Beaching, Voodoo Dancing and Haunted Houses

19

April 20, 2016 – Today was our last full day and after the past two, very full, days, we opted for a beach day. But first there were a few things we wanted to pick up – some jerk spice, some whole nutmeg, a bottle of rum cream, some coffee… I’d been price checking everywhere we’d been and the best price on the rum cream was, surprisingly, at the hotel. But the best prices on the coffee and jerk spices were, sigh, at the Rose Hall Shoppes, so back on the free bus we went, back to the resort and cruise ship tourist shopping deposit and thought “What are we doing back here!?”

We saw one cruise ship go out last night, and another two come in today, and when we arrived on the hotel bus the Rose Hall Shoppes were hopping and the parking lot was filled with parked buses full of the cruise ship passengers, hostage until their tour bus driver met the time allotment agreed upon between the tour group company and the little mall. Even our hotel shuttle makes us stay there for an hour (grumble).

We collected our coffee, our jerk spice, and our nutmeg and then did a quick circuit. There were more craft vendors than last time, a testament to the vendors increasing pushing their wares on the days the cruise ships arrive. It makes perfect sense…when a boat arrives and disgorges thousands of passengers at once, and when their excursions shuttle them to known locations where they are temporarily held hostage, you go where they are because they have money to spend.

A man was carving a pineapple from Jamaican mahogany, and a beautiful wooden starfish amongst his other wares caught both our eyes.

Kirk asked how much.

“$30”

“No mon, too much.”

“How much you pay?”

“$15”

“No mon, too little. $20”

“I’ll think about it…”

And we walked off.

Kirk really liked it, so we went back, but another couple had picked it up, along with two lovely wooden bowls, and we watched as the man asked how much. The artist gave him a price, and the man just pulled out his wallet and paid!

What’s up with that! Bugger didn’t even haggle, and paid the full price!!! Dammit!

We looked at other things the artist’s wares and saw a gorgeous carved fish (yes, I know, I’m a fish nerd and I can’t help myself). I pointed at it and asked how much,

“$30”

Here we go again……

“$15″

No mon, $20…..I just sold the starfish you wanted for the full $30 mon…..”

“Yes, I know, fine, $20, here you go”, and a discussion on woods, carving, etc fell out of the purchase before we walked away with our treasure.

We still had over half an hour or more to kill before our bus would collect us and take us back to the hotel, so I nudged us out of the shopping jail and walked out to the highway, where we bravely ran across to the middle of the highway, and then caught a traffic light to run the rest of the way across.

I can tell you that the drivers here seem like lunatics on the roads, and to a certain extent, they are. I don’t think I’d ever feel confident enough to drive here, it’s seriously frightening. That said, I think the drivers in Vancouver are far, far worse, merely because they lack the ability to pay attention to what is going on around them.

I wouldn’t have made that dash across the highway the first, or even the second, day we were here, but after spending a lot of time in the buses right behind the drivers, chatting with them and asking all sorts of questions about everything, including driving, I knew that unless I quite literally stepped out directly in front of a driver, I’d probably not be hit.

But I didn’t test that theory.

Across the highway was a golf course – the White Witch – and Rose Hall, one of the few plantation houses remaining of the roughly 700 originally on the island. In the uprising, the slaves burned all but about a half dozen. This one had been left alone because it was haunted and the slaves did not want to rouse the spirits within.

The security guard let us through the gate and we wandered up the road to take a few photos, before turning and shuffling our way back to the shops in the heat. I mentioned to Kirk that there was a night tour, a “haunted house” tour….. his eyes lit up, maybe we weren’t finished with our excursions from the hotel after all…..

Our bus came a short time later and took us back to the resort.

We dropped our treasures off in the room, collected our books, bottles of water, sunscreen, towels, and sunglasses and wandered down to see if we could find a shady spot near the water. We were lucky enough to find a perfect pair of lounge chairs in the shade beneath a palm umbrella and settled in to relax.

Kirk went off to check us in on the next day’s flight, and when he came back he had a receipt for one last tour, the night tour of Rose Hall.

It was windy out, and from the corner of my eye I saw something move. I thought it was a leaf, but I looked and saw a yellow crab skitter across the hot sand.

I did pretty well at the beach…I’m not really very good at sitting still, or sitting on a beach, or sitting still on a beach. A few mojitos, a few chapters of our books, a little snack from one of the restaurants, a bit of swimming, a few photos, a few hours…..and then I was finished “beaching”.

