BR: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, where we apply critical thinking and evidence-based analysis to, well, everything from the simple to the strange, the mysterious to the mundane.

PR: So this is going to be the first episode in a two-parter that has to do with Jamaican folklore and legends in Jamaica. So Ben, let’s go ahead and start with our first part. What are we covering this week?

BR: So this week I’ll be talking about probably the most famous haunted location in the Caribbean, some say the Western Hemisphere, and that would be Rose Hall, which is a former sugar plantation in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

0:01:11
And I first investigated it in 2005, and it’s a fascinating in-depth story. It’s one of my favorite cases and it’s appeared in one of my books as a book chapter. Anytime that I have to sort of distill an investigation into 10 pages or 12 pages, you always leave out a lot of really interesting behind the scenes stuff. behind it. It’s fun to sort of give people a sense of what didn’t make the book and sort of the other stories.

0:01:45
So it’ll be fun to talk about that. And then for the second part, which will be next week, I’ll be expanding it a bit to other ghost legends and stories around Jamaica, primarily Duppies.

PR: Cool. What are duppies?

BR: Duppies are sort of a version of the Jamaican ghost. Jamaican ghost. And there’s also another type of duppy called the rolling calf, which is one of the scariest entities that I’ve researched.

0:02:13
Yeah, and that’s saying something, I guess.

PR: Yeah, by the name I wouldn’t even imagine rolling calf. I’m just thinking, okay, a little calf just rolling down a hill.

BR: Duh, right? But no, I mean, I love, of course, monster lore and cryptozoology and everything from banshees to fairies to lake monsters and chupacabras. But I have to say that of all the monsters that I’ve researched and read about and heard about, the rolling calf is one of the top three or four that just scare the hell out of me when I think about it.

0:02:49
PR: Let’s leave it at that. I’m really excited to see what that’s all about. Because this week’s episode is mostly going to be Ben talking about his research on the White Witch of Rose Hall. We figured I could go ahead and open up the show with a little solo piece of me answering a listener email. Today’s email comes from Edward and it’s regarding poltergeist activity. Edward S. writes, Hi guys, do you have any possible explanations for poltergeist activity other than it’s a hoax?

0:03:51
Recently I watched a glass candle holder break in front of me seemingly spontaneously. I’ve also had an object thrown from a shelf across the room when I wasn’t watching, though I was alone in the house. I consider myself a skeptic, but I’m completely at a loss for theories this time. Anyway, love the show. Keep making skepticism entertaining. First off, thanks, Edward, for the kind words.

0:04:15
We’re really glad to have you as a listener. So let’s define what a poltergeist is, if any of you aren’t quite familiar. A poltergeist, German for noisy ghost, is presumed to be a type of supernatural entity that can affect the physical world. It could be blamed for anything from moving objects to making noises, levitating things, or physically interacting with living beings. Now as far as explanations go that can be a pretty broad topic. For the most part the general skeptical consensus is it can be a number of things ranging from your eyes playing tricks on you to the physical movement of the environment like seismic activity or even something as simple as slouching floors as I mentioned in a previous episode regarding my own experience with ghosts.

0:04:58
So Edward, it’s a little tricky to say one way or the other. We don’t really know the circumstances surrounding your experiences and we don’t really have any data related to what was going on around you when these things occurred. Unfortunately, human memory is a really tricky thing describing events with the accuracy needed for a scientific stance. What I will say however is that just because something seems unexplainable doesn’t mean it is. There could be a number of very reasonable and likely mundane explanations for what you experienced. The important thing to keep in mind as a skeptic is science has never found evidence in favor of the supernatural. We can’t even test for it because there’s so little data in that regard that we have no hallmark for what supernatural could even be in the first place. Most people claiming to know of the supernatural use devices that measure variations in the environment. The problem for me is that if we had devices that could detect ghosts then we’d know what a ghost was and we’d have a scientific way to measure for it.

0:06:00
That is something that we just have no data for and the devices that ghost hunters use only detect things like variations in electrical fields and temperature. That data alone is not terribly compelling and doesn’t speak to the nature of anything other than a so-called spooky place may have some kind of draft, a wiring fault, or maybe some Wi-Fi crossover from the neighbors. Overall my point is this. It’s fine to say I don’t know if the data isn’t there. It’s fine to accept that you may never know exactly what caused these things to happen. It’s also important to remember that jumping to the conclusion of ghosts just because you don’t have enough evidence to back up a less spectacular answer is a little bit of a stretch.

0:06:43
I mean that explanation is less likely than most so it deserves a more critical stance than being the default for the unexplained. Anyway, thank you Edward for your email. That was a lot of fun to discuss. I always enjoy talking about ghosts and the supernatural. And stay tuned because this episode will be covering a lot of that. If any of our other listeners would like to have their question answered on air, please feel free to email us at squaringthestrange at gmail.com or you can even reach us through our contact page on our website squaring the strings calm or message us through Facebook or Twitter Or Instagram, I’m sure we will see your message. It is a lot of fun to answer these on air. So keep them coming and Now on to the mystery of the White Witch of Rose Hall. Rose Hall is often believed to be the most impressive house in Jamaica.

0:07:49
It’s a mansion in the Jamaican Georgian style with a stone base and a plastered upper story. Sits on a hillside with a panorama view of the coast. It was built in the 1770s and it became the property of a man named John Palmer. But what we’re here for is to talk about some of the legends of this very old and very beautiful mansion So Ben, I’ll go ahead and hand it over to you. What what kind of mysteries and legends can we expect from this place?

BR: Funny you should ask Yes, the mysterious white witch of Rose Hall. It’s one of my favorite investigations.

0:08:29
It’s one of the chapters in my scientific paranormal investigation book. I just love the case because it’s so complex and has a lot of angles into it, folklore and research and skepticism and investigation. It’s just a cool historical mystery. Anybody can go there. Anybody can go there. I mean, if you just fly into Montego Bay, Jamaica, it’s about a half hour outside of town. It’s one of the most famous haunted locations in the Caribbean and certainly in Jamaica. Yeah, I actually did an investigation there in 2005 and since that time I’ve been called back to the island twice for TV shows who wanted me to tell my story, which is kind of neat.

