After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Dark Truth about Wuthering Heights

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Wuthering Heights, written by Emily Brontë in 1847, depicts a gothic world full of violence and passion, set against the wild Yorkshire Moors.So how did the daughter of a clergyman create such a story? How was it received at the time? And what darkness and intrigue happened in the Brontê's lives that could have influenced such stories?With a new Wuthering Heights film being released, Anthony and Maddy are exploring that world with you in today's episode.It’s one of relentless death and tragedy, wild creativity, and supernatural belief, all to the backdrop of an industrial Victorian England.If you're interested to find out more, you can watch the documentary Death at the Parsonage: The Brontês, on HistoryHit.com.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, hello there, listeners of After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today we're welcoming you to a special episode of After Dark, something a little different than usual. Last summer, we made a documentary for history hit called Death at the Parsonage, which explores the dark and gothic world that surrounded the famous Bronte family. Now, with a new Wuthering Heights film being released, we want to explore that world with you on the podcast. It's one of, you guessed, a relentless death and tragedy, but also wild creativity and supernatural belief, all against the backdrop of an industrial Victorian England. This episode was recorded on location in Howarth in Yorkshire, in the home of the Brontes themselves, where they lived, but also in its surrounding cobbled streets and on the windswet moors that feature so dramatically in their stories. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte wrote some of literature's darkest, most enduring novels,

including, of course, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and the tenant of Wildfell Hall. But where did this darkness come from? As we'll find out, death and a sense of foreboding were never far from their lives. Right in front of the house was the church graveyard filled with the town's dead, including members of their own family. And to the back of the house were the wild Yorkshire Moors, and untamed landscape steeped in its own eerie folklore, and that we were lucky enough to get to walk as part of the documentary.

In the middle of all of this were the Brontes themselves. Now today, the Moors still whisper with their presence, and the house they haunted in life is now haunted by their legacy, their brilliance and their tragedy. First, let's get a feeling for this place where the Brontes lived and worked. Here's Murray Tremelin, curator at the Parsonage Museum in Howarth. We're speaking now in what we now call the Bronte Parsonage Museum. But of course, when the Bronties lived here, this was a working parsonage. It was the parsonage of Howarth Church, which we can actually see just about from the window of the room where we're sitting now. Patrick Bronte, the father of the Bronte Sisters, was the minister at Howarth Church for more than 40 years. Patrick Bronte had previously. served as perpetual curate at Thornton, which is about six miles from here. But the family

moved here in 1820 when Anne, the youngest, was still only a few months old. And they spent the rest of their lives here. Patrick and his wife, Mariah, had five daughters. Another Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, and one son, Branwell. When they moved to the parsonage, they lived right next to the church at Howarth. It had stood unchanged for centuries, but the town of Howarth itself was in flux. Here's Juliet Parker, who's written perhaps the definitive biography on the family, whom I spoke to on the couple streets of the town the Brontes grew up in. The Haworth that the Brontes themselves came to was at a changing point in time. It was beginning to get to be a really busy industrial township. Even when they first arrived in 1820, they were already third.

working mills in the township which includes the outlying villages of Stambore and Oxenhope. By the 1850s there were three huge mills actually in the middle of Houth itself, including one that was going to employ a thousand people. So the contrast from when they first arrived to what was happening all the time that they were there, they were in the midst of an industrial revolution. You talked about this kind of tumultuous, restless place. in 1820 when they arrive and afterwards as well. What did they make of how? How did they feel when they arrived here?

And to us now, to visitors, it's beautiful and it's a lovely place to be. But I'm imagining it was slightly different for them coming here, landing their young family in the middle of this. I think it was, and it was very difficult because they didn't have any friends there. They were having to start from scratch. And this is a man who's already an elderly clergyman

with a family of six very small children, including a baby in arms. So the difficulty of becoming part of a community, which was very much a rooted community here, had been here for generations. Yes, they were getting involved in the Industrial Revolution, but it was still the same families. So for Patrick and the family, it was really hard to break into that area. And I think they felt that particularly Patrick himself. He calls himself a stranger in a strange land.

You really get this sense of isolation from the outset, I think, particularly for the father of the family, Patrick, who arrived as an Irishman at a time when that came with a lot of stigma. Patrick had a very strong Irish accent. It's interesting that his son Branwell, he was described as also being Irish, and the local people mocked him as an Irishman in one of the political campaigns that they have. But the girls, they don't talk about that at all.