Time to do something else. Our tour pickup was for 6:20pm, and that meant a late dinner on a lunchless day, so we swung down to one of the restaurants for a small meal to get us through the next hours. On the way through the pool area someone called out my name. That’s a strange feeling when you’re in a foreign country, though not the first time it had happened. Last time Kirk and I were docking a sailboat in a small harbour in Greece when my name was bellowed out and a man was running around the harbour yelling and waving….that was really weird.

In both cases it was someone we’d met on the trip, and considering I’m not super social with strangers, it’s just an odd thing.

This couple was from Kingston and they’d been sitting at the table next to us last night at dinner and struck up a conversation with us. He, LaVerne (that’s not a misspelling), had asked what I did for a living and when he heard “Fisheries” all other conversation was sidelined. Apparently he and his best friend love fishing, and want to come to BC to do a charter, and they are planning on being in BC in late August, perfect timing I told him, there will definitely be salmon to catch. We ran into them again, for a third and last time, later that night when we came back from our tour, and he said he didn’t want to seem forward, but could he have my email address so that he could contact me the next time they came out so he could get advice on where to go and maybe a good charter company. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I don’t fish, but I gave them my email because it’s not like I don’t know a hundred people who do, including some guides.

We ran up to the room to grab our cameras but found the cleaning staff still doing our room. We went and sat at some chairs around the corner until we heard a door slam and the roll of the cart, she had just finished. When we entered the room we found a new towel creature on the bed. We’d had sting rays, fans with flowers scattered in them, sea shells, but this time we had a swan and its body was decorated with bougainvillea flowers, a leaf on its head, and the little white centre flowers from two bougainvillea blossoms set as eyes. I launched back out of the room and around the corner and caught the woman before she vanished. She looked startled, she thought something was wrong, I just wanted to thank her for the swan and give her a tip.

She beamed.

Ahhh, but the tour.

If you come to Montego Bay, if you do no other tour, no other excursion, you simply MUST do the evening tour at Rose Hall’s Great House.

We were picked up by a taxi driver, our personal driver, John, his taxi had a funny little sticker on the door “Mr. Happy” and that he was!

He asked us how we were doing and we answered “Mi deh ya” and his body lurched forward and up a bit.

“Hey mon, how you know dat? You know what dat meanin’ mon?”

“Ya mon, it mean ‘I am here‘ mon”.

“Ya mon, you know “wah gwaan?”

“Ya mon, mi deh ya…!”

He laughed such a huge laugh…. “Yo bin learnin’ the Patwah mon, who bin teachin’ ya?”

“We had a little lesson mon.”

“Right on mon, right on, respect mon.”

And as with every driver before, we peppered him with questions about many things. And like every other driver we’d had, he was a jokester with a massive smile that shone through every inch of his body.

Jamaicans don’t just smile with their mouth, they smile with their entire being when their smile is real, it reaches deep and shines from within.

John dropped us off and hauled us in to the office where we were given our wrist bands, and when we found out that no photos were allowed on the tour we ran back to our personal taxi and left our cameras with him. Most Jamaicans are very honest and honourable, that much we’d learned very quickly.

When everyone had assembled, a stunning young woman named Tina gestured us to circle round…the sun had gone down, a man was playing the bongo, torches were lit around the paths, and the darkness was settling in on us. Tina started to dance to the music, and encouraged us to dance with her, she led us in some steps and arm gestures, she said she was calling on the Voodoo spirits to protect us from Annie Palmer’s, the White Witch’s, ghost.

It was hot, we were dancing, no one told us there were aerobics involved in this tour! But it was so fun. And then the music stopped, and in a hushed voice, she beckoned us to follow her up the path to the front of the Great House.

The house was magnificent. The thick and wide mahogany plank flooring creaked and groaned under us. The foot wide dark mahogany carved door framed and headers were stunning. You just had to slide your hand across them and marvel. The walls were finished in original silk coverings, some of the furnishings have been found and restored, others were of the day, but also from the day. It was a beautiful place with a dark and ugly past.

Tina was an amazing storyteller, animated, detailed, incredibly engaging. She drew you in to her tales and regaled you with the bloody history of the plantation’s last mistress, Ann Palmer. Ann learned Voodoo from her grandmother in Haiti and was named the White Witch by the slaves for her bloody ways.

