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Every year thousands of tourists and Jamaicans visit the famous Rose Hall great house, on the island’s North Coast, and enjoy a tour of the building, lovingly restored at enormous cost, and magnificently furnished with antiques.
Period costumed guides take visitors through the house and re-tell the story of Annie Palmer, once mistress of Rose Hall, a woman of unbridled passions and cruelty, steeped in obeah, blood and murder.
The line of patter today differs very little from a late Victorian version of the story, which tells how Annie “poisoned her late husband, aided by her paramour, a Negro, whom she flogged to death to close his lips; again married, poisoned her 2nd husband, whose death she hastened by stabbing him with a knife, married her third paramour ….who disappeared mysteriously.”
Her 4th husband made off while he still had his life.
The story has it that she was killed by her slaves, and her supposed grave, at the side of the great house, is pointed out to visitors. It is all essentially the story that H. G. DeLisser set down in his book The White Witch of RoseHall in 1929, and which was retold – with considerably more sex and violence – by Harold Underhill in his 1968 novel Jamaica White.
The trouble is, to use the vernacular: “It don’t go so,” John Palmer, Custos – essentially the chief magistrate of St. James Parish, acquired the property which became Rose Hall through his marriage to the widow of the previous owner. He began building the great house in 1770. It took him 10 years to complete, at the astonishing cost of 30,000 Pounds, its interior replete with an imposing mahogany staircase of singular grandeur.
The Reverend Hope Waddell wrote that the “floors and stairs, wainscoting and ceiling, doors and windows were of mahogany, cedar, rosewood, ebony, orange and other native hardwoods of various colours.”
Mrs. Rosa Palmer’s first 3 husbands had all died of natural causes. She was married to John Palmer for 23 years, dying at the age of 72 in 17909. He commissioned British sculptor John Bacon, R.A., to create a monument for her, and placed it in St. James’ Parish Church in Montego Bay.
Mounting debts eventually caught up with Palmer and he was forced to mortgage the Rose Hall estate and move to more modest accommodations at Brandon Hill. The property was under the jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery at the time of his death in 1797.
Rose Hall apparently remained unoccupied until 1820, when Palmer’s grand-nephew and heir, John Rose Palmer, obtained the title and moved into the great house with his wife, Anna.
British architect James Hakewell depicted the revitalized Rose Hall, with its pillared gateway on the main road, and half-mile driveway to the house, in his book A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, published in 1825.
John Rose Palmer died 2 years later and his widow, Anna, moved away. Rose Hall was empty once more. In August, 1830, when she allowed Presbyterian missionary Waddell to use it for congregation, he noted that it was occupied only by “rats, bats and owls.”
Archivist Geoffrey Yates has convincingly shown that Anna Palmer was Jamaican born and bred, daughter of a planter and granddaughter of a former Custos of the Parish of Hanover. Moreover, she married only once, died peacefully at Bonavista, near Montego Bay, in 1846 and was buried locally.
So how did the legend get started?
In 1868, John Castello, Editor of The Falmouth Post, published a gory tale of debauchery, obeah and murder at Rose Hall, implying that it had happened almost 4 decades earlier. He identified Mrs. Anna Palmer as the central character, adding that her memorial was in St. James’ Parish Church.
Through a mish-mash of mis-information, mis-statement and imagination, Annie Palmer – an orphaned Irish immigrant of DeLisser’s story, an English adventuress in Underhill’s one – became immortalized as a murderess.
The Henderson family who owned the Rose Hall estate for some years, removed the mahogany staircase from the great house, along with the main doors, and installed them in their home in Kingston. The building, which gained an evil reputation, remained empty, gradually falling into ruin.
In 1965 the property was bought by American multimillionaire John R. Rollins , who developed a golf course, built a large resort hotel and undertook to restore Rose Hall. He spared no expense in the reconstruction and furnishing and then presented it to the nation as a heritage site.
Who actually lies in the grave beside the great house? At a gathering of psychics held on the grounds several years ago, a Greek Cypriot soothsayer named Bambos declared to an interested audience of 8,000 people that he had just dug up a brass cloth and a voodoo doll.
