Charlotte Bronte and
her sisters Emily and Anne left a
literary legacy of eeriness that includes the laughing ghost in the
disused wing of Thornfield Hall and the plaintive
shade of Cathy Earnshaw beating on the window of Wuthering Heights,
begging to be let in. Has one of the gothic
sisters chosen to haunt her life-long home, Haworth Parsonage, in
Yorkshire, England?
Caught on film by Pearl Cragg in the early 1990s, the ghost may be
Charlotte Bronte. According to Cragg, she was
visiting the parsonage (now a museum) and feeling a deep sense of
depression. Cragg said that she called on Charlotte
(who had witnessed the death of three siblings in swift succession) to
help her endure. Shortly thereafter, Cragg took
the above left photo of the front of the parsonage. She is adamant that
there was no one in the doorway at the time.
Charlotte died in the parsonage in 1858 of exhaustion and dehydration
during the early stage of pregnancy.
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Charlotte Bronte, circa 1847, when
Jane
Eyre was published.
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Charlotte's spirit has been sensed by several mediums and by lovers of
her prose. One of the former
felt her presence in the church where the entire family--save for Anne--
is buried in a below-floor
vault. Two of the latter, Keith Hooley and Alexandra Lesley, told the
BBC, "I used to know a little shop in Halifax that
was run by a sculptor and inside the shop I glimpsed something which I
actually thought was a molding that he had
made, and I seemed to instinctively recognize it as Charlotte Bronte.
Without actually saying anything to the to the owner of
the shop, I asked him what it was and he said that it was a molding
that he'd taken from a similar molding that had been
brought into him for repair which--the people who'd brought it in
claimed was from a death mask of Charlotte Bronte--and I
bought the mask from him."
Hooley's friend Lesley states, "I may not be 100 percent convinced that
[the mask] is Charlotte, but I am 100 percent
convinced that Charlotte has manifested through it for me. I took out
the mask and just held it and had a look at it for a while.
As I began to look at her and hold her, I had a very strong sense that
she was there."
If anyone walks parsonage and the environs, however, it should by rights
be Emily. Reclusive in life and passionate
about remaining on her beloved moors, she died of tuberculosis on the
sofa in the front room of the parsonage in 1848.
During her final illness she had refused bed rest and the attentions of
all doctors and had wasted into a living skeleton.
Her coffin was less than 20 inches wide--the narrowest the local
undertaker had ever built.
Local legend has it that during her elder sister Charlotte's funeral, a
figure in black watched the proceedings from the
moors. Many at the time believed this was Emily.