0:09:21
I remember there was a show called The Dead Files, and the episode aired about two years ago. The producer called me up. He says, yeah, I read your stuff, and I saw you did an investigation and solved a mystery there. He’s like, yeah, we’re based in LA. We’d like to fly you out to interview you. I was like, fly me out where exactly?

0:09:45
He’s like, to Jamaica. I’m like, Done. Yes, that is the correct answer, sir. Here’s the dates I’m available. But it is kind of neat to, you know, a decade after solving a famous case to sort of, you know, still have it be in circulation. But yeah, so basically, as you said, Rose Hall, it looks like something out of a film. It’s nestled high on a hill outside of Montego Bay. It originally began as a sugar plantation called True Friendship, founded in 1846.

0:10:18
And of course, sugar and rum, the slave trade, the entire Caribbean is based on sugar plantations and this thing. So there’s such interesting historical facts and themes running through there. In the case of Rose Hall, I had heard about it before I went and one of the first things I did when I do an investigation is do some background research. So rather than going cold, you want to find out what are the legends, what are the stories, what are people saying go on there.

0:10:55
And what I found was that the overall story is that there is a woman named Annie Palmer, a white woman, now known as the White Witch of Rose Hall, who is said to haunt the place and her ghost is occasionally seen. She is said to have, depending on which source you read, she cursed the entire location, the entire plantation. She may or may not have killed four husbands. She may or may not have had outrageous orgies with the slaves and essential things like that. It’s just the whole story is just dripping with gothic allure and stuff. So, you can actually trace back the story of The White Witch of Rose Hall to a novel by the same name, by H.B.

0:11:46
DeLisser, and the title is The White Witch of Rose Hall. And I’ll just sort of summarize, because DeLisser’s book sort of serves as the foundation for the whole story, it’s useful to summarize it. Plus, it’s just a fun story. So, here’s sort of a rough overview of DeLisser’s book, The White Witch of Rose Hall. So here’s a here’s sort of a rough overview of DeLisser’s book, The White Witch of Rose Hall. DeLisser’s tale begins in 1831 as a young English bookkeeper named Robert Rutherford is sent to the Caribbean to learn the sugar trade. He arrives at Jamaica’s Rose Hall plantation surrounded by slaves and greeted by a beautiful young woman named Annie Palmer. Palmer’s husband John had recently and suddenly died, leaving Annie as the owner and mistress of Rose Hall.

0:12:24
A mutual attraction flares, and Rutherford is hired to help administer the plantation. Soon Rutherford learns more about his employer and lover. Annie had moved with her parents to Haiti as a young girl, and had learned black magic. The voodoo priests there, who were versed in the old African sorcery, have seen in this wonderful young girl great occult possibilities. Her parents then died and Annie moved to Jamaica where she soon met and married John Palmer who owned Rose Hall. John Palmer, like two of Annie’s previous husbands, had died mysteriously. Rutherford, though entranced by Annie’s stunning beauty and strong will, also had eyes for the young bookkeeper Millicent, the daughter of Taku, the most feared Obeah, or voodoo priest, on the island.

0:13:20
Millicent warned Rutherford of Annie’s evil nature, relating stories of Annie’s cruelty, murder, and occult powers. Rutherford dismissed the claims as superstition and jealousy, but his skepticism waned as he saw more of Annie’s true nature. Pride, and the life she has led, and the power she has had over her slaves, may have left her unhinged. Inordinate vanity and fierce passions may have unbalanced her, or insanity may be in her heritage, or traffic with evil things in Haiti may have affected her brain. Annie discovers the affair, and soon Millicent becomes deathly ill, cursed by the White Witch of Rose Hall.

0:14:00
Taku and a handful of slaves take murderous revenge on Annie Palmer, killing her in her bathroom and finally ending her evil. As one character notes, “Annie Palmer has lived out of her time. With her will and ability, she might have made a great name for herself, and her iniquities may have been counted as venial offenses, even if husband killing were included among them. been killing were included among them”. So in a nutshell, that’s the overview of Delisser’s book, The White Witch of Rosehall. That’s really kind of a cool story.

0:14:36
PR: If you’ve read up on it enough or if you’re familiar with it enough, you catch the very poor understanding of voodoo very quickly, especially in this story, which I imagine probably comes into play in your investigation of it.

BR: Indeed. Well, DeLisser wrote the novel in 1929, or it was published in 1929, and that sort of served as the basis for many of the legends of Annie Palmer. And it’s interesting because the book is very, very well known throughout Jamaica, of course, and it’s acknowledged as a novel.

0:15:12
I mean, Jamaicans, they know it’s not a documentary, but they believe it’s based on a true story. Why? Because DeLisser says it is in his book. So you have this interesting theme that all skeptics are familiar with, where it’s the latest Conjuring film or Blair Witch or Exorcist or Amityville horror and to throw a little verisimilitude, well, you know it’s based on a true story. I didn’t make this up out of cold cloth. There’s some truth to it, right?

0:15:54
So what DeLisser did is actually he drew upon pre-existing legends and stories. And so to many Jamaicans, again, they acknowledge it’s a fictional story, but they believe it has really strong elements of truth to it. The mixing of DeLisser’s fictional novel allegedly based on true story that has sort of then become the real story, it’s this fascinating blend of real life, history, fiction, mystery mongering, all this, you know, the stew, within the context of this, bodice-ripper, you know, in the Caribbean nights. Who doesn’t love this stuff, right? It’s great stuff.

0:16:39
So that’s the story that you hear when you go to Jamaica. So as DeLisser says, it is, “a very striking and curious story founded on fact.” So that was the story that I heard when I went to go look at Jamaica and visit the place. Annie was of course beautiful beyond compare. It’s never something you know, gawky.

PR: Still got the hair curlers in and walking around in house slippers.

