Season 07 Episode 07: Mansion on the Hill

wherever you get your podcasts now. Continuing with Unexplained, please be advised that this episode contains themes of slavery and torture that some may find disturbing. It's nineteen oh five. A small party of maids are sent from England to the Caribbean to cast their eyes over the crumbling great house that their employers have recently he purchased. Located roughly ten miles from Montego Bay, the Jamaican Georgian House Rose Hall,

overlooks the north coast of the island. The view is panoramic spectacular, but the wide blue sky and golden sun cannot compete with the heaviness that lurks in the air. In the seventy years prior to the maid's arrival at rose Hall, the house has fallen into disrepair after the abrupt exit of its former owners. The once impressive mahogany gateway is nothing but crumbling stone, defaced by those who fear and abhor the place. The ornaments that once decorated

the tops of the pillars have been stolen. Now rust and decay are its only adornments. Once a grand avenue of trees of infinite variety lined the half mile up to the property, far reaching part giant mahogany, the sweet smelling tang of orange trees. Now, though, the maid's horses shy away from the foreboding place, and the carriage is unable to proceed along the old road, so covered is it by weeds and bushes, and so they continue on foot.

The mansion emerges, pulled into their view through a dense thicket, as if by some invisible hand. The first thing that surely strikes them is how huge the places. The flight of steps up to the vast front door are over fifteen feet high. The landing place at the top is

a portico about twenty feet high. The dark mahogany doors or at least four inches thick, with huge hinges shaped like sea monsters that appear to be in an endless effort to bite themselves free of their posts, the maids enter and walk through into the main hall, the echoes of their footsteps muffled by dust as they make their way over the once lustrous, dark wooden floors. Despite the daylight playing through the hall, the atmosphere is unquestionably dark

and oppressive. The hall, like everything else, is also vast, at forty feet long and lined with brooding portraits. The carved gilded frames are stained and dull, but the paint has maintained its lustra and the faces are still fresh and alive, the hall's sole occupants, keeping watch over their former abode as it crumbles around them. One portrait is of a striking woman dressed all in white with jet

black hair, crowned in an orange floral wreath. Though she looks to the maids as though she is dressed as a new bride, there is nothing of the honeymoon happiness in her expression. Her mouth is set, but her eyes seem to follow the maids as they crossed the hall. You're listening to unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. As the maids continue through the mansion, they move first past

the downstairs bedrooms. All are equipped lavishly, though their furnishings are dusty and coated in cobwebs and eaten away in patches by many legged things. Moving on through the many other rooms and halls, the maids scratch notes in their small books, recording all the things they need to relay to their employers, the work that will be required, the staff needed, and the furniture that must be bought in

order to turn this strange place into a home. When they examined the far wall of a dressing room, the maids notice an entrance to an underground passage. They've heard about this passageway, heard rumors about the dark deeds that happened along it. There are other doors, other halls, banqueting rooms, and a grand staircase that twists up to the second floor. Though the wood is worn and damp, it retains its

former splendor. It is said that it was so beautiful that the English Governor General offered five hundred pounds about seventy thousand pounds to day to be taken down and sent to London. As they go, The maids don't leave each other's sight, an instinct perhaps telling them that they're better off sticking together. After all, they've heard all the stories about Rose Hall. Couldn't help, but no notice the

way faces darkened on their journey toward it. Whenever they spoke the name of the place, the whispers of murder, torture, and other vile deeds said to have been committed there, and something else too, The so called White Witch, who is said to haunt the property, often supposedly seen galloping across the grounds on a ghostly horse before vanishing into mist and shadow, or appearing at the top of the staircase with a sickening aura of malice. Nonetheless on the

maid's continue. The second floor is comprised of eight smaller rooms and suites that sweep across the back length of the house, with a balcony overlooking another portico, and it is to this balcony that one made drifts to take in the stunning view from the back of the house, the favorite view apparently of one of the mansions former residents. The maid is careful where she steps. The balustrades are crumbling like everything else in the house, and the jutting

platform beneath her creeks ominously. Perhaps she thinks she'll only stay for a moment, that she'll take in the sight of the estates, now wildly overgrown land, and imagine what it had once been like, when the lawns were trimmed and the trees filled with fruit, and the view to Palmyra, the neighboring plantation that had once been joined with this one.

