Episode 32: The White Witch of Rose Hall

Written By Stephanie Summar

Annie Palmer and Delphine LaLaurie

When you picture a monstrous slaveholder, who comes to mind?

If you're thinking of Annie Palmer, the so-called White Witch of Rose Hall, or Madame Delphine LaLaurie of New Orleans infamy, you're not alone. These women have been immortalized in ghost tours, novels, TV shows, and pop culture as the very embodiment of cruelty. Annie is remembered for torturing her enslaved lovers and practicing voodoo; Delphine for chaining, starving, and mutilating those she held captive.

But here's the twist: Annie Palmer never existed. And while Delphine LaLaurie did commit horrifying acts, her legend has been dramatically shaped and amplified over time. So why do these two women remain the most infamous figures in the history of slavery, while countless male perpetrators – often far more brutal – go unremembered?

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which people are victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as mentions of slavery, torture, murder, racism, and sexual violence. Please listen with care.

    If you're enjoying the show, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Your support helps keep the pajama party poppin’!

    An abridged version of “The Legend of Rose Hall”, by John Castello, published as a pamphlet in 1868:

    In the Parish Church of St James, Montego Bay, is a marble monument of the purest white without speck or blemish. Its ornaments are few and simple, but beautifully and delicately carved. It is one of those monuments that attracts attention and pleases the eye. The superscription purports that it was erected to the memory of Mrs Ann Palmer who was exemplary in all the social relations of life: as a daughter dutiful, as a wife affectionate and loving, as a parent kind and tender, that after a long and lingering illness, which she bore with the most Christian patience and resignation, she was removed from this to a better and happier world.

    About 10 miles away on the main road to Falmouth, you come to the remains of what formerly was a magnificent gateway, and about half a mile within the estate, you see a stately mansion, prettily situated on the top of a gentle slope. The first thing that strikes you is its magnitude.

    Inside the main hall, a room of lofty dimensions and magnificent proportions, three portraits in richly carved frames and painted by a master hand immediately attract attention. Indeed, they are almost the sole occupants of this lofty room, for there’s hardly a vestige of furniture, and the fine wood of the floor, once so highly polished, is now damp and mouldy. The gilding which formerly adorned the frames is tarnished and dull, but the pictures themselves are fresh and fair, and the colours are as bright and vivid as on the day they came from the painter's easel. They form a strange contrast to the neglect and decay of all around, and carry the mind back to the time when the originals lived in the old mansion, when instead of damp and mould and decay all was bright and gorgeous.

    One of these portraits represents a hard and stern-featured man, clothed in the scarlet and ermine robes of a judge. Another is of a benevolent-looking, gentlemanly person, dressed in the fashion of the older times, with powdered hair, laced cravat, lace ruffles, velvet coat. The other is of a female of about five or six and twenty, and if the painter has not flattered her, she must have been of exquisite beauty. Like the raven's wing is her hair, falling in thick clustering ringlets, unconflned by comb, down upon her alabaster neck and shoulders of purest white, her brow high and commanding, her eyes dark and expressive; a smile plays sweetly round her rosy lips, and the expression of her countenance is pleasant, but at the same time her eyes and brow show great determination of character. She is dressed in bridal robes. A wreath of orange-flowers round that fair, high brow contrasts well with her dark locks, while the small, fairy-like hand is in the act of putting aside the large bridal veil thrown loosely over her person. The panel of another picture is there, but the picture itself is gone.

    On the right side of the hall are two doors leading into bedrooms. In the farther one is an old-fashioned bedstead made of ebony and with tall posts and very low feet. The wood is quite black and old, but very elaborately carved. Examining closely the floor of the dressing-room, the entrance to a subterranean passage, now closed up, is seen. Opposite the main door are two others, fashioned in the same costly and expensive manner, which lead to a magnificent staircase, which still remains, and though neglected and mouldy seems to show what the rest of the mansion must have been.

    Such is the abode of that Mrs Ann Palmer whose virtues are recorded in the Parish Church. In this splendid mansion of Rose Hall, surrounded by all the luxuries which wealth could afford, this dutiful daughter, this affectionate wife, lived and died.