And I do think that Aunt Branwell, Mrs. Bronte's sister, who came to look after the children when their mother died and stayed with them for her entire life, which was some sacrifice. She actually, I think, would have encouraged the girls to lose that Irish accent because it indicated poverty, because it indicated that you'd come from elsewhere and she wanted the girls to fit in. Their lives were met with darkness very soon after moving there when tragedy struck. Here's Murray Tremelin.

The Bronte's experience of death, was tragic, but certainly not unique in the 19th century. This was a time when diseases like tuberculosis and cholera were rife. There were regular epidemics, not just here in Howarth, but all over the country, really. And unfortunately, once a virus gets into a household, it's very difficult to stop it spreading. But yes, there was a lot of death in the family. So the family moved here in the early months of 1820. Maria Bronte, the mother of the family, died only the following year. There's some uncertainty about her exact cause of death, but it's generally thought most likely to have been a form of cancer. That left Patrick with a problem because he was then left with six children,

all of whom would need to be educated. Of course, in those days there were no state schools and school fees were expensive. So, you know, this was a real problem for him with the income he had. In 1825, the two eldest daughters, Mariah and Elizabeth, were sent away to the clergy daughter's school, where later Charlotte and Emily would join them,

which must have seemed like the answer to a prayer for Patrick. Tragedy would soon hit the. the family again, though. Only a few months after they went to the school, Maria and Elizabeth both caught tuberculosis. They were brought home to Howarth, but very sadly they died within a few weeks of each other. Understandably, Patrick then decided to withdraw Charlotte and Emily

from that school. Charlotte, in particular, never forgave the school for what happened to her sisters. She really blamed the very rigorous school regime and the fairly difficult living conditions at the school, particularly the sort of cold dormitories and the poor food for having weakened her sister's immune systems. And of course Charlotte then, in her later life,

channeled her anger at the school into the writing of Jane Eyre, where it became the inspiration for the, notorious Lowood Institute, and the death of Helen Burns in the novel is directly inspired by the death of Maria, the eldest sister. It was against this backdrop of tragedy and isolation that Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Bramwell's creativity began to flourish. They started writing almost as soon as they were able to, really. They produced their famous series of little books, so-called because they genuinely were little.

They were absolutely tiny, not much bigger than a postage stamp, really. And they wrote on them in an absolutely minuscule hand, which we've had volunteers working on transcribing these books lately, and I can attest that even when you have the text blown up on a computer screen, on a high-resolution digital image, it's still really difficult to read. How they wrote it in the first place just defies imagination, really. But as you can imagine, these juvenile writings, the stories started out fairly basic,

but they quickly evolved as the children grew and became more and more sophisticated. And they, for their part, became ever more immersed in the imaginary world they were creating. As they got older and the children collaborated, their work became more outlandish. And you could say it spoke of a... deep desire to escape their own circumstances. In their adolescence, the Bronte children developed a series of imaginary worlds. Charlotte and Branwell worked together to create the kingdoms of Glasstown and Angria, which were nominally set on the west coast of Africa, albeit a highly fictionalised version of Africa. Emily and Anne initially worked with

Charlotte and Branwell, but they broke away and formed their own worlds of Gondall and Gouldeen. They created these imaginary worlds that really sustained them and nothing outside the parsonage could ever be as exciting as the worlds that they created for themselves. And the fact that they lived together but also the fact that they wrote together and imagined these worlds together. You've got partnerships, you've got Bramwell and Charlotte writing together, you've got Emily and Anne writing together. And you can't recreate that anywhere else. And okay, you're talking about, you know,

you've got misogynistic heroes, you've got heroes or adulterers, and all the sorts of drunkards and everything, drug addicts and everything, are all in the childhood writings from being very, very young. You can't sort of ignore that because that was so much more exciting to write about than it was. to think about what was going on in Boring Old Howarth. But one thing Boring Old Haworth did have was its surroundings. Firstly, those close by the parsonage, the neighbouring church graveyard.

Here's Dr. Clare O'Callaghan, a literary scholar who has written extensively on the Brontes. It must have been a huge influence because in the time that they've lived in the parsonage, they've seen that graveyard out the front grow and expand rapidly. And it's really interesting. There's a line in Weather and Heights when Kathy's unwell and she's in her delirium and she's had a visit from Heathcliff. And she talks about recalling when they were children and they would play out on the graves and try to summon the ghosts from the graves. Beyond the graveyard was, of course, the Wild Moors, which were every bit a character in the Bronte's stories as anything in human form. Back to Murray Tremelin. The Bronte children all spent quite a lot of time at home during their childhood.

