A murderous ghost haunted an exclusive Jamaican resort for centuries. But could she survive a paranormal investigation?

(CNN) — By day, it’s among the most spectacular historical sites in the Caribbean, a pilgrimage destination for fans of Johnny Cash, and the home of a championship golf course. Yet when the sun sets over Rose Hall Great House, the atmosphere shifts. Some staff refuse to venture out after dark, lest they fall foul of the shadowy figure spotted stalking the grounds on horseback.

The rider, according to eyewitnesses, is Annie Palmer. She is the “White Witch,” a 19th century plantation owner who murdered three of her husbands and terrorized the slaves of Rose Hall before she was killed in retribution, condemning her spirit to haunt the land where the White Witch Golf Course sits today.

It’s Jamaica’s most fabled “duppy” (ghost) story, a chilling bedtime tale whispered widely throughout the Caribbean. A cornerstone of tourism in Montego Bay, Palmer’s shadow stretches far and wide in popular culture, onto screen, stage, page and even song, courtesy of former local resident Cash.

The “Man in Black” would write music from within the grand old walls of Cinnamon Hill Great House, an 18^th century estate just off the 14^th fairway of the site’s second golf course, including 1973 hit “The Ballad of Annie Palmer.”

“At night I hear you riding, and I hear your lover’s call,” Cash sang, “And I still can feel your presence round the Great House at Rose Hall.”

Yet not all have been so spooked. Far from just contesting Palmer’s presence today, some have questioned whether she ever existed at all.

Reign of terror

Keith Stein, director of golf operations at Rose Hall Developments, is familiar with the tale of Palmer.

The Canadian has seen it all since making the permanent switch from Toronto to Montego Bay in 1992, overseeing the construction of the White Witch championship course – 18 holes of sloping green bordered by turquoise seas – before its grand opening in 2000.

Since the course opened, golf broadcasters have rubbed shoulders with a regular stream of camera crews looking to capture all manner of paranormal phenomena around Rose Hall, including for “Ghost Hunters,” which in 2010 sought evidence of Palmer’s lingering spirit. (Cinnamon Hill Golf Course, White Witch’s sister circuit, has an equally eerie media history. The waterfall behind the 15th green served as the setting for Baron Samedi’s sacrificial voodoo ritual in 1973 James Bond classic “Live and Let Die.”)

But who was Palmer? The story, as recalled by Stein, goes as follows.

Born in Haiti to British parents in the early 1800s, Annie Mary Paterson was raised by a nanny who taught her voodoo – spiritual practices known as “Obeah” in Jamaica. Paterson moved to Jamaica after financial hardship, where she met and married John Palmer, the wealthy owner of the sprawling Rose Hall sugar cane plantation.

Annie supposedly murdered her husband to assume ownership of Rose Hall, which she went on to run with an iron fist. Palmer would sit on the balcony of her hilltop estate, which offered panoramic views of the 4,000-acre plantation. Should anyone be deemed to be shirking their duties, she would ride out on horseback to deal out punishment.

“She terrorized her slaves, and she took men as she wanted to pleasure her,” Stein said. “If she saw people not working, she would whip them.”

Palmer’s reign of terror lasted until 1834 – the year slavery was formally abolished in the British colony – when she was killed by Takoo, one of her slaves, Stein added. (The machete murder is reenacted as part of the Great House interactive Night Tour, run four days a week.)

The hall was torched in the aftermath of Palmer’s demise, Stein continued, and lay decrepit for well over a century; its colossal husk left undisturbed save for the occasional group of intrepid local kids who would swing among its splintering rafters. Playtime ended in the 1960s, when Delaware businessman John Rollins bought the site and set about restoring the Great House to its former glory.

By the 1970s a restored Rose Hall was the centerpiece of a sprawling modern resort and residential complex. Yet old shadows still loom. Today, some club staff refuse to go out after nightfall, while others are reluctant to tend the course near the adjacent, centuries-old cemetery, revealed Stein, lest they have a run-in with Palmer’s ghost.

“It’s a spooky place … there’s an eerie feeling that comes about you,” Stein said. “You do have this sense that overcomes you that something terrible has happened here in the past. You can’t miss it.”

Identity crisis

Benjamin Radford has built his career on going through eerie feelings with a fine-tooth comb.

The American author is a paranormal investigator and deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine. Radford stumbled into an investigation of the Palmer haunting by chance. On holiday in Jamaica in 2006, he overheard mention of a ghost tour of Rose Hall and couldn’t resist. Interest piqued, Radford returned for a second visit armed with days’ worth of research under his belt in order to conduct more rigorous testing of the guide’s account.

