Haunted places in Central America & the Caribbean

In the Caribbean and Central America, ghost lore grew from many roots at once: Indigenous traditions, Spanish, British, French and Dutch colonial history, and the beliefs carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans. The result is a rich cast of spirits – the Jamaican duppy, the soucouyant and La Diablesse of Trinidad and the eastern Caribbean, and in Central America La Siguanaba and La Llorona, who lure travellers at night – that belong to living folk culture as much as to horror.

Many of the region’s haunted places are monuments to colonial power. The great Spanish forts of San Juan, such as Castillo San Felipe del Morro, are said to keep their sentries; Rose Hall in Jamaica is famous for the “White Witch” Annie Palmer, a legend largely shaped by Herbert de Lisser’s 1929 novel; and in Barbados, the sealed Chase Vault in Christ Church became notorious when coffins were reported to have shifted inside it between 1812 and 1820. Behind such stories often lies the harder history of plantations and slavery, which deserves to be told plainly.

Visitors find ghost walks in old San Juan, Havana, Antigua Guatemala and Panama’s Casco Viejo, and the legends are told with relish during Day of the Dead and All Souls’ observances. As everywhere, we set out the documented history alongside the story – and note when a famous ghost owes more to a novelist than to the archives.