She is indeed only there for a moment. Those that bore witness to the moment the maid tumbled over the balcony to her death spoke of her lurching suddenly, as though she were thrown by an invisible set of hands. There are others who say this story never happened, that the maid and the supposedly haunted house that chiefly concerned today's episode are nothing but legends spun out of Jamaica's

violent and brutal colonial history. Perhaps ghost is just the name we give to a lingering horror, the suspicion or dread that is affiliated with a place, a way of articulating the almost tangible manner in which terrible events can linger on in the locusts of where they were perpetrated In a time when record keeping was inaccurate and oral storytelling the main mode of communication. This blending of real happenings with supernatural consequences is what makes the story of

the White Witch of Rose Hall so fascinating. Begins with a young girl. Annie Patterson, was ten years old when she moved with her family from England to the land known to some as Sandmang on the western side of the island known today as Haiti. She was born in England in eighteen o two to an English mother and an Irish father, but was almost immediately orphaned in the Caribbean when her parents died from yellow fever. It is said that she was then raised by her nanny, a

local Haitian woman who was well practiced in voodoo. It is said that she taught Annie to be skilled in black magic. Two after the death of her nanny, in about eighteen twenty, a seventeen or eighteen year old Annie moved from San Domang to Jamaica in search of a wealthy husband, one of the few routes to a comfortable life that was afforded to women at the time. The search didn't last long, and the following year she supposedly

married one John Palmer, owner of Rose Hall. They managed the property together, as well as the connecting power mirror, creating a joined estate that constituted seven thousand acres of sugar plantation land and anywhere between three hundred and two thousand enslaved people. The house and land were worth well over thirty thousand pounds roughly three and a half million

in today's purchasing power. Annie was said to often be seen standing on her favorite balcony, overseeing the operations of the plantation, or riding around the estate in what some might call men's clothes. Her legs confidently astride her horn. But monitoring the mechanations of her new home did not amuse her for long, and after some time she began ordering enslaved men into her bed, her abuses growing to such an extent that they could no longer be concealed

from her husband. After catching her in the act, he whipped her mercilessly. Now consumed by rage and humiliation, Annie was said to have bowed revenge, and not long after, John Palmer died suddenly and mysteriously. In those days of unidentified fevers and cholera, and very few were diligent in recording the causes of death. Perhaps it was the case that most deaths were sudden and mysterious, but the rumors spread anyway and consumed Rose Hall faster than any disease.

Whispers of poison slipped into a mug of coffee, of fatal drugs, rubbed on meat, of unearthly powers sucking the life force from his body. And whispers of a grand inheritance for a young widow who had not born John Palmer a child. And then once Annie became the sole mistress of Rose Hall, her reign of terror truly began. Some say it was her skill in voodoo that incited

such dread, but she was fearsome enough without it. She is said to have whipped her enslaved for the slightest misdemeanor, tortured those who disobeyed her, and killed anyone who dared utter the name John Palmer. It was also said that she killed those poor men that she'd forced into her

bed in an effort to preserve her virtuous reputation. Stories of her malice and barbarism knew no bounds, and raged from tales of babies born to enslaved women being killed, their bones harvested for dark magic to murmurs of a torture chamber in the basement of the house. It is around this time, according to legend, that Annie Palmer received the sobriquet of the White Witch of rose Hall. Not long after the death of her first husband, Annie is

said to have married again. This supposed second husband, according to some, was also an English planter. He too was outraged by Annie's so called adultery. It was said that after an especially heated argument, he was promptly stabbed to death.

Those that claimed to have witnessed the dying man's final struggle described the pooling of blood on his shirt, the gurgling sound he made as he scrabbled at his chest, and his frenzied attempts to reach Annie and drag her to the afterworld with him, as he weltered and died at her feet. It is said that Annie then began locking the rooms where her husbands died, hiding the stains

of her murders. She was apparently married again relatively soon after, to a man who was described as rude and unlettered, who married her solely for her wealth. He was strangled by one of Annie's enslaved male victims. On Annie's orders, his body, like her previous husband's, was feried through the house to the passageway in the downstairs bedroom, which led out to the sea. Annie's own end was said to