We know that the children did go out walking on the Moors quite regularly. They also had a chance, I think, to really see the raw power of nature living in a place like Howarth. As we look out of the window now, the setting looks quite idyllic, but it would have looked quite different in the Bronte's time. Most of the trees that we can now see were planted after the deaths of the Bronte family. So the parsonage building would have been much more exposed in those days, much more open to the moors. They would certainly have felt the full force of the wind being up here on the top of a hill. In fact, if you look closely at the roof of the parsonage, you'll see that we don't have slates on the roof. We have stone flags because slates would be too light.

they would blow away when the storms hit. There was also a famous incident when the children were quite young called the Crow Hill Bog Burst. This was quite a rare natural phenomenon when after heavy rainfall, the bogs up on the moors became so saturated that they literally burst and caused a mudslide. The children were out walking at the time and they were almost caught in it. According to legend, they managed to take shelter in the doorway of nearby farm. So yes, they certainly had the chance to experience what nature can do. In this way, the Moors had a life of their own and they had a dark energy to them that made them all the more fearsome and intriguing, especially given the local folkloric tales and the supernatural

beliefs that existed in this area. Here's Dr. Kerry Holbrook, expert in British folklore, who I spoke to at the very edge of the Moors. in Howell. This landscape was littered with folklore, so many folkloric creatures wandering around. So you had things like the wailing woman, female apparitions, usually having died a tragic death, wondering the moor of wailing. You had corpse candles, so lights that would appear on the moors. Again, a bad omen, you didn't want to see them.

Revenants, so the returned dead were a big thing. You have to remember that the bronches lived very close to the graveyard, so death was very visible. idea of kind of the dead returning comes out very, very clearly in Wuthering Heights. And then you have things like fairy caves. So places like this, where it kind of passages down into the earth, down into the fairy other world. And again, we see this in Wuthering Heights with Kathy's Fairy Haunted Cave. And it is believed that Pondon Kirk, which is a rock structure nearby here, may have been the inspiration behind the fairy cave, belief that if you travel down far enough, you end up in Fairyland. So yeah, yeah, lots and lots of folklore. I'm fascinated by the way

that Brontes mind the landscape and its stories in terms of their own literary creations. But I wonder, does folklore for them mean more than just a literary device? How do you think they're engaging with it in terms of their own beliefs and their own domestic life? I think it was a huge part of their everyday lives. I don't think they were necessarily aware of it. It was just kind of part of their subconscious. They will have been told stories. They grew up telling stories.

It was a huge part of their early writing when they were children and then teenagers and ghosts, apparitions, elements of folklore, from creeping in from a very, very early age. And they also apparently had kind of supernatural experiences growing up. So I think it was, yeah, very much a part of their everyday lives and probably very much a part of their communities, everyday lives. How should we understand this belief in folklore then alongside their religious belief? Because we must even forget, they grew up in a parcelage, their father was a religious man. How does the Christian faith sit alongside folklore? Are they compatible or is there a sort of tension going on there? I mean, there was a very hazy line between religion and folklore. Sometimes they were in

conflict, but most of the time people could believe in both quite happily. They didn't contradict each other. There was just an awareness of there being more to this world. I think for the Brontes, it's interesting, though, that the stories that they were told probably came from either their aunt or Tabby Akroyd to the family servant and their friend. I think it's interesting that it's likely they got these stories of the landscape from a woman, rather than. than from their father, Atric Bronte. Yeah, it's so fascinating, isn't it? That handing down of stories from woman to woman

is slightly outside of that patriarchal system of Christianity. Absolutely. I think that's a really interesting element when you're thinking about the Brontes and how they grew up and the different influences that people had on them. All the while, the three Bronte sisters worked as governesses or teachers, often unhappily, struggling to find their way in the world.

Juliette Barker again. The girls all knew that they would have to, have some form of career to fund their lives because they knew as soon as their father died then they would be expelled from the parsonage and they had no income at all. He had no money to leave them. So they had to be self-sufficient. So Charlotte's first attempts were to go back to the school where she herself had been taught. She was invited back to go back as a teacher and then she wasn't happy there. She didn't like being confined and dormitories and having to give these wrote lessons, learning names and places and lists of things.

And so she found it deeply frustrating intellectually as well. There's that wonderful story about having the window open and she hears the bells of the church. She drifts off into a reverie about the imaginary world of Angria that she created. And then she says at that moment, an adult came up with a lesson, I thought I should have vomited. Which isn't quite the way to have a relationship with your pupils, as it's a future. So she then went off and tried being a governess in private houses, but that was even more soul-destroying. I think that is the word really for somebody like Charlotte,

because she was neither a member of the family, not yet a servant. She was in that in-between, so was mistrusted by both, unable to have any privacy again. And so she found that extremely difficult. And again, went through several posts and was not happy in any of them. None of the sisters, Charlotte, Anne or Emily, were finding fulfilment through their work as teachers or governesses. And, by the mid-1840s, their written output was becoming something they wanted to share with the world. Dr. Claire O'Callaghan.