    Let us return to the bedroom. On that bed lay in dying agonies the original of that stern-featured man in ermine robes whose portrait hangs in the hall. He died in his prime, in full youth and vigour; he died by poison administered by the hands of his wife; he died while his wife looked on his last agonies with a calm brow and serene countenance, and unheeding his groans; he died while his wife was urging her slave, her accomplice and paramour, to hasten the effects of the lingering potion and put an end to the dying man's struggles by smothering him with pillows.

    And what became of this accomplice? Ask the old man you see basking in the sun there before the door,  he will tell you of a slave gagged, tied, and flogged until he died, while his mistress stood by callous to his dreadful sufferings, unsoftened by his awful agonies, and, with an unmoved brow, quietly watching him while he yielded up his existence. That slave was the paramour of the woman of so many Christian virtues, and she murdered him to prevent his disclosing her shame and crime.

    Though suspicion might be excited, death comes so suddenly and unexpectedly in this climate that the decease of Mrs Palmer's husband was easily accounted for. And if anyone dared to think there was foul play, her high rank and great influence forbade suspicious persons from mentioning it, and the fearful vengeance she had taken on her slave was a terrific warning to her own household to keep silent. Time wore on and the deed was forgotten.

    Now picture this: The Parish Church is filled with a gay and gladsome crowd. Plumes are floating, silks fluttering in the breeze, and amidst shouts and cheers, a bride and bridegroom approach the altar. Kneeling before the rails is the same beautiful bride as in the portrait we admired, and by his fine, benevolent countenance and rich Court dress we easily recognise her partner. The nuptial rite is ended, and amid the discharge of cannon, the firing of musketry, and the shouts of the populace, the gay and glittering throng return to the splendid mansion of the bride. And there was another page turned in the history of that dark-haired lady's life.

    Back in the ruined great house, at the top of a wide and costly staircase, there is a door that’s firmly locked and barred. Pushing back the stubborn bolt, we enter a room more damp, more mouldy, more neglected than any we have been in yet. A heap of musty feathers matted together by decay shows the remains of a bed. There are a few dark spots on the floor, and near a corner, a larger stain. The only other object that attracts attention is a torn old portrait – the eyes are entirely cut out. Here, another dark tragedy was performed, another deed of blood was committed, and another dark page of crime and wickedness was turned in the life of that dark-haired, high-browed lady.

    The hand of death was fast closing the eyes of the bridegroom; his hands were weak, his tongue no longer obeyed his will. When dismissing her second paramour and accomplice from the room, she, not contented with seeing her victim perish before her eyes, taunted him with her infamy and avowed that she had been the cause of his death, that she had drugged his cup, that she had poisoned his meat, and that no earthly power could stay his fleeting breath. 

    Her taunts and reproaches roused the decaying energies of the dying man, and his shouts echoed through the vast mansion that his wife had poisoned him. To stop his cries, to hide her guilt, his wife stabbed him with a knife that lay near. Collecting all his energies, the dying man rose from the bed, a dreadful struggle ensued, and when the horrified attendants burst open the door, the man was seen lying dead in one corner of the room, weltering in his blood, and his wife lying beside him profusely bleeding from a wound received from her husband in their last deadly embrace. The stain on the floor was caused by the blood that flowed from the murdered husband.

    The world was told a tale that in the last moments of her husband, amid the delirium and frenzy of death, he had risen from his bed, first attempted to destroy his wife, then stabbed himself to the heart. He was buried, and the fatal room closely barred and locked, while the only emotion his wife showed was removing that old dilapidated portrait from the banqueting hall, saying she could not bear to see her father, for it was his portrait, and he was reproachfully looking at her.

    The next few years of her life were spent in retirement, shunned and deserted by the world. She spent her days in her splendid mansion with the paramour for whom she committed so enormous a crime, and whom she afterwards married. He was an immigrant, a mechanic, a rude and unlettered man, but with passions as fierce and temper as fiery as her own. Bitter were the quarrels and fearful were the strifes and contentions between them.

    He disappeared, it was said he left the country, and though her former life showed she was capable of every wickedness, and though it was more than hinted she knew something about his departure, it’s also said she doted on that worthless villain with all the love and all the affection which only a woman can bestow, and that she mourned his loss long and bitterly.

