The Rose Hall Plantation: The Legend of the White Witch and the (Ghost) Site/Sightings of Slavery in Jamaica

The Rose Hall Great House, the most renowned plantation in Jamaica located a few miles from the town of Montego Bay, has become a popular wedding venue and tourist destination attracting over 100,000 visitors per year. This house has been immortalized not because of Jamaica’s slavery past; rather, it signifies for most Jamaicans and visiting tourists a haunted house, in which the ghost of its famous mistress, Annie Palmer roams the grounds as the “White Witch of Rose Hall.” In this paper I explore how the Rose Hall Great House tours represent one telling example of how popular fascination with slavery distorts reconstructions of slavery today. I present some preliminary observations regarding the tours (which primarily utilize material from Herbert G. de Lisser’s 1929 novel entitled The White Witch of Rose Hall), and how these tours reinscribe enslaved women as the embodiment of Gayatri Spivak’s “historically muted subject.” Though the lore of Annie Palmer alludes to the intricacies of gender, sexuality, and power in a Jamaican plantation landscape, the tours prioritize the mythical “lovings and killings” of an elite White mistress and neglect the stories of enslaved women who far out-numbered White mistresses on Jamaican plantations. Instead, the tours underscore enslaved female corporeality as a marker of slavery, with enslaved women appearing as ghosts throughout the tours, as incomplete, liminal, and ghostly beings. Visitors leave with a titillating story about Annie Palmer; yet, the names and experiences of enslaved women who labored at Rose Hall remain unspoken, unremembered, and unmemorialized.