BR: No, no, no. all the women are all these you know stunningly ravishing that that no man could could uh… sure could resist uh… and and of course i mean it’s all it’s all part of the the the gothic the gothic sensibility of course right according to writer Mike Henry in his book uh… Rose Hall’s White Witch, Annie “mesmerizes the slaves with demonic acts of sensuality” now i don’t know what that means but i like it whatever demonic acts of sensuality I like it.

0:17:37
Whatever demonic…

PR: Demonic acts of sensuality. Sign me up. Yeah, I’m there.

BR: You had me at demonic. And then you seal the deal with sensuality. In fact, according to him, her sexual desires knew no boundaries and included sadism and transvestism. She’s said to have put on male clothes and ridden around the estate whipping slaves into submission.

0:17:59
PR: Oh, how scandalous.

BR: Yes. So you have all these dynamics, right? You have the rich white landowner and the slaves, you have slavery, you have sexual dynamics, the all sorts of things.

0:18:12
And according to the true story, again not DeLisser’s Novel, but according to the true story, I’m using air quotes here, Annie’s depravity grew too much, her fury too hot. She was killed in 1831 by a slave and buried in a tomb in a copse of Trees not far from Rose Hall. In fact, on the tour, when you do the tour, as I did, and many tours do, the tour ends at Annie Palmer’s tomb, which is a short distance from Rose Hall. It’s a beautiful area. As I said, with these events serving as the basis for the haunting of Rose Hall, obviously no one expects DeLisser’s novel fictional Annie Palmer to haunt the grounds.

0:18:59
Instead, it’s the real woman that DeLisser based the character on, the cruel, sensual, sadistic murderess, the terrified Jamaican spawn legend they think is there. One of the first things that I do when I’m doing investigations, the first thing is to look at the variants. From a folkloric perspective, one question is, what are people reporting? What are people saying? And so that’s when you look at the different stories. And so you try and sort out what is actually based on a true story. And the deeper question is, is there a true story? So one of the basic tenets of skepticism is something coined by Ray Hyman, who’s a psychologist in Oregon, and it’s called Hyman’s Categorical Imperative.

0:19:49
And it basically says, before trying to figure out how to explain something, make sure there’s something to be explained. So in other words, if someone presents you with a ghost photo, before trying to explain the ghost photo, figure out, before trying to explain what the ghost is, first explain is this actually a ghost, right? So don’t go off on a wild goose chase, dial it back to what’s known. And in this case, of course, there was an interesting blend of fictional and real. I mean, Rose Hall is there. It’s right there.

0:20:27
You can touch it. You can feel it. Rose Hall is there. It was a plantation, so there’s some historical aspects to it. But again, you also have the confounding influence of DeLisser’s very, very popular novel. So the first step is to study the variants. And so I got probably a dozen or so. I got as much as I could.

0:20:49
I went to the library, went online, and one thing that I found, and I found this in subsequent investigations as well, is oftentimes, particularly in a foreign place, there will be information that’s only available there. I made a mistake early in my career where I would be somewhere and I’d say, oh, you know, I’ll get this online later on. It’ll be cheaper on Amazon. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

0:21:18
But a lot of times, particularly if you’re researching some local mystery, there’s pamphlets and self-published books that may have really good, important information that you can’t get online. They’re just not there. And so that was a lesson that I learned early on was, you know what, it may cost you an extra 10 or 15 bucks, get it, get it in your hand, don’t think, oh, I’ll get it later on, because you’re like, oh, I wish I had, I read that thing and I wish I’d gotten it.

0:21:50
PR: I agree, I agree. I think up here in New Mexico, that’s also the case. There’s a lot of legends that you don’t find anything on online.

BR: Right, and so don’t assume that you can find it elsewhere. So that’s one thing that I did is, not only before I went there, I gathered research on it, and then once I was there, I gathered more that was local.

0:22:07
Then the question is, of these claims, which are falsifiable? There’s lots of stuff here. The legend is very complex. You have Annie Palmer. You have claims about her sadism, her four dead husbands, just everything. husbands, just everything. And so that includes historical facts. And usually in most of these cases, you can generally trust historical facts. If you go to a church in Santa Fe and they tell you the church was built in 1830, it was probably built in 1830.

0:22:46
It’s reasonable to assume that. In this case, that rule went out the window. I couldn’t trust anything because I soon realized that you know I would get I would get a dozen documents In front of me, you know tour guides local legend books or else and I would see three different Locations for for Annie’s tomb. I would see different dates for when the place was built. Really guys you You all can’t even… I can see some… Was it June or July? But come on man, was it 1642 or was it 1890?

0:23:22
I mean, come on. So that made it all the more challenging was trying to… What’s going on here? There’s just so much misinformation about it. And so many people just recycling whatever they want. So that was one of the challenging parts was trying to very quickly weed out what was what I could, because the problem is, of course, is if you pick a date as an established fact and then you compare that date with other dates in the story, if it doesn’t line up, then what you suspect is that those other dates are wrong.

0:24:00
But if you don’t even have that date right, for example, let’s say that one of the stories about Annie Palmer says that she was killed in 1602. Well, if she wasn’t even born until 20 years later, it’s just… So that was one of the really frustrating things. I’m like, what’s going on here? This is all over the map. So anyway, so then I had to look for the next step of course is that after you’ve sorted through all the conflicting stories, you sort of get the narratives. Like well, then you look for credibility, right? So if it’s written about in a BBC story, it’s probably more legitimate than just some random tourist’s comments on the Facebook page for Rose Hall.

0:24:46
So again, there’s just a lot of sorting through that. And what was interesting was that a lot of the evidence was, when I investigate hauntings and ghost cases, I begin by looking at the evidence, not looking for the evidence. And so what that means is, because I previously researched Rose Hall and I have some idea of what the outlines are. A ghost is seen doing X. A ghost allegedly pushed a caretaker down some steps and broke his neck. Whatever it is, just all these sorts of things.

0:25:26
Fortunately, in my house, I have a pretty good library of ghost books. I can do a lot of this just going to my living room and pulling from a shelf. So I have that benefit. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve collected them, but you know, but you still have to go to the library and gather stuff. Anyway, so there’s lots of stuff out there. But so one of the first steps is again to look at evidence, not look for evidence. And that’s contrary to the way that a lot of ghost hunters approach investigations.