    We have seen her affection as a wife. Her tenderness as a parent we can only glance at. One only daughter she had, the offspring of her first husband, and she consigned her to a fate worse than the most dreadful death.

    The next page of her history is almost a blank, and little is known of it. She married again, to Mr Palmer, but these last nuptial rites were celebrated in a manner widely different from those of her youth. No glittering cavalcade, no crowd of admiring friends, no multitude of exulting retainers, were summoned to add joy and eclat to the festive scene. The rite was solemnised in solitude, almost in obscurity. The name of the bride had become a scorn and reproach, and she no longer dared to meet the glance of her peers or be noticed by society. He chose her for her wealth alone, and having obtained that, warned by the dark whispers concerning the fate of his predecessors, he voluntarily banished himself from the society of his bride and wisely sought safety by flight, and a continued absence from the house of his still beautiful but fearfully dreaded wife.

    Left now alone to her own dark passions, her life was a continual prey to them, and as if these were not sufficiently strong, but perhaps also to drown the stings of remorse, she added the opium and liquor. Her nights were spent amid drunken orgies, scenes too disgusting to describe, while her days were spent in inflicting the most tyrannical cruelties and dreadful tortures upon her slaves, who were alternately the companions of her evening orgies and the victims of her morning remorse.

    One page more of her history: She that had looked calmly on the sufferings of others, she that had shortened the lives of three husbands, she that had seen unmoved the agonies of her fellow mortals while they were cruelly scourged to death, was now in her turn mocked by others. Her companions were her murderers. Through the underground passage she had used for her own wicked purposes, they entered her apartment. Her cries and screams were heard, but those were so common in the mansion that they passed unheeded and little or no attention was paid to them. Though some suspicion may have been aroused, she was so dreaded that her domestics cared not to interfere.

    In the morning, her body, flung carelessly on the bed with staring eyeballs, livid countenance and twisted throat, showed plainly the deed of violence that had been committed during the shadows of the night. A grave was dug and she was buried in sight of the house she had stained with so many crimes. This was the end of that Mrs Ann Palmer whose virtues are so conspicuously recorded in the Parish Church; this was the long and lingering illness which she bore with so much fortitude and resignation.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    On a sloping hill overlooking Jamaica’s Montego Bay, you’ll find Jamaica’s most famous great house – a beautiful Georgian mansion with a terrible past. Rose Hall is an 18th-century plantation mansion that today hosts conferences, weddings, a fancy golf course... and a museum dedicated to a serial-killing, voodoo-practicing madwoman whose ghost supposedly still appears in her bedroom mirror at night, although she’s more likely to do so if you pay for the ghost tour and seance.

    The legend of Annie Palmer, known as the White Witch of Rose Hall, has inspired novels, plays, a ballet, and even a Johnny Cash song – "The Ballad of Annie Palmer." Johnny became fascinated by her story after he bought a vacation home nearby. And honestly, who could blame him? It's the perfect horror story: a beautiful but deadly woman, murdered husbands, voodoo rituals, torture, secret passageways, and a violent end.

    There's just one little problem with this ghostly tale, and if you listened to the Myrtles Plantation episode earlier this season, it won’t come as a surprise: Annie Palmer never actually existed.

    As is often the case with the ghoulies and ghosties on this show, the infamous White Witch is a mash-up of several different planters’ wives who lived at Rose Hall, none of whom were serial killers or voodoo priestesses. I'm not excusing their slaveholding – that's inexcusable – but by and large, these real women all seem to have been the kind of wives who didn’t murder their husbands, and the kind of mothers who didn’t leave their children to a fate worse than death, whatever that is.

    The story I read at the top of the episode comes from a 10-page pamphlet written in 1868, which is the first mention of Annie Palmer, demoness. The story proved popular enough that it began to be included in Jamaica’s oral storytelling tradition, and eventually Annie became the subject of a 1929 novel by HG de Lisser – “The White Witch of Rosehall”.

    De Lisser added some juicy details, including a love triangle between a handsome white man, the wicked Annie Palmer, and a beautiful Black maid named Millie. Annie naturally plots to destroy Millie with the aid of voodoo. You see, Annie was orphaned at a young age in Haiti when her white parents died of yellow fever, and was taken in by a nanny who happened to be a voodoo priestess who could train her in sorcery. Duh.

