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Decades before Anne Brontë picked up her pen to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), the rugged hills of Haworth were already whispering a story of domestic defiance. Recently, I started looking into the lives of the people buried in the graveyard of St Michael and All Angels. The stories told through epitaph, family trees and newspapers reveals startling and often stark pictures of the lives of the people… Read More »The Real-Life Helen Graham: A 1760 Scandal in the Brontës’ Backyard

How Her Story Echoes Through the Brontës and Victorian Gothic In the patchwork fields and old lanes between Thornton, Denholme, Great Horton, and Hollingwood, a ghost story has long clung to stone walls, disused pits, and the moorland edge. It is the tale of Fair Becca – a beautiful young woman loved, betrayed, murdered, and doomed to walk the Yorkshire night. But there is not one Fair Becca.There are multiple… Read More »Fair Becca of Thornton: Two Legends, One Haunting

When you think of the moors around Haworth and Thornton, the windswept romance of the Brontës often comes to mind. But beneath the literary landscape lies a darker, more mysterious history… a world of forgotten tragedies and lingering spirits that are as much a part of the local fabric as the famous parsonage. Some stories aren’t found in novels, but in the whispers from old houses and the chilling silence… Read More »Beyond the Brontës: Unearthing the Hidden Hauntings of Thornton

Nestled amid the stark beauty of the Yorkshire moors, Top Withens stands as a testament to the enduring legacy of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” This desolate farmhouse, believed to be the inspiration for the novel’s haunting setting, draws literary pilgrims from around the world. Yet, beyond its connection to Brontë’s masterpiece, Top Withens harbours tales that veer into the realm of the supernatural, intertwining folklore with the fabric of literary… Read More »The Wild Hunt at Wuthering Heights

When she was just seventeen, Charlotte Brontë wrote The Green Dwarf: A Tale of the Present Tense, a novella . Part of the Glass Town saga, being a strand of the juvenilia that she produced set in the worlds she created with her siblings, it is discernibly part of the process that went on to form the literary genius she was to become. And in it she included a short… Read More »A Charlotte Brontë Ghost Story

In 1940, the Rev, Charles L. Tweedale of Weston, North Yorkshire, published a book titled News From The Next World: Being an account of the Survival of ANTONIUS STRAUARIUS, FREDERICK CHOPIN, SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE BRONTËS and many of the Author’s relatives and friends, as proved by their after-death manifestations, photographs and signatures; together with their description of the other-world life, and a discussion of the bearing of these… Read More »Channelling The Brontës

“I sometimes dream melancholy dreams,” answered Caroline; “and if I lie awake for an hour or two in the night, I am continually thinking of the rectory as a dreary old place. You know it is very near the churchyard. The back part of the house is extremely ancient, and it is said that the out-kitchens there were once enclosed in the churchyard, and that there are graves under them.… Read More »Melancholy Dreams

Folk tell of the ghostly crying of a young woman heard in the car park behind the Black Bull in Haworth. The car park was once the location of an old well from which the water was drawn to brew beer back in the 19th century. Water that had filtered through the graveyard situated next to the pub. The mysterious weeping lady is one of at least two weeping woman… Read More »Haworth’s Weeping Woman Ghost

The Brontë children’s nursemaid, Tabitha Ackroyd, had an intimate knowledge of the lore of the land and its spirits. She knew folk who had seen the fairies that frequented the beck on moonlit nights. But by the time she was nursemaid to the Brontë family, she would tell the children that all the fairies had long since gone. “It wur the factories as had driven ’em away,” she would tell… Read More »Fairies, Ghosts and UFOs

Haworth has, as far as I am aware, four carved stone heads adorning several of its buildings. The heads are all different ages and we know little of their purpose. The oldest is the one above the main entrance to The Haworth Old Hall (once the Emmott Old Hall). This is part of the original building, which would place it in the early 1600s. The most recent is a modern… Read More »The Mysterious Stone Heads of Haworth

What is the Gytrash? The soil of the islands of Britain can be said to be soaked in the folklore of the spectral black dog. Mark Norman’s “Black Dog Folklore” lists sightings from Aberdeenshire to Yorkshire and beyond. Wherever they are said to roam, they are known by local names… the Whisht Hounds of Dartmoor, Black Shuck (Old Shuck, Old Shock or simply Shuck) in East Anglia, the Barghest in… Read More »The Gytrash: Ghostly Black Dog of The Brontës