| Rose Hall Great House | |
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Location within Jamaica
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| General information | |
| Architectural style | Jamaican Georgian |
| Location | Montego Bay, Jamaica |
| Coordinates | |
| Completed | 1770s |
| Renovated | 1960s |
| Design and construction | |
| Owner | Most famously: Annie Palmer, the White Witch of Rose Hall Currently: Michele and John Rollins |
Rose Hall is a Georgian mansion in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The most famous occupant of the house was Annie Palmer, the White Witch.
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Rose Hall is widely regarded to be a visually impressive house and the most famous in Jamaica. It is a mansion in Jamaican Georgian style with a stone base and a plastered upper storey, high on the hillside, with a panorama view over the coast. Built in the 1770s, Rose Hall was restored in the 1960s to its former splendor, with mahogany floors, interior windows and doorways, paneling and wooden ceilings. It is decorated with silk wallpaper printed with palms and birds, ornamented with chandeliers and furnished with mostly European antiques. There is a bar downstairs and a restaurant. Now, Rose Hall has been used as a museum for tourists who wish to see where Annie Palmer ate, slept and also areas of the house where she is said to haunt. Possibly areas where the murders took place e.g. in her bedroom, where she suffocated one of her lovers with a pillow.
Rose Hall is also known for holding séances to try and conjure her spirit and gain answers about the mysterious deaths of her husbands and fanciful legends of underground tunnels, bloodstains and hauntings that surround it. There is little evidence to support the legend other than a version of which was written by H. G. de Lisser in his 1928 novel The White Witch of Rose Hall.
Rose Hall was bought in 1965 by former Miss USA Michele Rollins and her entrepreneur husband John Rollins. They refurbished Rose Hall at great personal expense and conceptualized a tour that showcase Rose Hall's slave history, antique splendor and original fittings.
The White Witch, Annie Palmer, was born in Haiti. She was adopted by her Haitian Nanny, who was known to practice voodoo, after her parents died of the yellow fever. According to legend, she was a beautiful but spoiled young white woman who arrived on the island as the wife of the owner of Rose Hall Plantation, east of Montego Bay in 1820. Annie's husband, and several husbands afterwards, all died suspiciously. Annie became known as a mistress of voodoo, using it to terrorize her slaves, and taking male slaves into her bed at night all of whom she subsequently murdered. It is also rumored that there was a love triangle between herself, her husband John and a slave named Millie.
She is also supposed to have dispatched three husbands allegedly because she was bored of them. Assuming this is true it would make Annie an extreme example of a clinical psychopath although the stories are speculation at best. The legend has her murdered in her bed during the slave uprisings of the 1830s. It is also rumored that her last husband did out live her, possibly being the one that killed her, rather than her killing him.
Herbert G. de Lisser popularized the story with his 1928 novel The White Witch of Rosehall (ISBN 0510199046).