    Thanks to all the husband-murdering, Annie amassed a large fortune and took control of the enormous estate. This status and power let her flout social norms and get away with unspeakable cruelties. She took lovers from among her slaves – an act we would now call coercion and rape – and when she became bored with them, she would take them to her dungeon in the cellar and force the other enslaved people to torture them to death. She was known to ride around in the night with a whip in hand, ready to beat any slave she encountered. And, perhaps worst of all, she would do it while wearing men’s attire.

    Yes, you heard that right. Pants. Pretty bold for the late 1820s.

    Each written retelling of Annie Palmer’s story – all of which, incidentally, are by male authors – has made her story more sensational and salacious. And this story has proven so compelling over the years that these days, Annie’s ghost brings thousands of tourists to Rose Hall every year, examining the bedroom decorated all in red – her favourite colour, visiting her tomb, and exploring her torture chamber.

    And that’s weird as hell to me. I mean, as we discussed in the Myrtles episode, plantation tourism is deeply problematic and I don’t like it one bit. And it’s very, very weird that the ghost everyone wants to see in this case is the disembodied spirit of a woman who never actually had a body in the first place. But the weirdest thing of all is that Annie Palmer’s reputation for sadism and debauchery and murder has made her the most infamous of Jamaica’s slaveholders. And you’ll never believe this, but I think it’s because she’s a woman. A fake woman, but still – a woman.

    To understand why her myth became so powerful, we need to understand the very real system that inspired it – a system so cruel that it stood out even in an era defined by inhumanity.

    We’re going to rewind through Jamaican history to the part where Christopher Columbus claimed it for Spain in 1494 during his second voyage to the New World. The Spanish settled the island in 1510, enslaved the local Taino people, and soon began importing slaves from West Africa. But it was under British control, which began in 1655, that Jamaica became one of the world's busiest slave markets.

    By the 1680s, the island's population was about 18,000, with enslaved people making up more than half that number. By the 18th century, Jamaica had become one of the most valuable British colonies, with Africans outnumbering Europeans five to one. Sugar production made plantation owners into some of the richest people in the entire British Empire, while the enslaved population endured what historians describe as possibly the lowest standard of living of any group that century.

    The plantation system in the British Caribbean was notoriously cruel, and Jamaica stood out even among its nasty peers. According to a historian from the 18th century: "No Country excels them in a barbarous Treatment of Slaves, or in the cruel Methods they put them to death." In 1764, another critic said that Jamaica's slaves were the worst-treated of any colony, and nowhere else were slaves so completely at the mercy of their masters.

    The conditions were truly horrific. Jamaica was already a dangerous place for Europeans due to yellow fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases. But if survival was difficult for white colonists, it was nearly impossible for enslaved Africans. The average life expectancy for an enslaved person brought to Jamaica was just seven years. Seven. Years.

    The number of slave deaths consistently exceeded births, creating a constant demand for new captives via the Middle Passage – a journey on which tens of thousands died before even reaching Jamaica's shores.

    By the time Britain abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, almost two million enslaved people had been transported to Jamaica alone. The violence inherent to the system led to constant tension that occasionally erupted into rebellion. White plantation managers lived in perpetual fear that they would be attacked – and with good reason. They were vastly outnumbered, and their cruelty created a powder keg of justified resentment.

    The social dynamics on these plantations were profoundly twisted. Men were whipped frequently and harshly, women were sexually violated as a matter of routine, and families were deliberately separated.

    So if we're looking for a villain in this story, there’s no need to invent one. There were plenty of real-life monsters running plantations in Jamaica.

    Take Thomas Thistlewood, for example, an overseer who eventually became a land-owning planter. He kept detailed diaries of his time on various estates, recording the daily brutality he inflicted on enslaved people with disturbing precision.

    He was unpredictable on purpose to ensure they never felt secure. He sexually assaulted 22 of the 29 women on one plantation – all rapes or coerced "relationships" in which consent was impossible due to the power dynamics. He deliberately manipulated enslaved people against each other to maintain control. He once wore out his pocket whip because he flogged so many people in a single day. Yeah, he had a pocket whip for on-the-go horror.