Ann poisoned her first husband after seven years together, she thought he was a drunk. She was married to her second husband for two years before she killed him. Her third and final husband only managed to eke out six months with her before she killed him because he was stupid (that’s what Tina told us!).

In each case she locked the dead body in a room and declared him dead by yellow fever. She had the slaves carry the bodies to the coast and bury them on the shore. On the way back, she declared that the slaves had run away and had them shot on sight.

She left no witnesses.

In the end, her lover made passionate love to her in her bed, and then strangled her to death. He ghost is said to haunt the house to this day.

The group we were with was fabulous, a collection of personalities, with a few nervous jittery types, and at least three good screamers. The first “ghost” to surprise us came after we paused at a door to a secret tunnel that led to the coast, put there in case the Great House residents needed to flee for any reason. As we stood there listening to the story of how Annie’s lover would use the secret passage to make his way to her room, I thought…I bet something is going to come out of that door. And as we turned to move to the next room, the door slammed open and a “ghost” lunged out.

A teenage boy fled the room and Tina was laughing and laughing at him “You shoulda seen yo face mon, you her alredda but ya shoes still ova dere!”

And it went like that. A young woman moving along with us just got more and more nervous as we went, and every time something went bang, something moved unexpectedly, something whispered….she jumped and shrieked.

We made our way down the back stairs to a small group of dancers, dancing Voodoo dances in the dark, by the light of the full moon overhead and the burning torches surrounding them. Tina said we should dance to lift any curses we had picked up, she got us moving again. Then she led us into the dungeon, the place where Annie would have any slaves who had displeased her thrown into a 16 foot pit with no foot or water and barely any ventilation, where she would leave them to die a tortured death.

We then filed through a door to a little space with some tables and a bar, a small tavern where we could have a drink and look at the historical photos, the plans of the Great Hall, photos taken of Annie’s mirror, sowing faces that weren’t there, photos of her headboard with strange shadows, eyes ghostly in the wood, photos taken by tourists and sent here from abroad.

Our young screamer just got more and more freaked out.

And then Tina led us outside and up a dark path. A gunshot rang out above us, that was the one thing that made me jump, I’d argue that was a natural reaction to hearing something akin to a bear banger, but the frightened young woman in front of us jumped and spilled a bit of her drink and just kept uttering “I don’t want to go up here, I don’t want to go there….”

I laughed and said “Safety in numbers”, Kirk said “no choice, the crowd is pushing you along.

We arrived at Annie’s grave. Tina pointed out that the grave had crosses on three sides. She said that psychics had come and said that by putting the crosses on all sides, Annie’s spirit would be contained, but that when three were placed, the psychics felt that Annie was not within, so the fourth cross was never placed and Annie was free to come and go from her crypt.

Tina told us to touch the rock coffin, to put our hands on it and wish Annie well….the man with the frightened woman suddenly said “Annie are you OK?” and those of us that heard burst out laughing and started singing. Even Tina burst into laughter, but she quickly brought us back to a sombre tone.

The frightened woman was babbling to the fellow with her, saying she didn’t want to be there, that she was freaked out. I reached out to her and said “Let me hold your drink, please…” and she handed it over willingly.

Behind us and up in the trees was a ghostly woman in a white dress….suddenly there was a loud noise, a sound of rocks rattling down a path, or rather, a large chain being dragged across the cobble.

The frightened woman whose drink I was holding practically climbed Kirk’s back!

As we walked away from the gravesite I handed back her drink and she thanked me, I told her it was nothing, it was merely self preservation as I didn’t want to wear it. She expressed disbelief that I wasn’t even a little bit frightened.

I suppose that’s the problem with being a logical minded skeptic, when something unexplained happens, I immediately look for the rational explanation, not the illogical or supernatural one.

When we finished our tour we tipped Tina and thanked her for a brilliant tour, and then returned to our driver. As he drove us back and quizzed us on the tour we told him that it was wonderful, a highlight. He asked if we’d been scared and we said no…. then we asked if he’d been and he replied to the affirmative.

We asked if he’d been scared and he emphatically responded “Ya mon, we Jamaicans are a superstitious people. There have been many accidents along this stretch of road in da wee hours. People have seen Annie in her white dress, riding her white horse and many people have been killed.”

When he dropped us off he wished us well and gave us a fist bump for the tip.

We finished the night off with a late dinner and a rum cream over ice before heading up to our room to pack for the trip home the next morning.

What a wonderful last minute bit of entertainment that tour was, and if you come to Montego Bay, you simply must take it.