Catherine's Ghost

Catherine's Ghost is the spectral presence of Catherine Earnshaw that appears throughout Wuthering Heights, functioning as both a literal haunting and a symbolic embodiment of the novel's central themes of obsessive love, unresolved grief, and the boundary between life and death. The ghost manifests in multiple forms—as a child's face at the window, as an invisible companion felt by Heathcliff, and as a persistent memory that shapes the lives of the surviving characters—making it one of the most powerful and ambiguous supernatural elements in English literature.

First Appearance: Lockwood's Nightmare

The ghost first appears not to Heathcliff but to the outsider Lockwood, during his disastrous overnight stay at Wuthering Heights. Sleeping in the oak-panelled bed that had once belonged to Catherine, Lockwood dreams that a child's hand seizes his through the window—a little, ice-cold hand belonging to a voice that sobs, "Let me in—let me in!" When he asks who it is, the voice replies, shiveringly, "Catherine Linton," and adds, "I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!" Lockwood, in terror, rubs the wrist against the broken pane until blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes, but the ghost maintains its tenacious grip and continues its lament. The voice mourns that it has been "a waif for twenty years," a detail that precisely dates Catherine's death and establishes the ghost as a restless spirit trapped between worlds. The nightmare is so vivid that Lockwood's scream brings Heathcliff rushing to the room.

Heathcliff's Response: The Anguished Invocation

Heathcliff's reaction to Lockwood's account transforms the episode from a mere nightmare into a revelation of his lifelong obsession. Upon hearing that the ghost called itself Catherine Linton, Heathcliff becomes violently agitated, striking his forehead with rage and demanding to know who showed Lockwood into that room. After Lockwood leaves, Heathcliff wrenches open the lattice and bursts into an uncontrollable passion of tears, sobbing, "Come in! come in! Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!" The spectre, however, shows "a spectre's ordinary caprice" and gives no sign of being, while the snow and wind whirl wildly through the window. This moment establishes that Heathcliff has been longing for Catherine's return from the dead, and that the ghost's refusal to appear to him is a source of ongoing torment.

Heathcliff's Haunting: Eighteen Years of Torment

After Catherine's death, Heathcliff experiences her presence as a constant, agonizing companion. He confesses to Nelly Dean that she has disturbed him "night and day, through eighteen years—incessantly—remorselessly." The haunting takes multiple forms: when he sits in the house with Hareton, it seems that on going out he should meet her; when he walks on the moors, he expects to meet her coming in; when he goes from home, he hastens to return, certain she must be somewhere at the Heights. In her chamber, the torment is most intense—the moment he closes his eyes, she is either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her head on the same pillow as she did when a child. He must open his lids to see, and so he opens and closes them a hundred times a night, always to be disappointed. This "intolerable torture" keeps his nerves at such a stretch that he compares them to catgut, and he describes the experience as being killed "not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths."

The Grave and the Locket: Physical Manifestations

Heathcliff's obsession with Catherine's ghost extends to physical desecration of her grave. On the night of her burial, he goes to the churchyard alone, gets a spade from the tool-house, and begins to dig until he scrapes her coffin. He is on the point of wrenching it open when he hears a sigh from above, close at the edge of the grave, and feels the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. Though he sees nothing, he becomes certain that Cathy is there—not under him, but on the earth—and a sudden sense of relief flows through him. He relinquishes his labour and returns home, "unspeakably consoled." Years later, after Edgar Linton's death, Heathcliff bribes the sexton to remove the side of Catherine's coffin so that when he is buried, his body can slide into hers, ensuring that by the time Linton Heathcliff joins them, "he'll not know which is which." He also opens Catherine's locket and replaces the lock of Edgar's hair with a black lock of his own, physically mingling their remains.

The Final Vision: Heathcliff's Death

In the days before his death, Heathcliff's perception of Catherine's ghost intensifies to the point of visible hallucination. He stops eating and sleeping, and Nelly Dean observes him staring at something within two yards' distance with an expression of "anguished, yet raptured" intensity. He tells her that he is "within sight of my heaven" and that he has his eyes on it, "hardly three feet to sever me!" On the final morning, he is found dead in the oak-panelled bed, his eyes open with a "frightful, life-like gaze of exultation" and his lips parted in a sneer. The window is swinging open, and rain has drenched the bed, suggesting that Catherine's ghost finally appeared to him and that he died in the act of welcoming her.

Aftermath and Folk Belief

After Heathcliff's death, local folklore maintains that his ghost walks the moors alongside Catherine's. A little boy tending sheep tells Nelly Dean that he saw "Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t' nab" and refuses to pass them. The old servant Joseph affirms that he has seen "two on 'em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death." Even Nelly, who dismisses these as "idle tales," admits she does not like being out in the dark or left alone in the house. The novel ends with Lockwood visiting the three headstones on the slope next the moor—Catherine's grey and half buried in heath, Edgar Linton's harmonized by turf and moss, Heathcliff's still bare—and wondering "how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." The ambiguity of whether the ghosts are real or merely projections of grief and superstition is never resolved, leaving Catherine's Ghost as a permanent, unsettling presence in the landscape of the novel.