    Or how about Dr Lewis Hutchinson, known as the "Mad Master of Edinburgh Castle"? He was a Scottish immigrant who murdered travelers passing by his property, many of whom were never found. He was eventually convicted of the murder of one of the soldiers coming to search his property and hanged.

    The most infamous, well-documented cruel slaveholders and psychopaths during this period were men, but their stories haven't been mythologised the way Annie's has. There are no ghost tours built around them. No novels, no Johnny Cash songs. Interesting…

    But we don't have to go far to find a parallel to Annie Palmer. Let's hop over to New Orleans to meet Madame Delphine LaLaurie.

    If you've watched American Horror Story, or been on a ghost tour of New Orleans, or listened to any true crime podcast about female criminals, you probably know this name. Delphine LaLaurie was a wealthy socialite in 1830s New Orleans who became infamous for the torture of enslaved people in her mansion.

    Unlike Annie Palmer, LaLaurie was a real person. She came from a powerful Creole family and gained significant wealth and social status through her first two marriages. She didn't kill those husbands, but she did outlive them, leaving her with enough power and money to eschew some of the gender norms of the time. Her third marriage to a physician, Leonard LaLaurie, was notable because contemporaries remarked on how submissive he seemed to his wife – the first of many red flags for the patriarchal society of the time.

    Madame Lalaurie had a few run-ins over the years with the law and nosy neighbours about how she treated the enslaved people in her household. This was made worse after one neighbour saw a 12-year-old Black girl fall to her death off the roof while trying to escape punishment from Delphine for… brushing a knot in her hair. The girl was buried on the property, one of several deaths reported inside the mansion.

    Then, in 1834, a fire broke out at the LaLaurie mansion, started by an elderly woman who’d been chained to the kitchen stove. Although the LaLauries begged them not to, rescuers broke down an attic door and discovered enslaved people who had been subjected to horrific torture. According to newspaper accounts, they found “seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated... suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other.” I’m not going to get any more into the account than that. It’s not for the fainthearted or the nauseous, and it’s made even worse when you remember that these crimes were not committed by an imaginary woman. A real person did this to other real people.

    As in Annie's story, some of the details were exaggerated over time. But there was enough evidence of cruelty – cruelty that shocked a society that was totally fine with enslaving fellow human beings – that an angry mob formed and destroyed the LaLaurie mansion. Delphine and her husband escaped justice and ran to France, where she reportedly died in 1842, hopefully of something painful and lingering.

    Today, the LaLaurie Mansion is one of the most famous "haunted" buildings in New Orleans. It's featured prominently in ghost tours, has been the subject of countless books and documentaries, was briefly owned by Nicolas Cage, and was a central location in American Horror Story: Coven, where Kathy Bates played a fictionalised version of Delphine.

    Just like Annie Palmer, Madame LaLaurie has proven to have pop culture staying power. But why? Why are these two female slaveholders so highly mythologised and held up as the epitome of the evil of slavery? Why not the dudes? Let's unpack that.

    These two female slaveholders have become prime examples of moral scapegoating. And in their cases, it wasn't just something that happened later, when spooky tourism and ghost tours needed a compelling villain. It was happening in real time. Their stories became vessels for cultural anxieties – not only about slavery, but about gender, power, and control.

    European colonisers believed that white women would have a “civilising” effect in their colonies. White women were expected to bring domesticity, Christianity and moral virtue to these colonial outposts. They were, in theory, supposed to soften the harsh edges of colonial life.

    But by the 18th century, a counter-narrative gained popularity in Britain: West Indian white women were portrayed as embodiments of colonial vice, so brutal they even outstripped their male counterparts and fundamentally different from the “true ladies” back home. The narrative essentially became: slavery isn't evil, unrestrained women are.

    This shift also played out in formal spaces of power. During parliamentary hearings about the conditions in Jamaica, some of the most damning testimony focused on the treatment of enslaved people by white women. But again, not as a systemic problem. The implication was that female slaveholders were too emotionally unstable to wield authority responsibly. Men, by contrast, were supposedly firm but fair.