0:25:54
Because they do what I call anomaly hunting. and so the instead of taking a claim investigating saying is this true is this right or wrong could this could this be could this have actually happened they they go into a location looking for evidence trying to generate evidence right so and that’s not that’s not how good investigation works it begins with specific claims right instead of like hey, let’s wander around a house with with night-vision cameras for eight hours in the dark I see what we find right right. No no That’s not how that that’s not any of that works.

PR: Yeah, well, there’s like there’s an entire rabbit hole with that that they go down It’s it’s interesting. You know because if you’re gonna go into to investigating something that then you’re going to walk in with, say you have a device that reads something, and you walk in picking up signals.

0:26:57
Well, what does that mean? It’s like it keeps going. There’s a whole rabbit hole of what does this mean that keeps happening when you pull the information. If we had ghost detectors, we would know there were ghosts. we measure, we have to know exists in order to measure for it.

Br: That’s how that works.

PR: So that’s an interesting, it is a very interesting approach that is just designed to always reach dead ends.

0:27:30
So I think it’s very interesting to look at it your way, which is to go in with the claims that are being made and then breaking those down because you can either confirm or falsify information. You have something to work off of other than just, oh, it’s cold right here.

BR: Well, and we can do a show sometime on anomaly hunting because it really is interesting.

PR: Oh, yeah, I’d love to.

BR: But basically, the fundamental flaw there is that the ghost hunters put themselves in the position of generating evidence that they themselves have to explain. And that’s not what you want to do as an investigator. You don’t want to generate new evidence. That’s like if you think about like when police officers investigate a crime or detective investigate a crime, you don’t want them generating new claims, new evidence. You don’t want them tracking in.

0:28:23
That’s called contamination. That’s not what you want. You want to go with what’s already there, what’s already seen, and the evidence is already there and you work from that. You don’t generate your own. Then it’s like a dog chasing his tail. Like, well, yeah, we went to look for ghosts and then at 2 or 3 in the morning we saw this weird light and well, you know, it could have been something, could have been nothing.

0:28:49
Like, why are you doing that?

PR: Now we have a new mystery. Right. It could have been something, could have been nothing. Why are you doing that? Now we have a new mystery.

BR: Right. Good job, dude. Way to go, Scooby-Doo. You began with three pieces of evidence.

0:28:55
Now you have six. Good job. Congratulations. You’re your gold star. In this case, one of the first things, as I said, is I would try and sort of cull all the different claims or what’s said to happen there. So for example I looked in a book called The International Directory of Haunted Places by Dennis Hauck. He says quote, people touring the basement dungeon often hear tortured screams. Interesting. Falsifiable claim. Unfortunately during the tour when I asked my tour guide Diana if that had happened she said that didn’t actually happen. So the So, the person that works there says, yeah, no, no, I don’t know where he got that.

0:29:44
This is par for the course, right? You have some breathless sensational, you know, like, no tourist can come out of there without seeing something terrifying. Or whatever. So, you see these sorts of things all the time. And so, at some point, you have to take it with a grain of salt. It’s frustrating as a researcher because I understand the desire to tell a sexy story. I get it. I do. I understand. Sure, if you’re going to write a book about ghosts, you want it to be dramatic. You want to say that tortured screams are heard and mysterious objects fly and all these crazy things. I understand that. But if it’s not true, then you’re lying. Or you’re misinformed. Or you’re misinforming your readers. Which of those is it? I don’t want to do that. So when I write something up, I do a book chapter, I want my readers to believe what I’m telling them. And if I tell them that there are tortured screams, by God, there better be tortured screams there. And just It’s because it’s important to me as an investigator and a writer and a skeptic to dot my I’s and cross my T’s.

0:30:57
It doesn’t mean I’m always right, but it just means that I’m very selective about what I pass along to readers and others of what’s real or not. So again, all this sorts of stuff. So what you find is that when it comes to… Once you sort of weeded out a lot of the demonstrably false claims, it comes down to what often these cases come down to is experiences, photos, weird feelings, blogs, things like that, right? This is what happens, right? You have this headline, dramatic, weird, crazy shit happens. and then you do some research is like Yeah, well, you know someone saw something weird and got a weird feeling and took a weird photo and yeah, that’s it SO you Begin with these these newspaper headlines and end with this sort of the caveats the the fine Yeah, I’m like well actually what we mean was… So what’s it so interesting

0:32:00
So what you find is that much in the way that amateur ghost hunters typically generate their own evidence, anomaly hunting, what you find is that in this case, you do have that with some ghost hunters because they’ve been there, ghost hunter TV shows have been there, there’s been many TV shows there, but also just the average tourists. And Rose Hall does something that many other places do as well, I’m not suing them out, but they put up and promote testimonials from their guests. As one would, right? If you have a haunted hotel, haunted bed and breakfast, haunted location, you have, you know, you have, you know, whatever, 20,000 tourists coming through, you know, a year or whatever, some of them are going to take some weird photos and send in their stories, and of course you’re going to put them on the wall.

0:32:46
PR: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Why wouldn’t you, right? Yeah.

BR: So, you know, that’s all. I understand that. I get that dynamic. Why wouldn’t you, right? I understand that. I get that dynamic.

0:32:53
I understand the process. But what, of course, it does is that it’s almost like false evidence. And I don’t mean that in the people reporting things that they didn’t experience, that are hoaxes necessarily, but it’s things that the average person thinks are evidence. As a skeptic, I’m like, no, that’s not evidence. I’m sorry, that orb that you see, that ain’t evidence. And the average person doesn’t really have, again, it’s not that they’re stupid, it’s just they’re just not, most people aren’t really familiar with investigative techniques. And keep in mind that most people who tour haunted locations are there because they want to see a ghost.

0:33:36
They want to be, I mean, they may be skeptical, but if you totally don’t believe in ghosts at all, you’re probably not going to go to these places or you might just sort of as a lark. But most people who go through are probably open to the possibility. And so, again, they take 30 or 40 photos and they see some weird thing. So anyway, this is the sort of evidence that’s generated. So one of the first things I did was to look at that evidence and very quickly identified typical photographic artifacts.

