Jamaican Myths and Legends: Duppies, Rolling Calf and More

Every Jamaican child grows up with these stories. You hear them from grandparents on the veranda after dark, from older cousins trying to frighten you, and at wakes, where storytelling has always been part of seeing someone off. Most adults will laugh about duppies in daylight. Fewer will walk a lonely country road at midnight without thinking about the rolling calf. This is folklore, not fact, but it tells you a lot about how Jamaicans see the world, and much of it came from West Africa with the people who were brought here enslaved.

The descriptions below follow the way the stories are commonly told in Jamaica, as recorded by the Jamaica Observer and by the folklorist Martha Warren Beckwith, who collected Jamaican stories in the 1920s. Details change from parish to parish and family to family, and that’s part of the fun.

Duppies

A duppy is a ghost: the spirit of someone who has died and is still around. Not all duppies are bad. A good duppy is usually a dead relative or friend who “dreams you”, meaning they come to you in a dream with advice or a warning. A bad duppy can do harm, and in the old stories it can be “set” on someone through obeah.

The signs that a duppy is near, according to tradition, are a heavy feeling in your head or a sudden, unexplained change in temperature. To get rid of one, people say to eat salt, which duppies hate, or wear your clothes inside out. Growing up, most of us knew someone who swore by one of these.

Duppies are also why a Jamaican funeral isn’t a single day. The wake and the “nine night” give the spirit a proper send-off so it doesn’t linger, and they’re a big social occasion in their own right, with food, singing and stories.

Rolling Calf

The rolling calf is the one that kept us off the road at night. It’s a huge calf-like creature that rolls along lonely country roads, blocks the way of night travelers and chases them. It has eyes of fire and drags a chain that clanks behind it. The story goes that a rolling calf is the spirit of a butcher who was dishonest in life and can’t rest.

The old people have their remedies: drop something it has to stop and count, get to a crossroads before it does, or stick an open knife in the ground. Whether any of them work, I’d rather not find out.

Ol’ Higue

Ol’ Higue (also spelled Ol’ Hige) is a witch, a story that traces back to West Africa. By night she sheds her skin, takes the form of an owl and goes out to suck the breath of people while they sleep, and babies are most at risk. Without her skin she’s vulnerable. If you find it and rub it with salt and pepper, it burns, and she can’t get back in.

Similar figures turn up across the Caribbean, which tells you how far the West African story traveled.

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River Mumma

River Mumma is a water spirit, the Jamaican cousin of the mermaid. She guards fresh water: rivers, springs and pools. She’s known for sitting on a rock combing her hair with a golden comb, and for leaving that comb on the rocks to lure people into the water. In the areas where she’s said to live, people traditionally wouldn’t eat the fish, because they were her children.

It’s a story with a sensible core. Jamaica’s rivers can rise fast and run strong, and River Mumma kept generations of children respectful of the water.

Anansi

Anansi is the spider-man trickster of Jamaican storytelling, small and weak but cleverer than everyone else, and always looking for a way to get something for nothing. Beckwith, who published her collection of Jamaica Anansi Stories in 1924, described Anansi as the culture hero of the Gold Coast, in today’s Ghana, and noted that Anansi stories were the regular entertainment at wakes.

Unlike duppies, nobody believes Anansi is real. These are stories for children and for laughing at: Anansi tricks Tiger, Anansi tricks Monkey, and sometimes Anansi tricks himself. You’ll still hear people call a smooth talker who’s always scheming “an Anansi”.

The golden table

In some rivers, the story goes, there’s a table of pure gold on the bottom. Every so often, at midday, it rises to the surface. Anyone who sees it becomes obsessed with getting it, and anyone who tries to take it drowns. Many Jamaicans link the story to the Spanish and their gold, but like all these legends, it’s told rather than proven.

The White Witch of Rose Hall

Jamaica’s most famous ghost story belongs to a real place. Rose Hall Great House, the restored 18th-century plantation house outside Montego Bay, tells the tale of Annee Palmer, the “White Witch” said to haunt it. The house was built on the labor of enslaved people, and that history matters more than any legend. Treat the witch as a ghost story, not a history lesson. My Rose Hall Great House guide covers the tour.

What visitors get wrong

• These aren’t tourist props. For many Jamaicans, especially older people in the country, duppies are taken seriously. Ask about the stories with curiosity, not as a joke, and you’ll hear far better ones.
• Obeah isn’t “voodoo”. It’s its own tradition, it’s sensitive, and it isn’t something to ask a stranger to show you.
• The language matters. Many of the best stories are told in Patois. My guide to Jamaican Patois phrases will help you follow along.

For more on the culture these stories come from, read my introduction to Jamaican people and culture, and for places to go, my list of things to do in Jamaica.