>The Haunted Plantation Part III

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In order to understand this blog, you must read Part I and Part II first, otherwise things I talk about here won’t make any sense.

I’ve had the picture on the left for several years. My friend sent it to me in an emailed collection of several dozen photographs from the nineteenth century and I remember being so drawn to it the first time I saw it. It reminded me of myself when I was a young mother in that period – all the hopes, the fears, the love and the work put into molding the new little soul into an intelligent, thoughtful and generous individual. This photograph spoke to me in a way that others haven’t in all the years that I have studied and collected things throughout history.

When I came across the photograph today, I found myself thinking not of Fanny as a young mother, but of L’s soul bound to a decaying plantation house where she lived and died trying to bring a baby of her own into the world. She was killed in childbirth by the doctor she trusted to deliver her a healthy child. She was killed because she wasn’t married. The little baby girl was a bastard, yet to L, that baby represented the love that brought about her conception even if it wasn’t by traditional means. I looked at this photograph, which had such a personal representation to me, and I wondered to myself what I would have done if Lawrence wasn’t my husband but merely “the father of a bastard baby.” I expect I would have not been able to move on to the afterlife either if the doctor had killed me during Grace’s birth. Suddenly I had a new understanding of what L endures in that old plantation house even if she no longer has a body. She’s still a mother. So am I. So are all women who have had and will have children. I don’t think that doctor correctly estimated the ferocity with which a mother will love and try to protect her child. It makes me sad that L never got to raise her daughter as I was allowed to raise Grace, Wyllys, Emily and Gertrude.

The reason why these thoughts were in my mind as I went about my day is because I had a rather vivid dream last night. I don’t know if it was “just a dream” or my medium skills going out for a stroll while I slept but the dream has stuck with me all day. In the dream, I found myself at the plantation house again but I was alone that time as opposed to being with my friends. The house was as it looked in L’s lifetime but V was there as well even though she lived there much later. I went up the front steps and went inside as if I lived there but I knew it wasn’t “real” – it was a very vivid medium experience. I went to L’s room without stopping at the other rooms along the way. She was there in a dark blue house dress, as in not a dress she would wear out, and I could tell that she was about six months pregnant. She was standing at her table with the mirror between the windows and she was arranging what she called her tea roses in what looked more like a crystal bowl than a traditional tall flower vase. She loved her roses and I had spoken to her about them when I was actually there last month.

She invited me to sit in an armchair by the fireplace and she was happy to show me the baby clothes she had been sewing. The entire time both she and I knew that she was no longer alive and this was a big projection of imagery from her life that she preferred to think about rather than dwelling on her last day of life and why she never knew her baby. To her, it seems that going through the motions of preparing for the baby makes her feel like she could have had some control over what happened.

This is when it got really interesting.

As she showed me a few things for the baby, her eyes lit up and she told me she knew I could keep her secrets like her “sweet cousin [editing name out]” did. I said of course and she pulled out a letter from a hiding place (I don’t want to say where) and showed me a letter from the baby’s father. He was elsewhere, as in L had been sent to that plantation when her pregnancy was discovered, and the father was kept away from her. She kept telling me that she wasn’t “loose” and she had intended to elope before things unraveled. I told her I understood and she began to cry. She was wringing her hands and saying that nobody knew what happened to her, that she was a big secret and so on and so forth. I told her not to upset herself and that a lot of us knew the truth about what happened to her and we know that she was the innocent party in this story. That seemed to make her feel better. After a moment of silence, she wondered what happened to her baby’s father and if he ever thought about her. I think she truly did love that man.

It’s interesting how perceptions can dictate what legacy people leave and what happens to them. I had five children with the man I loved and nobody batted an eyelash because we went through a ceremony that made our union acceptable. Without that ceremony, people could be just as in love but deemed sinful, evil or mentally ill. Two couples could love each other equally but if one couple wasn’t married, the child produced of that love had less value than the child produced by the married couple. Phrases like loose woman and bastard baby could ruin – or even end – lives in the blink of an eye.

I would say that L gets to me in ways that other spirits I’ve worked with do not. She cannot let go of that plantation house until the doctor who killed her leaves and releases his grip on the other souls stuck there. I think my sense of hopelessness about the situation makes the case stick to me. There is no quick fix. I can only do my best for L, her baby, V and the other souls connected to that plantation.

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>The White Witch of Rose Hall

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The impressive Georgian great house pictured here is known as Rose Hall, built in the eighteenth century. It sat on a thousand acre sugar plantation in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Rose Hall is known to be haunted by the former mistress of that plantation, Annie Palmer, also known as the White Witch. Very little is known about her and what is known appears to come from decades of local legend that paints a picture of an exceptionally cruel woman who not only routinely killed her slaves but killed her three husbands as well. There isn’t a lot of documentation to back it up but the people of Montego Bay believed her to be a powerful voodoo practitioner.