“It was presented as a true story,” said Radford, who published his investigation in a 2008 magazine and later a book. “Now, of course, to any skeptic or journalist worth his or her salt, ‘based on a true story’ are fighting words.”

First on the agenda was an investigation into claimed encounters with Palmer’s spirit. This was the easy part – most in Rose Hall’s case were the flash of a camera reflected off glass or an object, he said.

Visual or physical encounters, such as one tourist’s claim to have felt a push from the White Witch, fell under “a very wide variety of claimed phenomena” and could be explained by a psychological concept dubbed priming, Radford, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, explained.

“Rose Hall is manicured, amazing, weird, cinematic and it has this bloody history,” Radford said. “So when people go there, they are primed to interpret any random thing – anything that can’t be immediately explained – as being part of the ghost story.”

As far as Radford is concerned, the beautiful but sadistic, voodoo-practicing Annie Palmer never lived. Instead, Palmer is simply an amalgam of fact and fiction that has snowballed into the legend told today.

He traced the origin of the Palmer tale to an 1830 account by an abolitionist called Reverend Waddell, who claimed a Mrs. Palmer was killed by slaves at the nearby Palmyra estate.

In 1868, gossip was enshrined in print courtesy of a pamphlet published by James Castello, who described Palmer’s murder of her first two husbands – both via poisoning. Then, in 1929, the legend grew with Herbert G. de Lisser’s novel “The White Witch of Rosehall,” that bestowed upon Palmer her moniker, added the murder of a third husband, and further blurred the lines between truth and fiction.

Geoffrey S. Yates, an assistant archivist at the Jamaica Archives in the mid-20th century, along with other historians, has argued that Annie Palmer may have been confused with Rosa Palmer (Kelly), the original mistress of Rose Hall, who died in 1790, 12 years before Annie Palmer (née Paterson) was born.

Paterson married the grand-nephew of Rose Hall’s original owner, possessed no slaves when she sold her rights to Rose Hall in 1830, before dying in the Jamaican hamlet of Bonavista in 1846, Yates wrote.

“Categorically” neither woman was murdered by slaves like the purported “sinister beauty” Palmer, he added, and there was “no evidence that either of them was involved in debauchery or unnatural cruelty.”

Endurance

Yet for Radford, unpicking the facts behind the Palmer legend is less intriguing than how it was spread and sustained. Just why has the tale of the White Witch proved so widespread that he is yet to meet a Jamaican who does not know it?

Radford is not short on theories. For one, “there’s a long tradition of loving terrible villains,” he said. It’s a tale embellished by taboo tropes – “sex, death, voodoo … and black magic” – common in Caribbean folklore. He also argued Palmer’s arrival, terror, and demise “fits in perfectly with Jamaican history,” loosely mirroring the era of British rule and its slave trade, before its eventual abolition.

“She’s explicitly a transplant,” Radford said. “She’s a White woman – a rich, powerful, cruel, sadistic White woman – that represents the slave-owning class at the time.”

Such stories are also “self-perpetuating,” Radford added, with tourists and ghost hunters continuing to flock to the site, generating their own paranormal evidence and thus preserving the legend.

But the bottom line is stoking the legend is good for Rose Hall’s bottom line.

“It comes pre-packaged with the place,” said Radford. “If you run a boat shop in Inverness, why would you not run Nessie boat tours?” For the hall’s owners and operators, “it’s just not in their best interest to look at it too closely (with skepticism) – that would be the way I would put it.”

Make no mistake: ghosts aside, Rose Hall has weathered hard times. Once a flourishing spot for tourism and real estate, Montego Bay was rocked by the 2008 financial crisis, Stein recalled. The White Witch course – which had cost some $8.5 million to build – was forced into contingency planning, but rebounded over the subsequent decade.

Things were looking up until the Covid-19 pandemic began, costing the site millions of dollars, according to Stein. He calculated that the majority of the course’s revenue came during tourist season, from November to April, and the course, to this day, remains opens only during those months to help meet running costs.

Montego Bay remains a hub for Jamaican tourism, and though tours of Cash’s former residence generate significant footfall, it is the enduring allure of the White Witch that drives interest in the area.

“It’s another case of where the legend has been co-opted by different people for different purposes,” Radford concluded.

“Reverend Waddell co-opted the legend in support of trying to end slavery; the Rose Hall owners at different times have co-opted the legend to promote tourism; the locals have co-opted the legend as one of many dubious and scary things to be afraid of at night, so it fits in perfectly.

“If there wasn’t an Annie Palmer, someone would have had to make her up.”

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