A Ghostly Story of the White Witch and Miss Rose

A Ghostly Story of the White Witch and Miss Rose

The island of Jamacia is a place where family secrets and human foibles are shrouded in the smoke of misinformation and mysticism of the most sinister kind. And the good folks of Little Kent were no different than those in other small villages all over the world where ignorance, parochialism, and superstition dominate closed minds. It is also a place where grudges fester, and scores are settled with powerful aid from the occult. This Jamaican mindset is best illustrated by the amalgamation of folklore and myth in the legendary tale of Annie Palmer, the White Witch of Rose Hall.  

Rose Hall Great House just outside Montego Bay is a popular attraction for tourists as well as locals because of its association with the female plantation owner of the most vicious sort dubbed the White Witch of Rose Hall by slaves. Annie reportedly grew up in Haiti where her nanny, a voodoo priestess, nurtured her in the black arts. After her nanny’s death, Annie moved to Jamaica in search of a wealthy husband. She met and allegedly cast a spell on the owner of Rose Hall Estate, John Palmer, and trapped him in marriage. Palmer owned a vast and prominent plantation that was regarded as the finest Great House on the island. Annie poisoned her husband for control of the plantation. She allegedly married two more times and killed those husbands.

Anne ruled her plantation with an iron fist, and because of her voodoo practices, she was feared by all. Annie supposedly also murdered the infants of her slaves so that she could harvest their bones for black magic. Annie was murdered by her slave lover, Takoo, in retaliation for her killing one of his relatives. She was buried in a tomb behind the Great House, and a voodoo ritual was performed to keep her locked in. The ritual was not completed, and Annie’s spirit was free to roam the plantation, and still does to this very day. That’s how the popular legend goes.

The lurid tale of the wicked white witch and her slave lover became widely popularized as fact based in part by the work of Jamaican journalist Herbert George de Lisser who wrote The White Witch of Rose Hall, which was published in 1929. Today, Rose Hall Great House is open for tours daily and at night it draws locals and tourists alike to hear the story of the White Witch of Rose Hall. People claim to have witnessed Palmer’s ghost riding her horse around the plantation. She is also sometimes seen on the balcony.[i]

Visitation by the dead is more than just folklore in Jamaica. People live with the practice of unleashing a notorious ancestorial spirit or “duppy” on one’s enemies. It is more than just putting a curse on someone. If you are spiritually well-connected, you could conjure up the dead to settle your scores with the living. The really wicked practice the very black art of Obeah. This religious ritual was brought to the island by enslaved west Africans where it evolved overtime into witchcraft and sorcery. Obeah became “a religion of fear, suspicion and revenge.” [ii]

Slave revolts in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean colonies were led by Obeah practitioners.[iii] In fact, this form of the occult was considered so powerful that colonial governments passed anti-obeah laws to extinguish the threat. The first such law in Jamaica was written in 1760 and last revised in 1973. Punishment for practicing the black art includes imprisonment for up to a year, with hard labor, or being whipped in lieu of a prison sentence. Yet the practice continued unabated.

Nowadays, you can engage a Jamaican Obeah man to bewitch or “mash up” your enemy or to destroy fortune and property. My maternal grandmother was not a practitioner, but she certainly believed in the power of Obeah. “High science” she called it. But not to worry, granny was protected from the evil forces all around. Her only son gave her a ring—an amulet—that she proudly showed off. She was confident it would ward off any offensive spirit sent her way by those bad people with the intent of doing her harm. Granny kept a concoction of garlic, vinegar, and tomato seeds in a dish behind her front door. That was her traditional brew for keeping unwanted spirits out of the house. So, she confined her ancestral dark arts practice to the use of medicinal herbs and bushes that she gathered from her garden and the wayside to maintain her stamina.

Rose Hall is apparently not the only haunted house on the island. Jamaicans will tell you that they have on occasion encountered the malicious spirits of the departed, “duppies” as they are known in the national parlance. But the White Witch of Rose Hall was no match for the duppy of Miss Rose.

By all accounts, “Miss Rose,” as they called her, was a kind, soft-spoken woman with a very light complexion. She was my grandfather's second wife. He was 50 and she was a 28-year-old “spinster” when they got married in 1945. They lived a tranquil married life in a remote hillside town on the north coast of the island, but the couple had no children. And even as daily life went on in Little Kent, death was never very far away. It seemed to hunt and haunt Grandfather more than most mortals. He lost his first wife and two children to early deaths. In fact, he was so sure of his imminent demise that he bought lumber to make his own coffin. He stored the cedar planks under the cellar of their tiny village cottage. His second wife inherited that lumber when she died in 1965 from hypertension and a “cerebral accident.” She was only 53. I was there in the aftermath of the event. It is among my earliest memories of being around Grandfather.