Their writing process clearly goes through different stages of evolution. When their children, they're definitely creating together. They bring out these imaginary worlds, the Glass Town Federation, Angria, Gondol. But they get quite competitive with one another. And as much as they build themselves into their writing, so they're these little godlike figures. Tensions come in in terms of who owns the world, wherever the stories go in.

So we get some fracture in terms of writing relationships. As they get older into their late teens, it's really interesting that even when they're away from home, they're still co-creating. So we know that they often wrote poetry in isolation. And we know that because Charlotte basically breaks into Emily's private writing material. to read what she has been writing and describes what she sees as a peculiar music. And it's from there that she manages persuade her to, after a long of arguments, I should add,

to publish a first volume of poetry. The first volume, which includes poems from Charlotte, Emily and Anne under male pseudonyms, sells just a few copies initially. But it sparks the hope, along with Branwell's influence, who wants to be an artist in his own right, that there's money to be made from writing. Here's Juliette Barker. After that failure, they'd got the bit between the teeth

and they'd realised that this was potential for making money and the way to do it was actually to do novels. But from all throughout their lives, it had always been Bramwell, who'd been the initiator in their childhood games, who was always first to do different types of things like writing poetry, like writing plays, leading and being the inspiration of a lot of their childhood,

games. He was the one who first got poetry published in the papers while he was working in Halifax. He was the one who suggested writing novels because he thought that would be a way of earning. His tragedy was that instead of writing a novel, he just took to drink and never achieved anything more. But without his impetus, even at that late stage in his life, I do wonder whether or not the girls would have actually embarked upon what was to become such a great literary career. Branwell's failed love affair with the wife of an employer and subsequent dismissal triggered a spiral into addiction. In 1846, his health rapidly deteriorated due to alcoholism and opium addictions, becoming increasingly unstable and reclusive.

It's during this period, however, in 1847, that within three months Charlotte publishes Jane Eyre, Emily publishes Wuthering Heights, and Anne publishes Agnes Gray. all under male pseudonyms of the Bell Brothers. Here's Murray Tremblin. It's not that women weren't allowed to write in the 19th century. There were plenty of women authors in that era, but the Victorians did have quite strong views about what was, quote, unquote, proper for women to write.

And I think the Bronte's siblings realized that their works definitely would not be considered proper for women. in to write in that era. Publishing as they did, Anne as Acton Bell, Emily as Ellis Bell and Charlotte as Kerr Bell, the sisters will have been curious to know how their writing was received by critics and readers alike. Here's Dr. Claire O'Callaghan. When Jane Eyre, Weatherin Heights and Agnes Gray all come out together at the same time, there is a kind of move in the kind of Victorian readership. People are wondering who these writers are, who are these Bell brothers,

and what is it that they're doing? These books are seen as dangerous books. So Victorian critics very quickly label the bells, the Brontes, as coarse. They see these works as vulgar and they think that they're dangerous. And it's really interesting that very often gothic novels, despite all of the kind of the macabre, the supernatural, the things that go bump in the night, I've often seen as have an incredibly moral agenda,

but the Brontes novels aren't seen in that spirit. The earliest reviews of Jane Eyre, for example, accuse Carabelle of fostering anti-Christian sentiment and encouraging rebellion, particularly with young women in mind. Young women are discouraged from reading that book. The fear is that they will all be seeking independence and liberation and wanting to fall in love with their employers. Whether in Heights, on the other hand, is singled out for a lot of criticism. One critic writes, read Jane Eyre, but burn or. Weatherin Heights, which tells you quite a lot about the fear that book struck because readers couldn't find any moral purpose to it whatsoever, particularly with his character Heathcliff,

who is opening graves and removing coffin sides so that he can be together with his love for all eternity. So that really was a problem for Victorian readers. Another reviewer of Weather in Heights simply said, the writer of this book must have been eating cheese late at night, which tells you that they're seeing it in this kind of delirious novel, and they really can't make head-n-tail of it. It should have been a celebratory time, but less than a year after the publications of the sister's first novels,

the family was struck by a second wave of deaths. Back to Murray Tremelin. It was when the surviving children reached their late 20s, early 30s, that we then have this second wave of deaths in the family, starting with Branwell, the only son in 1848. Now Branwell is quite a contentious character within the Bronte story. Different biographers have treated him in quite different ways, some of them sympathetic, some of them less so.

