Since 2009, tourists have paid to encounter Emily Brontë's ghost at Haworth. Today, there are four such ghosts working.

The first might have been authentic, trailing the last visitors around the Brontë Parsonage Museum on winter evenings. It became a selling point, with guests willing to pay for the barest glimpse of the spectre.

Others followed. One stands in mourning at the overcrowded graveyard. A caretaker at the Old School Room offers ouija board seances with a spirit that signs itself "EMLY". English postgrads pay well for private sessions to aid their dissertation research.

These are different spirits. They can't all be Emily Brontë, and it's possible none of them are - likely they are obsessive fans rather than the writer herself. But it makes money for the town, and these spirits play along.

Tourists are eager to surrender to the illusion. But I feel sorry for the souls of the dead who are willing to pretend to be someone else.

Background

One of the projects I 'might' do is a novella-in-microfiction about the Brontës (although it's unlikely to happen in this lifetime). The industry around the Brontës is fascinating, as it sometimes effaces both the real people and their work. I'm not sure what real relationship exists between the novels and visiting modern-day Haworth. It's hard to connect a visit to the 'Brontë waterfalls' to any specific literary experience.

I love Wuthering Heights though. My favourite essay in my MA was one I wrote that interpreted Emily Brontë's novel as a love affair between two houses, with reference to feminist theories of anthropology. That piece also received the lowest marks I had on the course.

I use the structure in this story a lot. I start with a concept - a tourism industry that uses real ghosts to impersonate Emily Brontë (which seems a bizarre matter-of-fact response to genuine interactions with the supernatural). I then sketch some implications of this, before rounding it off with a slight different perspective. Although maybe introducing an “I” in the final sentence is cheating.

I don't think it's a bad structure - it comes from reading comic books, where the captions would hint at other stories. This became something of a trope in the 90s onwards, with new characters referring to invented continuities.

This could be written taking more time over the story, maybe following a single character - perhaps a tourist slowly realising there are multiple ghosts; perhaps the caretaker, tiring of fleecing tourists. I could follow through their life in the town, paint in the details over a few thousand words. But I'm not sure what the story would gain from that. I prefer this form - which I can see is basically a script for a single 9-panel comic page.

(The idea of researchers contacting ghosts in seances was something El Sandifer did in Last War in Albion, which features a citation from William Blake in 2014)

This Newsletter’s Second Birthday

I’ve now been producing weekly stories for two years. Sending out a story every week has been sometimes challenging, but I’ve enjoyed it. I do have some interesting plans for the next year, but haven’t quite had the time to put them together to share. I will. But, in the meantime, thank you for reading.

Recommendations

The toad, work, continues to sit on me, meaning I've not had much time to explore new things, or to write about them - especially Bryony Good’s excellent In a Land zine (which features a story from me). In the meantime, during this damp lull in the summer weather, you can listen to Emma’s delightful July Pool Party Mix.