0:34:15
Orbs, some of them were actually camera straps caught in a flash reflection. Because I looked at it, I know what that is, ooh, armchair debunking. It’s like, no, I’ve done that. I’ve seen that. So probably, I mean, I don’t want to suggest that everything in the glass cases I could explain right away, but I would say probably two-thirds of the photos that were offered as evidence of the presence of the White Witch of Rose Hall were clearly nothing of the sort.

0:34:51
So again, it’s… and it was interesting because the the… in addition to Rose Hall, you also had Johnny Cash. Not literally, but apparently… I was thinking, why is Johnny Cash around here? I did not know this. So it turns out that the owners, either the current or former owners or certainly at the time, were friends of Johnny Cash’s. So which is why, I don’t know about to this day, but certainly when I went, along with White Witch of Rose Hall mugs and t-shirts, there’s the Man in Black selling CDs, right?

PR: Very interesting.

0:35:28
Why not do that? So there’s bags and videos and t-shirts and merchandise and perfume and this and that. So anyway, so there was the evidence that was generated by the visitors, and then there was the evidence that was generated by ghost hunters. As I mentioned, many, many ghost hunters have gone through there. It’s one of the most famous haunted places in the Caribbean, certainly, and absolutely in Jamaica. And so, of course, it attracts people all the time. And so, you have all these shows going through, and of course, the ghost hunters, they’re trying to sex up their TV show, and they do their anomaly hunting and walking around in the dark type thing.

0:36:06
So among the ghost stories that are circulated about Rose Hall, you see claims, for example, in Dennis Hauck’s dictionary of haunted places. He says that the current owners say they live with the ghost, quote, on a daily basis. And many tourists visiting the property have felt her presence. Oddly though, no one has been able to capture her apparition on film. This is a quote from the book. Ever since the ghost photo was taken, people’s cameras break down or fail mysteriously. As soon as they leave the house, their cameras work fine. Well of course this is bullshit. I mean, my camera worked fine. In fact, they have they have walls of photos that clearly falsify these claims. So again,

0:36:51
So again, just over and over again, you see all these crazy stories. And I’m used to that in ghost research, investigation. I mean, people write all sorts of stuff, but it was just especially salient in this case. It was just so clear that people were just making shit up. And just mystery mongering, or they don’t care, they don’t know. you know. Of course, a lot of the writers hadn’t been to Jamaica at all, or Rose Hall. This is a lot of the references, because I did my investigation in 2005, a lot of them were before the internet. I mean, certainly, the internet was around by then, but a lot of the references were pre-internet.

0:37:36
In addition to the tourists offering their so-called evidence for Annie Palmer’s ghost, you also had, of course, the ghost hunters who came in and they do their thing. And one of the more interesting parts was the psychics. The psychics would come in and oftentimes mediums or psychics will be enlisted by ghost hunters to communicate with the spirits that they believe are haunting the location.

PR: A necessary addition to most of those sensational ghost hunter shows.

BR: Exactly, exactly. If you think there may be a ghost there, who better to validate this scientifically than a psychic?

0:38:15
Yeah, well they can talk to the dead. I’m not the expert.

BR: Right, right. Bring in the psychics. So one of the most prominent psychics that investigated Rose Hall was a woman named Eileen Garrett. She actually was very prominent during the first half of the century. She died in 1970. And she visited Rose Hall in 1952. And I tracked down one of her books that refer to that because, and that’s another thing that I always recommend investigators do, is go for original sources.

0:38:48
Don’t trust that because someone’s ideas or a quote appears attributed to them in some other source is right. Don’t assume that’s right. It may be, it may not be. On many occasions, I have just done some and found out that in fact what seemed to be a pretty innocuous, you know, something that’s not even controversial, right? Why would you even make that up?

0:39:25
Sure enough, they screwed it up or transposed it or sexed it up or did some change to it. So anyway, I tracked down Eileen Garrett’s book, which she’s done several books, but she has one book called Many Voices, the Autobiography of a Medium, published in 1969. In that book, on page 152 through 155, she talks about her experiences at Rose Hall. I found this especially interesting because, again, you have a psychic who is claiming to be in contact with Annie Palmer, the ghost of Rose Hall, the White Witch. And she claimed to be basically channeling Palmer’s experiences. And I see this, this is actually very common.

0:40:11
In one of my investigations, I looked into the best case for psychic detectives. And in that case, that happened about maybe five or six years ago. In that case, a woman named Nancy Weber, a psychic, claimed to have relayed to police a psychic claimed to have relayed to police investigators the last final moments of a woman who was killed. I investigated that case. It’s a really interesting case. We can talk about that on the show sometime. But anyway, so the idea that a psychic medium would claim or believe that she can, usually it’s a woman, sometimes it’s a man, can emote experiences channeled through them of someone’s last moments are fairly common.

0:40:55
That certainly was the case here. So, you know, I’ll just read a couple sentences from her book. She says, she starts out by bashing how beautiful Palmer was. This is Eileen Garrett talking about Annie Palmer. She says, “she’s not at all as attractive as reported. She looks to be in her late 40s when killed. One gets the impression of black hair and very flashing, stimulating blue eyes. She must have known that her life was in danger since she was trying to escape.

0:41:26
When I stood near the tree, I got this feeling of her terror”. She says, “I clairvoyantly feel that she suffered through the night. She appears to say, nothing will grow or flourish or come to fruit. No children shall be born here. I died unhallowed, but the force of my life is not spent, only my blood. There is something strong, and this man will remember.” And she goes on talking about that Annie Palmer was a particular tree that she was beaten, violated, and finally killed.

0:42:00
So again, you have Eileen Garrett, a very prominent psychic medium, talking about giving apparently very factual, real information about Annie Palmer’s last moments, and who’s to challenge that? I can’t say that she’s wrong. I wasn’t there. If she says that Annie Palmer is speaking to her or any other ghost, I can’t say, no, they’re not. I can’t prove that, right?