    This brings us directly to HG de Lisser's 1929 novel, "The White Witch of Rosehall." De Lisser was a Jamaican nationalist writing during the decline of British rule, and his novel was meant, in part, to show that colonial Jamaica had screwed up by letting white women step out of line and enjoy more power than they could handle. Annie Palmer's monstrosity becomes a symbol of the shortcomings of colonial rule and the dangers of improper female authority.

    Delphine LaLaurie’s legend followed a similar trajectory. She became a metaphor for the antebellum South: polished, elegant, respected – while hiding unthinkable violence behind closed doors. Just like Annie, she becomes a metaphor for a system gone rancid.

    The problem, however, is that telling the stories this way turns both Annie Palmer and Delphine LaLaurie into individual, deviant culprits, while the systems they operated within fade conveniently into the background.

    And both of these narratives are deeply gendered. Annie and Delphine were – and remain – infamous because they crossed boundaries that were particularly rigid in their time. 

    We’re told Delphine Lalaurie, prior to the scandal, was renowned for her beauty and highly regarded in New Orleans society. She married a high-ranking Spanish royal officer, and after his death, a financier and lawyer. She was celebrated for being a fashionable hostess, and somewhat of a living saint for her many charitable activities, including nursing yellow fever victims back to health.

    The epigraph that John Castello tells us was on Annie’s memorial says everything about what women were supposed to be at that time: “As a daughter dutiful, as a wife affectionate and loving, as a parent kind and tender” and that she bore her supposed “long and lingering illness” with Christian piety.

    But Castello also tells us all the unfeminine things that Annie did in life, and they’re the things that make her monstrous. She poisoned her own husband – betrayal! She watched calmly while he died painfully – emotionally cold! She was an adulteress! She stabbed her dying second husband to cover her murder – selfish! Angry! In de Lisser’s book, she becomes a true femme fatale, using her sexuality to influence men and manipulate authority to her advantage. A man-eater! She uses black magic to pursue terrible ends! Un-Christian! She loses her mind pursuing a man who loves someone else – hysterical! Irrational! Unstable!

    And in Annie’s case, the legend adds an extra layer of gendered and racialised fear: the white woman who becomes too close to Blackness. In many versions of the story, little orphan Annie is taken in by her Black Haitian nanny, who teaches her obeah or voodoo. (And in one version, she’s not just any old nanny – she’s a fearsome voodoo priestess who played a powerful role in Haiti’s successful, Black-led rebellion.)

    Annie doesn’t just reject Christianity – she embraces the “enemy’s” religion. It’s not enough that she sexually assaults enslaved Black men – she’s betrayed her White culture spiritually. She crosses racial boundaries with her body and her soul. She becomes a figure of contamination. She’s unclean. She’s tainted. She’s terrifying.

    All of these transgressions are layered onto their violence. They don’t just torture people. They do it while being beautiful. While being mothers. While being respectable. That’s the horror of their stories: the inversion of the feminine ideal. The nurturer becomes the torturer. The lady becomes the monster.

    These women aren’t just evil. They are evil in a specifically feminine way. They are – say it with me – the monstrous-feminine: creatures whose horror lies in their gender, their sexuality, and their failure to conform. Their existence threatens to annihilate an entire way of life.

    What's especially telling is that both women's legends center on what was seen as “illegitimate” female power. Annie Palmer supposedly inherited control of Rose Hall plantation after killing each of her husbands. This wasn't just murder in society’s eyes – it was a woman seizing authority that rightfully belonged to men.

    Similarly, Delphine LaLaurie accumulated wealth and social status from her first two husbands who died, allowing her to maintain positions of influence she hadn't “earned” in the patriarchal view of the time. She used her skills as a hostess and her social standing to influence local politics, even though she couldn’t legally vote. In the same way, her dominance over her third and final husband, Leonard, who was also much younger than her, was viewed as an unnatural power grab. Even though he was alive, she was still illegitimately taking his authority over their household as her own.

    Looking at these stories through a gendered lens helps us uncover deeper truths about power – who has it, who’s punished for wielding it, and how that punishment is framed. But that doesn’t make the pain any less real. In Delphine LaLaurie’s case, real people – enslaved human beings – were horrifically abused. Pointing out how women like her become scapegoats for broader systems of violence doesn’t excuse their actions. It shows us how easy it is to focus on a so-called monster and look away from the everyday brutality that made her possible.

