The Haunting of Catherine Earnshaw

Follows the supernatural afterlife of Catherine Earnshaw as a persistent ghostly presence that haunts Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, and the folklore of the moors.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

The Written Name

Spirits in Ink Catherine's Signatures The window ledge of the oak-panelled bed is covered with the name Catherine, repeated in all kinds of characters: Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton. Lockwood, examining the marks, also finds Catherine's diary with its record of childhood rebellion. A Name as Spell The repetition of the name is a written haunting, the script of a soul projecting itself across time. It prepares for the ghostly visitation that follows, making Catherine a presence before she appears.

The Ghost at the Window

Let Me In A Child's Phantom Lockwood dreams that the branch of a fir tree becomes the hand of a child crying, "Let me in—let me in!" The specter names itself Catherine Linton, claims to have lost its way on the moor, and says it has been a waif for twenty years. A Cruel Awakening He rubs the ghost's wrist across the broken pane until blood soaks the bedclothes, then wakes to Heathcliff's fury at the empty window. The haunting has passed from manuscript to nightmare to the living grief of the widowed lover.

Come in, Cathy

A Lover's Invocation Desperate Prayers at the Lattice Heathcliff, after hearing Lockwood's account, wrenches open the window and sobs for Catherine to come in once more, calling her his heart's darling and asking her to hear him at last. The snow and wind whirl through the room, but the specter gives no sign of being. Twenty Years of Waiting His outburst, witnessed against Lockwood's will, reveals that Catherine's ghost has been summoned nightly for two decades. The scene transforms the rationalist tenant into a reluctant confessor of the Heights' terrifying romance.

The Grave's Sigh

Unquiet Earth A Presence Above the Coffin After Catherine is buried, Heathcliff digs down to her coffin, determined to hold her once more, and hears a sigh that seems to come from close beside him. He abandons his labor, convinced that her spirit has returned to comfort him. A Consolation That Devours He describes to Nelly how, from that night, he felt Catherine was always with him, leading him home and filling the house with her invisible nearness. The haunting is no longer merely terrifying; it becomes the obsessive center of his life.

The Opened Coffin

The Desecration A Promise of Mingled Dust Heathcliff tells Nelly that he bribed the sexton to remove the side of Catherine's coffin, so that when he is buried his remains may slide into hers. He has seen her face again, unchanged after eighteen years, and has made his own death a means of reunion. The Horror of Love The act is both a violation of the dead and an ultimate act of devotion. Heathcliff's monomania finds its final, terrible expression in his determination to be physically joined to Catherine.

Walkers on the Moor

Folk Belief and Phantoms The Shepherd Boy's Panic Nelly reports that country folk swear Heathcliff walks, that some have met him near the church and on the moor, and that an old man sees two figures looking out of the chamber window on every rainy night. A little shepherd boy refuses to pass the Heights because he has seen Heathcliff and a woman under the nab. A Belief Neither Confirmed Nor Denied Lockwood dismisses the tales as idle, but his own unease in the dark and the peaceful headstones suggest that the haunting has passed from terror into legend. The ghosts have become folklore, the lovers fixed forever in the landscape they once roamed.

Lockwood's first night at Wuthering Heights, 1801

the same night, during Lockwood's dream

immediately after the nightmare, the same night at Wuthering Heights

the night of Catherine Earnshaw's burial

after Edgar Linton's funeral, autumn 1801

after Heathcliff's death, in the autumn of 1802