I think it's pretty clear though that in the mid-1840s, after he had a failed love affair with the wife of his employer, he went irrevocably off the rails, really. He started drinking very heavily, he started taking drugs. And as can be imagined, unfortunately, that had a very serious effect on his immune system. So when he caught tuberculosis in 1848, he didn't really stand a chance, to be honest. In fact, I think it's fair to say that by the time he did die, his death was almost regarded as a mercy by the rest of the family

because it had been clear for quite some time before that that his mental and physical health were degenerating to a point where he was unlikely to ever recover. Just to make that loss then even harder for the family to bear, only a few months later, Emily also became severely ill again from tuberculosis and she died at the end of that year. The tuberculosis then unfortunately had also infected Anne.

She managed to survive until the spring of 1849. She begged Charlotte to take her away to the seaside. She was hopeful that taking the sea air might improve her condition, perhaps even cure her. Charlotte was quite reluctant to leave home, partly because she was worried that the journey to Scarborough would be difficult and might even finish Anne off before they got there. Also, because of course, their father by this time was himself quite elderly, and Charlotte was reluctant to leave him.

Eventually they did set out for Scarborough towards the end of May, if I remember correctly, but unfortunately Anne died only four days after they arrived. And Charlotte decided to have her buried in Scarborough because she didn't think that their father would be able to face the trauma of going through another family funeral in such quick succession. All of a sudden, Charlotte was alone in the parsonage without any of her siblings.

And the sense of loss, of absence, must have been so present for her. So when Charlotte returns from Scarborough, the first thing she encounters at the door are the surviving animals of her sister, Anne's dog Flossie and Emily's dog keeper. And she makes a comment that the dogs are clearly

looking for their mistresses, and they're only greeted by her. So she's contending with their loss, as well as her own, and they're kind of haunted, everyone's haunted by that absence. She's writing alone. All of the things around the house are reminding her of her sisters, the wail of the sound that goes around the parsonage, the winds at night, and Charlotte hearing them. It's almost as if Emily has kind of become Kathy's ghost

trying to get in at the parsonage door. I think she feels that sense of solitude acutely, and she's now the sole care of her father as well. So it must have been such a difficult time. So she's got overwhelming grief that she's had to endure in such a short space of time it changes her. Charlotte is now the last surviving Bronte's sibling. She's living in the house with her father, but she's writing alone for the first time in her life. When before, of course, there was this incredibly creative, collaborative. environment in which the Bronte siblings created their art.

So how did this loss affect her creative process? And what did her novels look like now that she wrote them in solitude? Before she gets to the summer where she's writing on her own, Charlotte Bronte had started writing her second novel, Shirley, in the wake of the blaze of Jane Eyre. And she'd begun writing that in early 1848. But when her brother and then her sister become unwell, She puts Shirley down. At that point, she's written the first two volumes. After Anne's death in 1849, the first thing she picks up again is Shirley. And she writes the last volume, which begins with the really ominous chapter called The Valley of the Shadow of Death. What's interesting about that is not only is there a lot of sickness and a lot of ill health throughout that part of the book, but Charlotte saw work and writing at that point as a cure for sorrow. She actually says that. She writes, she writes.

to a publisher and she says, Labor is a cure for sorrow. But in that book, she also memorialises Emily, at least. And some say Anne as well. So the titular Shirley of that book was a portrait of her sister, as she would have been in health and prosperity. She finishes Shirley late in that summer and it comes out later that year. So she does pick up writing, but she does it in a way that's memorialising her sisters. It's like they've never left her. They're now on the page. Charlotte continued to write, achieving further acclaim with Shirley and Vallette, and eventually married her father's Curate, Arthur Bell Nichols. But, in 1855, while it has been reported, pregnant with her first child,

Charlotte died at just 38, likely from complications related to severe morning sickness. She was the last of the Bronte siblings. And so, the parsonage fell quiet. The vibrant, collaborative, fiercely imaginative world The Siblings had once conjured in whispers and scribbles It was gone. Patrick, who had watched each of his children die, was left alone until his death in 1861.

The legacy the Bronte is left behind is completely extraordinary and, as we've heard, complicated. Their novels broke round with raw emotional power, unflinching depictions of obscenching, obsession, madness, longing and grief, but they were also shaped by deep isolation, illness and trauma. Their worlds were gothic because their lives so often were too. And yet through death, constraint and in part obscurity, they created something enduring, stories still read and still felt today. If you'd like to see more of our explorations into the dark world of the

you can watch our documentary, Death at the Parsonage, the Bronties, on historyhit.com. And we'd love to hear your ideas for future shows, so do get in touch at afterdark at historyhit.com. Until next time, goodbye.