It is said that Annie Palmer was born in Haiti to European parents. When they died of yellow fever when she was ten-years-old, she was placed in the care of her Haitian nanny, who taught her everything she knew about voodoo. It is also said that she only grew to be four-foot-eleven. Marriage brought Annie to Jamaica where she lived at Rose Hall amongst the slaves who worked the fields and cared for the needs of her and her husband. She was alleged to have found life on the plantation terrible and dreamed of the fast-paced, interesting life in grand European cities like Paris. At some point, her dreams became resentment toward her husband. He suddenly turned up dead and the people of Montego Bay suspected it was by Annie’s hand.

A woman left alone to run a thousand acre sugar plantation had little choice than to cultivate a tough image or she would leave herself open to those looking to take advantage of her. Annie took her tough image to the extreme. Every morning, Annie went to the back balcony of the great house where her slaves assembled in the garden and she delivered her orders for the day, which often included beatings, punishments and executions. She also began taking slave lovers, forcing men who struck her fancy to satisfy her sexual needs. She lived in the lap of luxury while the people who cared for her needs suffered and feared they would be the next to die.

Annie played with her slave lovers like toys but tired of them quickly. Once she tired of them, they were due to meet their deaths. A man forced into her bed knew that his days were numbered. Voodoo was widespread in the region and people knew that she practiced it with skill, making her reputation grow. She married two more men who certainly were foreigners unaware of that reputation until they too turned up dead under mysterious circumstances.

I have heard two stories of how Annie died during the slave uprisings of the 1830s. One story is that she was killed by her slave lover in her own bed out of the knowledge that if he didn’t kill her, she would certainly kill him. The other story is more complex. Allegedly Annie’s slave overseer (a slave himself) was quite a powerful practitioner of voodoo himself and his daughter was engaged to marry another slave. Annie’s lust fell on that slave and she took him for her own lover. The overseer wanted to protect his daughter from getting hurt so he planned to have Annie killed. She killed her lover the first night she took him to her bed and it enraged the overseer, who fought her and killed her in return. Other slaves prepared a grave with voodoo rituals meant to contain her body and soul so she could not rise from the grave and harm more people. The ritual, however, was done incorrectly and so was born the ghost of the White Witch of Rose Hall.

A great many people since then have reported ghostly activity in the great hall of both Annie and the slaves she tortured and killed. The great house sat in ruin for two hundred years but was purchased by a man in the twentieth century who built a Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the grounds and overhauled the great house. Workmen began reporting that their tools were moved, disappeared, reappeared, etc. They heard voices when there was nobody else there, they heard footsteps and the sounds of babies crying. In the tales of Annie’s voodoo practices, she allegedly sacrificed the babies of her slaves and their cries can still be heard today. Eventually the only workmen to take the job were not from Jamaica.

Once the great house was opened for tourists, they too began reporting the disembodied voices, mysterious footsteps, apparitions, physical touches and so forth. The basement was turned into a bar and restaurant for the tourists, but in Annie’s time, she used the basement to contain uncontrollable slaves. Many were killed. Shadow figures have been seen in the basement and there are reports of liquor bottles moving, as well as footsteps, all phenomenon of which is generally attributed to the slaves who were held there. Annie herself most often manifests as the sound of hurried footsteps through the hall toward the back of the house and she is also reported to try and physically seize people as they come into the house. She has also been seen riding a black horse on the grounds and wearing a green riding habit, whipping anybody who gets in her way.

The most famous and frightening way Annie manifests is through one of the only mirrors remaining in the house that was present in her lifetime. A great deal of tourists have sent pictures to Rose Hall of this mirror with what appears to be manifestations of a woman in the reflection. Several can easily be debunked but some are chilling in what they are supposed to show. This is an example of one of the alleged ghost photos of Annie Palmer reflected in her mirror.

What do you think? Is this a woman or a trick of the light?

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>Dressgasm of the Day: 1866 blue dress

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Today’s dressgasm struck me as so much like my own style of the period that I intend to replicate it right down to the soft, yet vibrant blue color if I can ever find the right fabric.

This dress dates to 1866, which is a year after the Civil War ended. At that time, the female silhouette was beginning to shift from the exaggerated wide shoulders and skirt with the narrow waist to the more elongated, natural shape of a woman’s body. If this dress had been made before or during the Civil War, the decorative stripes on the bodice would have been wider set – more horizontal than vertical – and the shoulder seams would have been dropped a bit more. In order to replicate this dress for Civil War reenacting, I will have to do those simple alterations to the design.

I believe the main fabric is silk taffeta based on other silk taffeta dresses I have seen. The decorative stripes might be satin or another fabric that would be extremely shiny compared to the silk taffeta. The buttons on this dress may or may not be original to the dress, but if they are, they are gold and quite fancy. The lady who wore this dress had some money at her disposal.

Belts were quite popular in the mid-nineteenth century and could be attached to the bodice, skirt, or totally unattached. Many belts were made of the same material as the dress, while others were black or another contrasting color. This belt has a rosette, which is a gathering of fabric made to look like a flower. Rosettes were a popular design on belts and as other decorative pieces on dresses.

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