    Planters’ wives and female relatives had power over enslaved people – but very little power within their own household. Men could hunt, join the military, play sports, gamble, and sleep around. Women could do none of those things.They were isolated on rural plantations or confined by the rigid expectations of urban high society, with few acceptable outlets for ambition or frustration. Many lived with the constant awareness that their husbands might be raping enslaved women, making them sexual rivals in a twisted, fucked-up power dynamic. They were expected to represent Christian virtue while also being complicit in – and sometimes instrumental to – a brutal, dehumanising system.

    This doesn't excuse the crimes against humanity at all – but it might explain why violent control of slaves became so associated with women in these legends. The gender element is essential to the horror – men did that and worse, but women weren't supposed to.

    What I’m arguing is not that these women were innocent – it’s that their monstrosity became a narrative solution to a much bigger problem.

    And that’s why both these women still haunt us – not because they were uniquely evil, but because they help us make sense of an evil we don’t want to face. Annie Palmer never existed. But we needed her. We needed someone to carry our cultural guilt. Someone to be the face of cruelty, so we wouldn’t have to look at the system that allowed it.

    Delphine LaLaurie becomes that face, too. The historical record confirms that she was abusive and that enslaved people in her household suffered terribly. The survivors who were rescued from the situation with devastating injuries, and some died shortly afterwards.

    But over time, the story became even more sensationalised. And significantly, those embellishments came from both sides of the slavery debate. Abolitionists circulated the story to expose the depravity of slavery, while pro-slavery types leaned into her monstrosity as a cautionary tale about women who take on authority properly assigned to men. In both cases, the legend functioned as propaganda. LaLaurie stopped being a person and became a symbol. And at the heart of both versions is the same disturbing image: a woman whose cruelty is perverse, pleasurable, and domestic. The violence and horror isn’t abstract anymore – it’s beautiful, maternal, and sitting right in your parlour.

    That’s why she endures. And that’s why Annie sells tickets. Because we don’t want to confront the system. We want a monster we can name.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. By the way, if you feel a suffocating pressure on your chest tonight, it’s not a ghost. It’s just the weight of unresolved historical trauma. Sweet dreams!

    To learn more about Annie Palmer, Madame LaLaurie, or the gorgeous wedding venues available at Rose Hall – ew – check out my sources in the show notes.

    Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

    I’ll be back in two weeks with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

The answer lies in how societies use gendered narratives to manage guilt.

In both colonial Jamaica and antebellum New Orleans, white women were expected to represent Christian virtue and domestic gentility. They were supposed to “soften” the violence of slavery with feminine grace. When women like Palmer or LaLaurie defied this expectation by seizing authority, displaying sexual agency, or simply being cruel in ways considered "unfeminine", they were turned into monsters.

This isn't just about individual cruelty – it’s about symbolism. Annie and Delphine became vessels for social fears: of racial transgression, of failed femininity, of the system cracking under its own moral contradictions. Their supposed crimes weren’t just horrifying – they were horrifying because they violated gender roles. Poisoning a husband, wearing trousers, dominating a man? That was the true horror.

Meanwhile, overseers like Thomas Thistlewood, who kept diaries of daily rape and torture, are largely footnotes in history. His crimes are systemic, expected. Hers are salacious, personal, scandalous. That’s what sells tours. That’s what becomes legend.

Turning individual women into symbols of systemic evil doesn’t just let the real monsters off the hook. It also obscures the reality of white women’s complicity in slavery, framing them as aberrations rather than participants. These stories deflect attention from the institutions of colonialism, patriarchy, and racism by offering audiences a satisfying villain they can safely condemn.

So when we tell stories about Annie Palmer or Delphine LaLaurie, we should ask: What does this horror really reflect? What truths are we avoiding by casting a woman as the face of slavery’s violence?

Hauntings persist when there’s unresolved grief. And these legends haunt us not because they’re real – but because they help us forget the things that are.

If you’re fascinated by the intersection of folklore, feminism, and horror, subscribe to Paranormal Pajama Party for more haunted history with a critical edge.

Sources

Stephanie Summar
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