Rose Hall Great House

Rose Hall Great House is a classic 18th-century sugar plantation mansion built on the shores of Montego Bay in 1780. Today, after years of neglect, the house has been renovated to remind visitors of Jamaica’s colonial past and official functions and parties are held in the lavishly restored interiors and glorious tropical gardens.

However, this is more than a pretty house – its last mistress, Annie Palmer is an infamous figure in Jamaican history and the house also tells her story. A practitioner of voodoo, the Haitian art of black magic, Palmer presided over her plantation and the slaves who worked it in a cruel and despotic fashion.

Picking slaves who took her fancy, she would take them to her bed and once tired of them, would murder and bury them in an unmarked grave; she dispatched three husbands under suspicious circumstances and they were apparently buried under the tall palm trees beside the beach; and she indulged in human sacrifice, especially that of infants, to make her voodoo powers even stronger.

Eventually, after she murdered her Overseer’s hoped-for son-in-law, the vindictive and vicious woman was killed by a slave uprising in 1831 (not before time). The White Witch of Jamaica’s horrible rule was over, the plantation disbanded and the property left to fall into ruin. Locals say she haunts the place still, riding in a green, velvet habit on a large black horse, heard as a series of hurried footsteps through the main hall, in the echoes of cries from babies she murdered and old music as if from a ball long ago.

Daily viewing.

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This post was written by imilgrom, posted on February 28, 2013 Thursday at 9:06 am