Jamaican legend says the mistress of Rose Hall murdered her husbands; the records say her husband died in debt and she sold her claim for £200

The White Witch of Rose Hall is a legend. It says Annie Palmer, trained in witchcraft, murdered three husbands and enslaved men and was killed by an enslaved man, Takoo. The records tell another story. Rosa Palmer, the house's first mistress, married four times; none of her husbands was murdered. She died on 1 May 1790 and left her estate to her last husband, John Palmer, who died in 1797. The estates passed to his grandnephew, John Rose Palmer. On 28 March 1820 he married Annie Paterson, aged eighteen. He died in 1827 with debts of £6,000. In 1830 Annie sold her claim to both estates to a Dr Bernard of Bristol for £200, moved to Bonavista and died in 1846. Geoffrey Yates of the Jamaica Archives found she owned no slaves and found no evidence that she or Rosa was killed by enslaved people or was cruel. The legend first appeared in an 1868 pamphlet by the journalist John Costello. The investigator Benjamin Radford says the modern story is modelled on Herbert de Lisser's 1929 novel, The White Witch of Rosehall, and calls it "an amalgam of fact and fiction." In the 1960s the American businessman John Rollins bought Rose Hall and restored the house. In 2024 it ran night tours four days a week, and a golf course on the estate, opened in 2000, is named White Witch.