"Emily Brontë’s Ghost Story" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Unquiet Voices: The Magical Art of Laying Ghosts"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 30
Emily Brontë’s Ghost Story
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Emily Brontë, born this day in 1818, was
not an occultist; She left no grimoire, joined no order, and by every surviving
account, was too private and too devoted to her family's parsonage to have gone
looking for one. And yet the single novel she managed to finish before dying of
tuberculosis at thirty has spent nearly two centuries doing something occult
writers keep noticing and keep returning to: it treats a ghost, a haunted
house, and a man's demand to be haunted forever as the emotional center of the
story. This isn't a piece about Brontë as a secret magician but, rather, how
the tradition she never joined has claimed her anyway…
A Ghost Story for the Ages
Strip away the romantic reputation Wuthering Heights
has accumulated and what's left is, structurally, a horror novel. The visitor
Lockwood spends his first night at the Heights being clawed awake by the icy
hand of a child claiming to be “Catherine Linton,” locked outside for twenty
years and begging to be let in through the window. Heathcliff's reaction, once
he learns what happened, isn't relief that Lockwood is safe. It's fury that he
didn't let her in. He flings the window open himself and begs her spirit to
haunt him for the rest of his life rather than leave him in peace, a request
the novel's own ending suggests was granted: local “country folks,” Brontë
writes, would swear on their Bibles that Heathcliff still walks the moors.
Between those two scenes sits one of the more genuinely disturbing details in
Victorian fiction: Heathcliff has Catherine's coffin dug up eighteen years
after her burial and arranges to have one side loosened, so that when he
eventually joins her, their remains can mingle. That's not just mere gothic
atmosphere; at its occult core, we can recognize a form of necromantic
devotion, staged as romance.
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Brontë's fascination with a landscape that could turn violent without warning wasn't invented for fiction. On September 2, 1824, when Emily was six, she was out walking on the moors above Haworth with her siblings Anne and Branwell when the peat bog on nearby Crow Hill ruptured without warning, sending a wall of mud and water crashing down the valley toward them. The children sheltered in a farmhouse porch and survived unhurt, but their father Patrick, watching an approaching storm from the parsonage and unable to see them, spent the worst of it convinced he'd lost his family. He later preached a full sermon on the event, framing it explicitly as a divine warning to a sinful world. That same year, a servant named Tabitha Aykroyd, universally known as “Tabby,” joined the household and would remain for three decades, filling the children's evenings with Yorkshire folklore and ghost stories. Emily grew up, in other words, in a house where the earth itself had once tried to kill her, and where the woman who raised her told local ghost stories at the hearth every night. It would be strange if none of that ended up in the books.
A Mysticism of Her Own
The real farmhouse widely identified
as the model for Wuthering Heights, a ruin called “Top Withens” on the moors above Haworth,
didn't stay safely fictional for long. By the early twentieth century it had
already been folded into genuine local ghost-lore: a 1922 newspaper account
describes an ex-soldier living there alone remarking that “a man can't be
lonely at Wuthering Heights,” and the site has since accumulated its own layer
of supernatural tradition entirely separate from Brontë's text, including tales
of Gabriel's Hounds, the phantom pack associated with the old English legend of
the Wild Hunt, and the Guytrash, a spectral black dog said to roam the
Yorkshire moors well before the novel existed. Today Top Withens sits on the
standing route of Haworth's ghost tours. Fiction and folklore have folded into
each other so completely at that particular pile of stones that it's no longer
entirely fair to call it just a literary landmark.
No later writer did more to claim Brontë for the occult imagination than Ted Hughes, and Hughes was in a position to know exactly what he was doing. He and his wife Sylvia Plath were, by their own extensive record, seriously engaged practitioners: they built a homemade Ouija board from a wine glass and cut-out letters, consulted the tarot deck Hughes bought her, cast horoscopes, and treated the results as genuine creative and personal guidance rather than parlor amusement. Hughes's own library, auctioned after his death, included works on the Kabbalah, the I Ching, and Waite's astrology compendium. It's this Hughes, immersed in actual occult practice, who repeatedly described Brontë as “the mystic of the moors” and wrote of her in terms of shamanic communion with the Yorkshire landscape rather than conventional literary craft. In 1998's Birthday Letters, his book-length reckoning with his marriage to Plath, Hughes included a poem titled simply “Wuthering Heights,” recalling a pilgrimage the two of them made together to Brontë's moors, treating the visit less like literary tourism and more like a visit to a shrine. His own biographers noticed the identification ran both ways: more than one has described Hughes himself as living out a kind of Heathcliff role, the brooding figure wandering the same landscape in search of his own lost love.
Brontë didn't need Hughes's framing
to earn the word mystic; scholars had been reaching for it long before he did.
Her poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine,”
written not long before her death and among the last things she wrote,
describes a direct, unmediated experience of the divine that critics have
specifically identified as carrying “something which might almost be called a
mystic's vocation.” It was well enough regarded that Emily Dickinson, on the
other side of the Atlantic and deep in her own private religious struggles,
kept a copy of it close at hand. Whatever Brontë actually believed in the
privacy of that parsonage remains genuinely unclear. What's not unclear is that
later readers steeped in the occult, from local ghost-story tellers to a
working ceremonial-magic household in the 1950s and 60s, kept finding something
in her single novel worth treating as real.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Emily, and every ghost that ever refused to remain
silent...
Unquiet Voices: The Magical Art of Laying Ghosts
By
Rob Douglas & Nonie Douglas | Llewellyn Worldwide
Heathcliff spends the second half of
Wuthering Heights doing the exact opposite of what this book teaches: rather
than laying Catherine's ghost to rest, he actively refuses to let her go. For
readers curious what the traditional British Isles approach to a genuine
haunting actually looks like, Rob Douglas draws on thirty years of practice
rooted in rural Scottish tradition, work he learned firsthand as part of a
living lineage of “laying ghosts,” and pairs classical necromancy with a
working classification system for the kinds of spirits a practitioner might
actually encounter. It's a practical, grounded field guide rather than a
ghost-story collection, and it makes a fitting companion to a novel whose
central tragedy is a man who got exactly what he asked for and never let go.
Our thanks to Llewellyn for keeping traditional British spiritwork like this in
print!
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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