Mrs. Gaskell, the Brontë biographer, relates that a friend of Charlotte Brontë said Charlotte had told her "a misfortune was often preceded by the dream which she gives to Jane Eyre of carrying a wailing child. She, Charlotte Brontë, described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing.... The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such sensitiveness to omens was ... present to susceptible people...." This in the main explains the origin of the child-apparition as an omen of disaster in Charlotte Brontë's works.

It would seem by Charlotte's statement in Jane Eyre that Tabitha Aykroyd, as "Bessie," was responsible for the origin of this little superstition; and it is instructive to find the child-apparition as an ill-omen in connection with Tabitha Aykroyd as Mrs. Dean in Wuthering Heights. I have shown John Reed and Hindley Earnshaw represent Branwell Brontë; we may notice, therefore, that the child-apparition is given equally in Wuthering Heights and in Jane Eyre as coming before disaster or disgrace to Branwell Brontë.

Wuthering Heights.Jane Eyre.
Chapter XI.Chapter XXI.
Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition as a token of calamity to Branwell Brontë.Tabitha Aykroyd's child-apparition as a token of calamity to Branwell Brontë.
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Says Mrs. Dean [Tabitha]: "I came to a stone which serves as a guide-post to ... the Heights and the village.... Hindley [Branwell Brontë] and I held it a favourite spot twenty years before, ... and ... it appeared that I beheld my ... playmate seated on the ... turf, ... his little hand scooping out the earth."[27]
"Poor Hindley!" [Branwell Brontë] I exclaimed involuntarily. I started—my bodily eye was cheated in the belief that the child lifted its face and stared straight into mine! It vanished in a twinkling; but immediately I felt an irresistible yearning to be at the Heights. Superstition urged me to comply with this impulse—"Suppose he were dead! ... supposing it were a sign of death!"		Presentiments are strange things! ... and so are signs.... Sympathies I believe exist (for instance, between far-distant ... wholly estranged relatives). When I was a ... girl I heard Bessie [Tabitha Aykroyd] say that to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble.... During the last week scarcely a night had gone ... that had not brought ... the dream of an infant which I ... watched playing with daisies on a lawn or ... dabbling its hands in running water.[27] It was a wailing child this night, ... a laughing one the next, ... but whatever mood the apparition evinced ... it failed not ... to meet me.... I grew nervous.... It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had been roused ... when I heard the cry: and on the ... day following ... I found a man [Bessie's husband] waiting for me; ... he was ... in deep mourning, and the hat in his hand was surrounded with a crape band.
"I hope no one is dead," I said. And the man replies that John Reed [Branwell Brontë] had got into great trouble and was dead.

Branwell Brontë was not dead when Charlotte Brontë wrote those two versions, but it seems certain that an apparition of a child in some period of Charlotte's life preceded a further debasement of Branwell, the original of Hindley Earnshaw and John Reed. We may note Charlotte Brontë's Method II., in regard to Hindley.

In Charlotte Brontë's The Professor we find reference to her child-phantom wailing outside, and to the eerie, premonitory signal made against a lattice, as in her Wuthering Heights:—

Wuthering Heights.The Professor.
Chapter III.Chapter XVI.
Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening.Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening.
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While leading me upstairs she [Zillah, the stout housewife] recommended that I should hide the candle and not make a noise, ... they had so many queer goings-on.
He sleeps and is awakened by—
The branch of a fir that touched my lattice.... I listened doubtingly, ... I heard the gusty wind and the driving of the snow;... I heard also the firbough repeat its teasing sound.... I ... endeavoured to unhasp the casement, ... knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the ... branch; instead of which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice-cold hand.[28]... I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it and a melancholy voice sobbed—"Let me in—let me in!"
... As it spoke, I discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window.... Still it wailed "Let me in!" and it maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.
"How can I?" I said.... "Let me go, if you want me to let you in." I stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer, ... yet the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on!
"Begone!" I shouted; "I'll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years."		Take care, young man [recommended "the herdsman's wife">[, that you fasten the door well, ... whatever sound you hear stir not and look not out. The night will soon fall, ... strange noises are often heard ... you might chance to hear, as it were, a child cry, and on opening the door to give it succour ... a shadowy goblin dog might rush over the threshold; or more awful still, if something flapped, as with wings, against the lattice, and then a raven or a white dove flew in and settled on the hearth, such a visitor would be a sure sign of misfortune.
The stranger, left alone, listens awhile to the muffled snow-wind.

In Wuthering Heights Charlotte Brontë has worked the child-phantom into the story proper, setting it for the spirit of the departed Catherine, who as a child again (Method II., altering age of the character portrayed) seeks Heathcliffe. The building of the child-phantom in the plot of Wuthering Heights created a peculiar state of affairs; but as we have seen by Charlotte Brontë's reference to it in the extract from The Professor, she was impressed by its possibilities of giving a weird spiritual atmosphere, and she did not extend the idea in The Professor. The substance of Charlotte Brontë's two versions of the child-phantom wailing outside a house for admittance is identical:—

The Professor.Wuthering Heights.
Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. Young stranger admonished by the good housewife that there are queer goings-on thereabouts.Scene: An isolated homestead on a winter's night, snow-wind blowing, storm threatening. Young stranger admonished by the good housewife that there are queer goings-on thereabouts.
Subjunctive Mood.Indicative Mood.
Something might brush against the lattice, and a phantom-child might wail outside for succour, On opening to admit it an awful, supernatural incident might occur.Something brushes against the lattice, and a phantom-child wails outside for succour. On opening to admit it an awful, supernatural incident occurs.

Thus we perceive the famous child-phantom incident in Chapter III. of Wuthering Heights had its origin (1) in Montagu's lonely-house incident; (2) in Charlotte Brontë's awe of a child-apparition; (3) in Charlotte Brontë's Method II., alteration of age of character portrayed, by which Catherine the woman becomes a child again; and (4) in Charlotte Brontë's notion, as evidenced in Shirley, Chapter XXIV., that a loved dead one can "revisit those they leave"; can "come in the elements"; that "wind" could give "a path to Moor(e)"—Heath(cliffe), "passing the casement sobbing"; that the loved dead one could "haunt" the wind. These, then, we see were the notions in Charlotte Brontë's head responsible for Catherine's returning so sensationally to the abode of her lover as a child-spectre. For Catherine's love for Wuthering Heights was not simply because of the place and its moors, as so many writers have wrongly contended, but because it was associated with Heathcliffe.[29] Let my reader peruse again the "wailing child" passages I quote from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in Chapter II. of The Key to the Brontë Works.