have come only a few years later. Her life after her final marriage was described in a pamphlet published in eighteen sixty eight as knights spent amid drunken all scenes too disgusting to describe, while her days were spent inflicting the most tyrannical cruelties and dreadful tortures upon her slaves. There were several versions of this part of the story,

but they all agree on a few key details. Annie fell in love with a man who was in love with the granddaughter of an Obearman, an enslaved practitioner of Jamaican spirituality. In a jealous rage, Annie killed the obearman's granddaughter in revenge. The o bear Man, with the help of those fellow enslaved who'd suffered so long under Annie's tyranny, entered the Great House one night, Then, moving silently through it, he crept into Annie's chamber and strangled her to death.

Annie Palmer's supposed death did not free those she'd terrorized from fear of retribution. Their belief in Annie's voodoo continued to haunt them, as they wondered if she'd use her powers from beyond the grave to exact revenge. So when they buried her, a voodoo ritual was allegedly performed to keep her locked in her tomb, But this ritual was of course not completed, and Annie's wrathful spirit has been

free to roam the estate ever since. The earliest record of Annie's story is thought to come from around eighteen thirty. Then Reverend Hope Masterton is thought to have told his parishioners in Montego Bay about a Missus Palmer who was hanged by those enslaved and her plantation. In eighteen sixty eight, the story appeared in print in a pamphlet written by John Costello, which was called Legend of Rosehall Estate in

the Parish of Saint James. Here the murders take place in the seventeen hundreds, and Costello's black widow like villain is in fact named Rosa Palmer, not Annie. This was then seemingly corrected by a series of letters published in eighteen ninety five. Of particular note was a letter from John W. Broderick, who claimed to have been Annie Palmer's overseer as well as the source for Costello's story. He

reiterated that it was in fact Annie who was the murderer. However, there was a Rosa Palmer married to a Henry Fanning who bought the estate in seventeen forty two, which at the time was known as true friendship. He married Rosa, then named Kelly, in seventeen forty six, but, much like an hour story, died soon after, leaving the estate to her, which by then he'd renamed rose Hall in honor of

his wife. Rosa, too is said to have married many times, culminating in a marriage to one John Palmer, possibly the great uncle of the John Palmer from our story, who at that time was the owner of Palmira, rose Hall's neighboring estate. Rosa's marriage to the senior John brought the two estates together. When Rosa then died in seventeen ninety,

John Palmer became the joint owner of both estates. After the older John Palmer's death in seventeen ninety seven, his two estates were eventually passed down to his great nephew, also named John Palmer. In eighteen eighteen, John duly traveled to Jamaica from England to claim the estate, and on the twenty eighth of March eighteen twenty married a woman named Anne Mary Patterson. Are Annie perhaps or perhaps not. Some say Annie Palmer or Annie Patterson was never a

real person. Some say she never married again, and at that part of the story is just a repurposing of Rosa Palmer's numerous marriages. Some say she was Jamaican born, some that she came to Jamaica from Sandermang, and some that she came straight from England. There is supposedly a record of a Missus Palmer selling whatever rights you may have had to rose Hall and Palmera dying in eighteen forty six at Bonavista. Bona Vista was owned by the

Bernard family, who she'd purportedly sold Rose Hall to. She was allegedly buried in the churchyard at Montego Bay on July ninth. However, there is no tombstone to mark the spot. Skeptics, historians, and believers who argued for centuries about the story of Annie Palmer and the White Witch of rose Hall. In nineteen eleven, the author Joseph Shaw, published his book The True Tale of Rose Hall, telling the story You've just heard, a dreadful tale of voodoo and murder, confirming Annie Palmer

as the White Witch. The story gained notoriety in nineteen twenty nine when The White Witch of Rose Hall, a historical fiction novel by writer Herbert Delissa, was published. This book further entwines facts and fiction, claiming that the ob a man who apparently finished her off, was named Takou, his granddaughter was Millicent, and the man after whom Annie

lost it was a bookkeeper called Robert Rutherford. Over the years, the story has taken on a life of its shifting and evolving into something beyond the binaries of fact and fiction. What remains most curious is that with each attempt to poke holes in the tale seems to come a tighter clinging to the legend as a history. There are many reasons that this might be the case, multitudes that contribute to The White Witch of Rose Hall being heralded today

as Jamaica's most famous and lasting ghost story. This story climbed to its current popularity in the wake of the abolishment of slavery in the Caribbean in eighteen o eight and emancipation in eighteen thirty eight. It's been speculated that it was freely perpetuated by the white postcolonial settler society in an effort to maintain a facade of civility, enabling them to obscure their own links to the past under the supposedly devilish and demonic deeds of one most likely fictitious.