0:42:38
So this is always sort of the black box problem among skeptics dealing with psychics. Anyway, so again, it was a matter of looking at all the different types of evidence, including the psychics and the ghost hunters and all that sort of thing. And so there was the official version of The White Witch of Rose Hall in De Lisser’s 1929 novel. And then you have the widely believed story of Rose Hall, some facts of which were supposedly used in there. But there’s actually a third version of Annie Palmer. And this is where it gets even more interesting.

0:43:12
So after researching all these sorts of things and investigating what claims I could, when there really wasn’t very much, again, I was there trying to listen to terrifying screams and they weren’t there. And there’s a lot of the stuff, when you actually go there, a lot of the big phenomena really sort of vanishes. And so it was fun in my book, Scientific Power of Investigation, I have a chapter on this, and it was fun to sort of go through and use quotes from DeLisser’s novel as introduction parts to my book. So for example, here’s a quote from DeLisser’s novel. It says, “It is all guess and hearsay, murmured Burbridge of Annie Palmer. It is most of a conjecture, admitted writer. I said as much at the beginning”.

0:44:02
I said as much at the beginning, and sure enough, it’s most of it conjecture. So the real story of Annie Palmer can be found in an obscure 1965 research report by a man named Jeffrey Yates. He was an assistant archivist at the Jamaica Archives. He did this good research, and it turned out to be basically solving the mystery. and so I don’t claim to have solved the mystery of the White Witch of Rose Hall I brought it together and I sort of updated it and I was I was very pleased to be able to bring his work to life, but the real credit for debunking the White Witch of Rose Hall belongs to Jeffrey Yates, who’s now dead, but he just did a fantastic job So let me just briefly go over what Yates found and that’s contained in his 1965 report.

0:44:53
So here’s the overview. Here’s what really happened. We’ve heard all sorts of stories, what DeLisser said. We’ve heard all the other stories. Here’s what really happened according to historical facts. Annie Mary Patterson was born in 1802 in England. She traveled to the Caribbean as a child, though instead of being instructed in the dark voodoo arts in Haiti, she had an unremarkable youth. She did indeed marry John Rose Palmer at the age of 18 in 1820.

0:45:20
The couple moved to Rose Hall, but Palmer’s fortunes had ebbed and their life was one of debt and want, not opulence. John Palmer died seven years after their marriage in 1821 at the age of 42. He died several thousand pounds in debt and Annie inherited little or nothing. So this contrast with this notion that, you know, she was this big, rich, widow landowner who had the run of the plantation. She was in fact deeply in debt and had almost nothing. Though Palmer died young by modern standards in those days of poor medical care, dying of fever, especially in the tropics, was not uncommon.

0:45:59
So it’s true that she had a husband who died at 42, and you know, maybe in 2017 that might seem mysterious. Not so much in 1820. Sure. People dropped dead at 42 all the time in the tropics from malaria, you name it. So again, keep the context in your head. Research into accounts of the day reveal not even a hint of any foul play in Palmer’s death. As Yeats puts it, quote, there was no murder, there was no motive, and no evidence, end quote.

0:46:31
As for Annie, she soon moved out of Rose Hall to another part of the island and never married again, dying 1846. She was buried in a churchyard in Montego Bay on 9 July. That’s the truth. So let’s revisit the story, shall we? So when you look at the true facts, the historical facts, it becomes clear that virtually nothing about the true story, the supposed true story behind the story, is true. John Palmer was not rich, nor was he murdered for his money, nor for that matter is his corpse missing, as is often claimed.

0:47:10
In fact, records of his burial can be found in the St. James Parish Register. Annie Palmer never learned voodoo, nor engaged in any murder or cruelty or debauchery. She had only one husband, and she was not murdered in 1831, but died of natural causes 15 years later. Furthermore, and this is the part that I just savor as a skeptic, I’m drooling here. Furthermore, she wasn’t even buried on the plantation. Her tomb at Rose Hall that all the tourists stop in is empty. There’s nothing there. It’s not a grave at all.

0:47:47
And yet, that’s where everyone says she is, right? So you have psychics who go there and they communicate with her. And so it’s fascinating to look at the history of how the legend started. So basically here’s where it gets even more interesting. I love it. I just love this thing. I love teasing it out. And again, I benefited greatly from Jeffrey Yates’ work and I added my own stuff. And of course, much had happened since Yates had written his piece in the Daily Cleaner in Jamaica. So it was really fun to do research, find someone who had already solved it, and then sort of amplify it and put the pieces together for a modern audience. That was really cool to me to do. So basically what you find here is that the legend of Annie Palmer is a hybrid of two different women who owned the property at different times. So there is no Annie Palmer.

0:48:53
She did not exist. What that means, of course, is that she can’t have a ghost any more than Superman could have a ghost, or James Bond could have a ghost. You can’t have a ghost of a fictional person. That’s just kind of one of the rules. Yeah, that can’t happen. So, what actually happened was, there’s two women whose life stories were basically conflated into and crystallized into this alleged Annie Palmer. The first one was Rosa Kelly, who Rose Hall was named after. She was the first mistress of Rose Hall.

0:49:34
She got it when she married a man named Henry Fanning in 1746. He died six months later. She remarried twice and Rosa died in 1790, leaving her property to her fourth husband, John Palmer. So there was a John Palmer. And the church records show that she’s buried in the cemetery and she died at age 72. So then you also have Annie Palmer, who was formerly Annie Mae Patterson, who I mentioned earlier, who was born in 1802 in England. She married John Rose Palmer, the grandson of Rose’s widower and heir to the estate. So I know this is getting confusing, but trust me on it.

0:50:14
It all hashes out. So Annie left Rose Hall for another part of the island. As I mentioned, in 1830 she gave up her claim to Rose Hall. She died in July 1846 at age 34 and she was buried in St. James Parish. So again, it’s inescapable. There is no Annie Palmer. There is, there ain’t no thing there. You can’t have a ghost there. This is the problem that ghost hunters and psychic mediums have trouble dealing with because, yeah, right?

