How she refused to let go, allowing herself to be cut by the window repeatedly, showed the passion with which she aspired to return into the house; a passion that rivaled madness, spirit or not. Heathcliff’s reaction to Lockwood’s account of the ghost reveals his own involvement and his turmoil concerning this spirit. Cold and angry, he ushers Lockwood away and once alone in the room cries for Catherine.  “ ‘Come in! come in!’ he sobbed. ‘Cathy do come. Oh do – once more! Oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time – Catherine, at last!’ ” (Dickens, 24).  Clearly Heathcliff yearns deeply to see this ghost and to have her wish fulfilled, calling her his “heart’s darling” she is clearly the object of his affection. He loved her so, and it is then easy to assume that her death may be the cause of Heathcliff’s general misery and callous behavior.  The miserly man curiously seems to wish to be haunted, calling out to Catherine out of an extreme yearning to be near her.  


“She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And, since then, sometimes more, and sometimes less, I’ve been the sport of that intolerable torture!... When I went from home I hastened to return: she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber – I was beaten out of that – I couldn’t lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child.” 
(Bronte, 257)


This assumption is proven true in a later conversation (see right) where Heathcliff tells of his first haunting and of his lust to see the ghost again. Further insight can be taken from this scene as to the potency of Heathcliff’s passion for his lost love and how it has absorbed his life and motivations. It both tortures him and drives him, for he only desires to be with her.  As he said, he no longer leaves the house for long worrying he’ll miss her appearing, and sleep escapes him because he imagines her near and can’t rest knowing it. This obsession drives him into madness, it is the cause of his decent and resulting death. His madness reaches its height when Heathcliff digs up the body of Catherine and reveals his desire to be close to it still, to lay next to it in eternal slumber. Here he has arrived at the point in his delusion where it tortures him into a resolution, he must be with her and figures that death is the only way to accomplish that, thusly he loses his will to live and carry out his vengeance. 

During his decent into madness Heathcliff tells Nelly about his change in motivation from vengeance to his obsession over his dead love, how the mania affects him physically is what qualifies the incident as bizarre. 