They were, he said, the remains of Annie Palmer.
‘Nuff said.
Period costumed guides take visitors through the house and re-tell the story of Annie Palmer, once mistress of Rose Hall, a woman of unbridled passions and cruelty, steeped in obeah, blood and murder.
The line of patter today differs very little from a late Victorian version of the story, which tells how Annie “poisoned her late husband, aided by her paramour, a Negro, whom she flogged to death to close his lips; again married, poisoned her 2nd husband, whose death she hastened by stabbing him with a knife, married her third paramour ….who disappeared mysteriously.”
Her 4th husband made off while he still had his life.
The story has it that she was killed by her slaves, and her supposed grave, at the side of the great house, is pointed out to visitors. It is all essentially the story that H. G. DeLisser set down in his book The White Witch of RoseHall in 1929, and which was retold – with considerably more sex and violence – by Harold Underhill in his 1968 novel Jamaica White.
The trouble is, to use the vernacular: “It don’t go so,” John Palmer, Custos – essentially the chief magistrate of St. James Parish, acquired the property which became Rose Hall through his marriage to the widow of the previous owner. He began building the great house in 1770. It took him 10 years to complete, at the astonishing cost of 30,000 Pounds, its interior replete with an imposing mahogany staircase of singular grandeur.
The Reverend Hope Waddell wrote that the “floors and stairs, wainscoting and ceiling, doors and windows were of mahogany, cedar, rosewood, ebony, orange and other native hardwoods of various colours.”
Mrs. Rosa Palmer’s first 3 husbands had all died of natural causes. She was married to John Palmer for 23 years, dying at the age of 72 in 17909. He commissioned British sculptor John Bacon, R.A., to create a monument for her, and placed it in St. James’ Parish Church in Montego Bay.
Mounting debts eventually caught up with Palmer and he was forced to mortgage the Rose Hall estate and move to more modest accommodations at Brandon Hill. The property was under the jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery at the time of his death in 1797.
Rose Hall apparently remained unoccupied until 1820, when Palmer’s grand-nephew and heir, John Rose Palmer, obtained the title and moved into the great house with his wife, Anna.
British architect James Hakewell depicted the revitalized Rose Hall, with its pillared gateway on the main road, and half-mile driveway to the house, in his book A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, published in 1825.
John Rose Palmer died 2 years later and his widow, Anna, moved away. Rose Hall was empty once more. In August, 1830, when she allowed Presbyterian missionary Waddell to use it for congregation, he noted that it was occupied only by “rats, bats and owls.”
Archivist Geoffrey Yates has convincingly shown that Anna Palmer was Jamaican born and bred, daughter of a planter and granddaughter of a former Custos of the Parish of Hanover. Moreover, she married only once, died peacefully at Bonavista, near Montego Bay, in 1846 and was buried locally.
So how did the legend get started?
In 1868, John Castello, Editor of The Falmouth Post, published a gory tale of debauchery, obeah and murder at Rose Hall, implying that it had happened almost 4 decades earlier. He identified Mrs. Anna Palmer as the central character, adding that her memorial was in St. James’ Parish Church.
Through a mish-mash of mis-information, mis-statement and imagination, Annie Palmer – an orphaned Irish immigrant of DeLisser’s story, an English adventuress in Underhill’s one – became immortalized as a murderess.
The Henderson family who owned the Rose Hall estate for some years, removed the mahogany staircase from the great house, along with the main doors, and installed them in their home in Kingston. The building, which gained an evil reputation, remained empty, gradually falling into ruin.
In 1965 the property was bought by American multimillionaire John R. Rollins , who developed a golf course, built a large resort hotel and undertook to restore Rose Hall. He spared no expense in the reconstruction and furnishing and then presented it to the nation as a heritage site.
Who actually lies in the grave beside the great house? At a gathering of psychics held on the grounds several years ago, a Greek Cypriot soothsayer named Bambos declared to an interested audience of 8,000 people that he had just dug up a brass cloth and a voodoo doll.
They were, he said, the remains of Annie Palmer.
‘Nuff said.
Liz
...Thank you ackeegirl! 
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