0:50:46
So let’s return a second to Eileen Garrett’s story. Eileen Garrett’s horrible, terrifying, dramatic, sensational story. Talking about this poor woman who’s violated and beaten and murdered and Garrett’s talking about how horrible it was and she felt her emotions, the woman’s last dying breath, but no, no, that didn’t that didn’t actually happen. So it’s just such a fun, bizarre story in terms of like how exactly did this hash out. So in the case of psychics, basically there’s two explanations here. I’ll just be charitable. I’m known for being charitable.

0:51:27
I will be charitable, he says. He outstretches his arms. So given that Annie Palmer didn’t exist, that is the woman described in the legends, there Palmer didn’t exist, that is, there was no such person, then the question is, well hold on here, so what about all the evidence that people are saying? Because we have tourists going there, we have ghost hunters going there, we have psychic mediums going there, we have a whole tourist machinery geared towards this. So the question is, well hold on here, hold the phone. What are they seeing?

0:52:03
What are they reporting? phone? What are they seeing? What are they reporting? Now, it’s possible, I will grant you it’s possible, that there’s another ghost there. Maybe someone else died there. I don’t know. All I’m telling you is that it can’t be Annie Palmer, the White Witch of Rose Hall, because she didn’t exist. So in the case of psychics, basically there’s two explanations for what Eileen Garrett experienced.

0:52:22
The first one is that she intentionally fabricated the contact. She’s a famous psychic. She goes to Rose Hall, there’s tourists there, there’s news media, she’s the star of the show, she’s the person that can contact the White Witch and tell the true story. Well either she hoaxed it, and she’s a liar, I mean she’s dead now so I can’t say anything Or she merely succumbed to the power of suggestion. And she talked about what she thought might have happened.

0:52:59
She’s like, oh, well, I’m sensing something bad happening and evil and cruelty and oh, it’s horrible. And I think that’s what I mentioned earlier, the case of Nancy Weber and another case, in the in the in the uh… another case uh… when they could the best cases like a detective so yeah and in new jersey who was allegedly channeling a dead woman right and that’s what i believe happened that case as well, I want to make it clear i’d i’m not accusing anybody of fraud i think that in most these cases as with Eileen Garrett and several others i think the psychics generally believe that they’re channeling some unseen spirit they they really believe that. They you know that they work themselves up into it And they sort of that they believe they’re in a medium and impressions that come into their head. They they interpret as being It’s either that or the line Or it could be both. I don’t know yeah, but but I In my in my approach to investigation and skepticism. I prefer to be charitable about it. I can’t prove it either way Certainly many people can get it in their heads that they’re experiencing things that they’re not. So one of the obvious questions is, how did this legend come about? I mean, it makes a good story. Know that, but I love the story. It’s gothic, it’s creepy, it’s weird, it has racial politics, it has history, it has sexual politics. It has racial politics, it has history, it has sexual politics, it’s just perversions, right?

0:54:30
Everything you want. Everything and then… Sensational ghosts. Right, and the kitchen sink. So here’s what’s interesting. So in parsing it out, so I did some research and I also relied on Yates’ work in terms of teasing out what the hell happened. How is it that the most famous ghost story in the Caribbean is based on a fictional person? Well, it turns out that in 1830, there was an abolitious minister named Reverend Hope Waddell and he collected stories from slaves and hyped them about the cruelty.

0:55:09
So his goal was to try and outlaw slavery. Admirable goal. Good for him. But in the process of doing so, he collected stories at Rose Hall. And in fact, as it turns out, one of the ironies is that instead of the original story being that the slaves were treated so cruelly and horribly at Rose Hall, especially badly, in fact they were actually treated better than average at Rose Hall.

0:55:36

So yeah, so in fact, there was a slave rebellion and Rose Hall was spared from being burned down. It was later burned down, but during the rebellion, Rose Hall wasn’t torn down, partly because the slaves were treated better there than other places. But it was partly due to Hope Waddell’s research, and he wrote a book about it, talking about talking about the evils of slavery and basically trying to dramatize the cruelty of it. And so that’s one of the reasons that this idea that Rose Hall was particularly cruel and sadistic and especially evil things went on there was attached to Rose Hall, was because this guy was trying to dramatize and exaggerate for good purposes, don’t get me wrong.

0:56:24
But he was like, well, let’s show everybody just how bad it really is. In Rose Hall, for example. And then it’s like, that actually wasn’t the case. So that was 1830. And then in 1868, a guy named John Costello, who was the editor of our local newspaper, the Falmouth Post, published a pamphlet titled The Legend of Rose Hall, which expanded on Wendell’s findings and embellished it. So what happened was that you had an 1830 pamphlet by a minister that was sort of dramatizing and sensationalizing the cruelty and sadism going on at Rose Hall.

0:57:06
And then 38 years later, you had a local newspaper that essentially legitimized it and put it in the newspaper. So it was like, well, this is in print, right? This is a newspaper man. And and you know the power of print, right? So yeah, the people may or may not have seen what else pamphlet floating around but when John Costello Expanded on on Wendell’s findings and sort of hyped it up and talking about the the the evil things going on Rose Hall People latched on to it. And then you skip ahead to 1929 when when DeLisser wrote his novel, The White Witch of Rose Hall, which became internationally famous. It’s probably the best-known literature in Jamaica, certainly of the era.

0:57:50
And that sort of crystallized and solidified not only the Jamaican people’s beliefs about Rose Hall and Annie Palmer and this plantation slavery, but it also dramatized it. So it further dramatized it. It’s not like someone sat down and said, hey, let me dream up a ghost story. That’s not what happened. It’s far more interesting than that.

0:58:15
It’s more of an evolution than that. And so again, you have these little elements that each person sort of bumps it up a notch, and another person bumps it up a notch, and another person adds a couple details. And we see this today, right? This is one of the reasons why the story of Rose Hall is so dramatic and sensational. Why have we all these dramatic bloody screams from the basement, and dead bodies, and psychics coming and talking about the horrific things that this poor woman endured, even if she wasn’t real.