The wake for Miss Rose was an early childhood trauma for me. We arrived in Little Kent late in the evening to find Grandfather’s little cottage crammed with relatives and neighbors who came to show their respect and to hang on for a free meal. After the commotion of the evening settled down, it was time for washing the body of Miss Rose that was lying in a metal tub full of ice. The women in the extended family had the duty to prepare her for the wake and burial. My five siblings and I were bundled in a single bed. It was probably in the same little back room where I was born some seven years earlier. I could hear the discussion among the women about the propriety of a boy being in the room during the washing ritual. I pretended to be asleep among the huddle of younger kids piled on the old straw mattress. Although traumatized by being in the same room with the dead, and overhearing the women’s concern about my being there, I did sheepishly peek out of one sleepy eye to see the spectacle of a completely naked woman being raised vertically out of the tank of ice water. She was stiff as a board. I closed my errant eye quickly and drifted off into what must have been an onslaught of nightmares for the remaining hours of darkness.

The next day’s drama was just as haunting because Grandfather raised quite a stir when he accused a member of the extended family of stealing his money during the wake at the crowded house. He complained that it was, “the one God Almighty pound" he had. The ensuing family feud verged on physical confrontation with the disputatious old man over his missing currency. They managed to get Grandfather to calm down and when he searched diligently through his hiding places, he found the pound note in his jacket pocket. In 1965, the one-pound sterling note was the second largest paper money bill in circulation on the Jamaican island. The missing money was probably not enough to buy a cow or a casket, but it was certainly enough to raise Grandfather’s ire even in his moment of grief. 

I remember the drive from the funeral service to the gravesite through the muddy clay of the narrow road up to Johnson where Miss Rose was to be buried behind the cottage on Grandfather’s little plot of land. There was a big dispute about which vehicle Grandfather should ride in for the funeral procession from the church to the gravesite. The body of Miss Rose was loaded in my uncle David’s white station wagon. The back seat no doubt folded down to make room for the glistening cedar casket that my father had expertly finished to a high polished gloss. It was custom made for the occasion out of the aged cedar planks Grandfather had bought some years ago. Grandfather was installed in the front seat of the station wagon. The dispute was about whether he should be in a vehicle in front of the cortege or in one following the makeshift hearse. It was apparently very bad luck or even tempting fate for the grieving spouse to go ahead of the coffin of a departed partner. They made Grandfather get out of the hearse and into another car.

So here he was again, the unlucky supposed Irishman widowed for the second time at age 73. But he dodged the bullet only briefly because shortly after the burial of his beloved Miss Rose, Grandfather got very sick and had to go live with his oldest son in St. Ann’s Bay. He left the familiar but sorrowful surroundings of his little cottage in Johnson for life in a parsonage full of noisy grandchildren and the scrutiny by nosey parishioners.

Grandfather and Miss Rose, thankfully, were out of sight and out of my young mind. It was sometime in 1966 when the sinister visitations started. My father was far away in Canada. We were huddled in the house, five kids all under 10 years old and my mother, frightened out of our wits by thuds in the night. I remember hearing Mom yell out in the darkness “go back to Johnson where you belong” in her desperate plea for the duppy of Miss Rose to go away and leave us alone.

There was no doubt Miss Rose was the nighttime terror we heard pulling out lumber from underneath the crawl space of my childhood home in the remote Kelly Pen gully. My father had indeed stored in the crawl space the lumber left over from the coffin he made for Miss Rose. We should have been done with her after the burial in Little Kent but to our horror, it appeared that she had come back from the dead to claim the rest of the timber.

I never saw the duppy but, like the rest of the family sleeping in the small cinderblock house, I did hear those odd, hard-to-explain noises in the middle of the night. Maybe it was just the power of suggestion working on my impressionable young mind, but the loud thuds and reverberations of solid wood being tossed about were unmistakable. No wind or animal could have made those strange and still inexplicable sounds. And certainly not the fact that they were emanating from under the narrow crawl space. I was sure that if Miss Rose had a score to settle with anyone in the house, it had to be me for peeping out at her corpse during her final bath. We never saw any lumber in the yard in the mornings after her nocturnal appearances, but the legend and my childhood trauma live on.

People in the Caribbean and in parts of Africa historically used the ritual for “fixing the dead” to keep them in their graves. It did not work too well for vanquishing the spirits of Miss Rose or the White Witch of Rose Hall. Grandfather died of cardiac failure at age 88. Patriarch of the family, he is buried in the St. Ann’s Bay Cemetery along with the only honest men in the parish. Grandfather left me with a positive image of old age that has stemmed my fear of death and duppies. I can’t say that I have seen him since he died, but he visits in my dreams always shrouded in the sweet scent of pipe-tobacco smoke, giving me comfort and direction in crisis.

[i] https://theculturetrip.com/caribbean/jamaica/articles/who-is-the-white-witch-of-rose-hall/; and Radford, Benjamin (September 2008), "The White Witch of Rose Hall", Fortean Times, no. 239, ISSN 0308-5899.

[ii] Bilby, Kenneth M., and Jerome S. Handler. "Obeah." The Journal of Caribbean History 38, no. 2 (2004): 153-183.

[iii] Wisecup, Kelly. "Knowing obeah." Atlantic studies 10, no. 3 (2013): 406-425.