Trail of the unexpected

Witchcraft, voodoo, sex and murder at Rose Hall in Jamaica

Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica is a sprawling and magnificent period pad dating back to 1770. At the time it was the finest house on the island and it's easy to see why: the garden is beautifully landscaped, the views of the Caribbean Sea are fantastic and the house itself is an imposing spectacle of a bygone era.

However, it has a colourful past. I have vague memories of growing up in rural Jamaica, and of hearing a tale, exaggerated at every recital, of a white witch named Annee Palmer who once lived in Rose Hall and roamed the area around Montego Bay. She is still rumoured to make the odd guest appearance today. Returning to Jamaica all these years later, I was intrigued to find out whether she was really diabolical or whether it was just the fertile imagination of a young boy.

Before trying to find out (we were to have dinner in the house), I spoiled myself with a spot of snorkelling, shopping and sightseeing in "Mo'Bay", as everyone calls Jamaica's second-largest city after the capital, Kingston. The island has changed considerably in the past two centuries: Rose Hall now lies within the grounds of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, a sumptuous spa and golf resort hotel.

The day leading up to our meal was filled with talk of ghost stories. Night falls early in the Caribbean and the tales acquired even more frisson as we made our way through the estate. On arrival at the Great House, a member of our party announced that she was feeling queasy. She professed to possessing psychic powers and presciently pointed to the west wing of the house.

Annee Palmer was a teenager when her English mother and Irish father took her on a voyage to the West Indies early in the 19th century. She became a beautiful, lascivious and, they say, diabolical plantation owner. Annee is said to have lured into her bed any man who took her fancy. Further, she is alleged to have dabbled in voodoo, tortured her slaves and murdered all three of her husbands: poisoning the first, stabbing the second and strangling the third. She killed each husband in a different bedroom and it is said she then instructed slaves to carry their bodies to the sea, after which they themselves were killed to protect her guilt.

She claimed yellow fever - which was common at the time - took the lives of all three husbands, and because of her involvement in voodoo and her reputation for cruelty, no one challenged her. Strangulation was how the "White Witch" eventually met her death in 1831. She was murdered in her bedroom by her slave lover, Takoo, who suspected Annee of plotting his murder after he took another lover.

When she died, 700 such houses stood overlooking sugar plantations in Jamaica. During the slave rebellions of 1831-1838, all but a handful of them were looted and burned. Annee Palmer's house survived, though it remained empty after her death until the 1960s. The millionaire John Rollins bought the estate and restored the Great House to its present condition, complete with crystal chandeliers, velvet wallpaper and mahogany panelling, replicating how it was when Annee Palmer was sleeping and murdering her way into the island's legends.

Before dinner we took a tour of the house. The first bedroom we came across in the west wing was Annee's. It is decorated in blood red. In it there is a mirror, one of only two remaining artefacts that originally belonged to Palmer.

Over dinner, conversation centred on the veracity of the story. Two of our party said they felt uneasy while in Annee's bedroom. But most confessed that the only thing that touched their senses was the smell of the delicious Jamaican cuisine prepared by the hotel's award-winning chef, Dennis McIntosh.

That did not, however, stop every stray noise and every creaking floorboard being met with an agitated twitch or a sly glance upstairs.