0:58:46
But again, it’s this snowball effect. Everything is amplifying everything else. And then it wasn’t until the Daily Gleaner published Jeffrey Yates’ series in 1965 when he basically did the research. He was a great skeptic. I wish I would have loved to have met him. And I’m sure he wasn’t trying to debunk anything. He was just like, I’m a newspaper man. This is a famous story.

0:59:16
is there anything to it? And good for him. Good on you, man. That’s what people should do. That’s why journalism is inherently skeptical. Just because your mother tells you, don’t believe it. Anyway, so that was 1965, and then I reinvestigated the case and brought it up to date and brought in other stuff.

0:59:40
And so that was sort of the evolution of it. And so it’s interesting, again, being able to trace back the history of it and how the whole story evolved. And as with a lot of cases, again, these things don’t occur in a vacuum. This is one of the points I always talk about is that you look at something, for example, you look at the Amityville horror story. That was a precursor to The Exorcist in 1973. So you really can draw a very clear line in pop culture certainly between different well-known stories and cases.

1:00:18
And again, all these cases don’t occur in a vacuum. There’s always some sort of cultural phenomena and something that generates. and the same thing happened in my Chupacabra investigation, where the Chupacabra didn’t suddenly pop into existence in 1995. There’s a whole series of interesting social and cultural phenomena that led into it. So anyway, I don’t want to go on too much about it, but it is interesting how the legends and ghost stories can be used to further an agenda. In the case of Reverend Waddell, his agenda was talking about how bad slavery was. The unintended consequence was to attach dramatic tales of sadism and cruelty to Rose Hall that weren’t based in fact.

1:01:07
Other people’s agendas were, of course, to mystery monger, to sell tour tickets, to sell books. So, you know, a lot of times, much of the story of Rose Hall is misinformation and mystery mongering. And people just not knowing or caring what parts of the story are true, what parts of the story are fiction, it’s all sort of jumbled together. And one of the main things that I try to do as a skeptical investigator is tease that out. And one of the main things that I try to do as a skeptical investigator is tease that out.

1:01:43
You can’t just assume that a story is true. You can’t just assume a story is false. You have to take the time and the effort to sort it out and to verify these things. And it was, for example, when I was publishing my article and I contacted Jeff Bellinger, who’s written several books. He’s the head of a website called GhostVillage.com. And I contacted him, and I think I’d met him once before, and I said, you know, hey Jeff, you know, here’s my research on Rose Hall. Because Rose Hall was mentioned in one of his books, in several books, on ghosts. And I said, by the way, you know, I just thought you might want to know.

1:02:25
And since that time, that was in 2008, I contacted him in July 2008, and you can guess whether his subsequent books and mentions of Rose Hall talk about the fact that my research and that of Jeffrey Yates has debunked it. I’m not going to give away any spoilers, but let me just say don’t look too hard for my name in Bellinger’s books. And I think the other point that sort of comes to my mind about this case is that there’s an ethical issue here, which is that even though Annie Palmer isn’t real and didn’t exist and is just a fictional character in DeLisser’s novel, there was a woman with that name.

1:03:12
She has been maligned. She’s been smeared. You have cases where innocent people and their legacies have been tarnished by ghost hunters and people who just don’t care. They say, oh, we had the evil spirit, blah, blah, blah. She was sadistic. She murdered 15 people.

1:03:38
And it’s like, well, hold on here. I mean, in some cases, the ghost and the person is fictional, but in some cases, they’re real. And again, in the case of Annie Palmer, there was no one of that description fitting that name, but there was a person of approximately that name associated with the home.

PR: So thanks, Ben, for that very extensive, exhaustive uncovering of the mysteries of Rose Hall.

BR: Yeah, well, you’re welcome, I hope you enjoyed it. It was an in-depth, fun fascinating case with lots of skeptical angels to it. We’ll be doing Part 2 on Jamacia next week where I’ll be discussing various ghost stories and legends of the island.

PR: Be sure to like us on Facebook at Squaring the Strange as well as give us a rating on iTunes if you want. That’s the way we get listed or ahead of other podcasts.

1:04:48.

The better our ratings are, the higher up we are.

BR: Yeah, we tried bribing somebody, but we didn’t really know who to bribe. It was really embarrassing.

PR: Yeah, I don’t know who to bribe. I tried to bribe iTunes, and that got us in a little trouble.

BR: My shillbucks are not covering this.

PR: Shillbucks do not work for that kind of bribery. It’s weird. It’s sad.

1:05:12
Well, at least they still take them at Peter Piper Pizza. But make sure to follow us on Twitter at Squaring Strange or Instagram, Squaring the Strange. And be sure to check out our Patreon. It’s patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. You can come over there. You can pledge various amounts and you get different benefits for whatever you decide that you think we are worth. You know, these are whatever you’re worth. Whatever you decide you think we are worth. We spend a good amount of our you know personal time and and a little bit of money Making this happen and while we do love the fun of doing it It is a lot of work and any contribution is much appreciated of doing it. Like I said, you do get some cool little perks depending on the level that you want to jump in. And we actually are going to be giving out free stickers to patrons very soon here, so stay tuned for that. Current patrons, you will be getting some kind of message from us explaining what’s going to go on there. New patrons, you’ll just get some stickers.

1:06:24
BR: And I have, well you didn’t know this, I’m surprising you here in the studio, but I may have something really cool that’s Jamaica related as a giveaway for some of our big supporters.

PR: Oh awesome, awesome. Alright, well you heard it here first, we got some kind of Jamaican surprise. I would assume it’s probably legal.

BR: well you know it’s it’s I will tell you this in all honesty I was surprised I got through customs with it I’m dead serious I did I thought for sure I was gonna have you know them pull out the rubber glove so yeah but I yeah

PR: well head on over to our patreon page if you if you’re interested in what this mystery is we’re not gonna give it away right now but we still have a part two of this episode next week.

1:07:17
So I think that’s about it. That’s all I got. How about you, Ben?

BR: No, I got nothing. All right. Well, then you guys have a great week and thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned for part two next week. Bye.