that the name of Annie Palmer may have
become confused with Rosa Palmer, the original mistress of Rose Hall who did
have four husbands but was said to be unwaveringly virtuous.
~ Popular culture ~
·
Barry Reckord's 1975 play White Witch of Rose
Hall is based on the legend.
·
The television series Ghost Adventures featured
an episode at Rose Hall.
·
The 1993 novel Voyager by Diana Gabaldon features
Rose Hall as a setting while the main characters are in Jamaica.
·
Coven featured the song "The White Witch of
Rose Hall" on their first album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps
Souls (1969).
·
The 19th-season finale of America's Next Top
Model featured its final runway show taking place at Rose Hall.
·
Scariest Places on Earth featured Rose Hall in
Season 2 Episode 3, "White Witch".
·
Ghost Brothers featured Rose Hall in Season 2
Episode 5, "Rose Hall"
·
Ghost Hunters International featured Rose Hall
season 2 episode 13
·
The Dead Files
***
MORE Discredited Female Serial Killer Legends & False Reports
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