The misogynistic fear of a female plantation owner and female sexuality are also clearly evident, disregarding the biases of whoever tells the story. Regardless of whether or not a barbaric Anni Palmer ever truly existed, there are many similar real tales scattered throughout the violent pages of colonial history. It must be noted that it doesn't require an explicitly violent or brutal act to be perpetrated against an enslaved individual to constitute an act of barbarity. In that context, owning

an individual is a barbaric act in itself. There is no such thing as a benign slave owner, but there are certainly those who are more barbaric than others. For possible inspiration of Annie Palmer's story, we need look no further than Delphine Lelori, who lived in New Orleans in the early eighteen hundreds. Like the supposed Palmer, Delphine Lelori

was also married numerous times. Though never implicated in the deaths of her husband's she was said to have maintained an outward appearance of dutiful care towards her enslaved in public. Behind closed doors, however, lurked unimaginable horrors. Four years of funeral registers from eighteen thirty to eighteen thirty four showed that at least twelve enslaved people died at her mansion on Royal Street in New Orleans. There is no cause of death listed, and so diseases cannot be ruled out,

but the benefit of hindsight suggests otherwise. Twelve deaths include Bond, a cook and laundress, and her four children, Juliette aged thirteen, Florence aged ten, Duels aged six, and Leontine aged four. One eight year old girl named Lea, enslaved by Delphine, was witnessed falling to her death from the roof of Delphine's mansion while trying to avoid being whipped. Then, on

April tenth, eighteen thirty four, a fire broke out. The fire was started by the seventy year old cook, who, having been chained to the stove, had attempted to take her own life. After being resisted by Lelori and her then husband, doctor Leonard Louis Nicholas, a group of local residents finally succeeded in breaking down the doors of their mansion. Inside they found at least seven people black men and women, who had been tortured and horribly mutilated, having been imprisoned

in iron collars and suspended from the ceiling. They'd been kept in there for many months. Two died not long after their rescue. The house was later destroyed by another group of residents, but has since been rebuilt. Thet Lorry Mansion is known today as one of the most haunted

houses in New Orleans. For almost two centuries, locals have spoken of paranormal activity at the Lo Lorri Mansion, tales of moans from the room where enslaved people were often kept, tour guides feeling tugs on their bags and taps on their shoulders. It's even been speculated that the brutal murder of a tenant who lived there in the eighteen nineties was in fact caused by demonic spirit trapped in the house.

Similar stories also plague Rose Hall. There have been numerous apparent sightings of Annie Palmer stridently riding her horse around the grounds. Some say they have seen her on the balcony gazing imperiously out over her former home. Others tell of pictures inside with moving eyes, disembodied voices drifting down corridors, the crying of babies, and strange activity around a mirror in what was once Annie's bedroom, a ghostly reflection or smudges,

and photographs taken nearby. During renovations in the nineteen sixties, it is said that builders and laborers reputedly had such a disquieting time that many of the local workforce subsconded, tools went missing, voices called their names, and one account tells of old bloodstains discovered on a newly finished floor. The truth of it all is a murky matter. Perhaps Annie never existed, Perhaps she did but led a relatively blameless life, retiring somewhere obscure after the heartbreak of being

widowed so many times. Or perhaps she really was the murderous, sadistic white witch of local legend. The facts, in some ways are unimportant. What she symbolizes, the most atrocious aspects of colonial history and slave ownership cannot be erased. For although there are some who prefer not to dig up the past or to dwell on the wrongdoings of those who have come before us, there are some events so

horrifying that they will never be silenced. Whether Annie part is real or not, the horrors of which he is accused speak to a brutal and violent reality, and so in the memory held by Jamaican Land, whether we like it or not, the White Witch of Rose Hall will continue to ride on. This episode was written by Ella McLoud and produced by Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained is an

Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard mclin Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mclin Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcast, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas

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