The oldest section of Ponden Hall dates to 1541, incorporated into the eastern end of the present building. The main hall was built in 1634 by Robert Heaton, then aged 47, for his son Michael, then aged 25. An old porch and peat house were added later in the seventeenth century by Michael's son. In 1801 the hall was rebuilt by his great-grandson, also called Robert Heaton, in the coursed millstone-grit style typical of upland Pennine farmhouses, with a slate roof and two storeys and a date plaque above the central porch. It has been Grade II* listed since the twentieth century. A second farmstead across the road was demolished in 1956, leaving Ponden alone above the moor.

The relationship between Ponden Hall and Emily Bronte's only novel is one of the longer-running puzzles in English literary tourism. Local tradition has long claimed that Ponden was the model for Thrushcross Grange, the comfortable, refined Linton home where Catherine spends weeks recovering after the dog bite at the start of Wuthering Heights. The trouble is that the novel describes Thrushcross as much grander than Ponden actually is. The Bronte biographer Winifred Gerin thought the architectural details matched Wildfell Hall, the old mansion to which Helen Graham flees in Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; latticed windows, a central portico, a date plaque above. Most modern readers settle for the idea that Ponden, which the Bronte sisters knew well, fed details into both Emily's and Anne's novels without being precisely either Thrushcross or Wildfell.

There is one specific feature of Ponden Hall that pilgrims look for. Above the porch, a small box-shaped casement window opens onto what was once a child's bedroom. It is the kind of window through which, in Wuthering Heights, the narrator Lockwood believes he sees a small hand reach in from the moor at night, the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw begging to be let in. Emily Bronte may have slept under that window during visits, or simply seen it from the moor. There is no proof and no need for proof; the alignment of object and scene is one of those moments when fiction reaches back into a real place and changes how subsequent visitors see it. The current owners, who operate the house as a bed and breakfast since converting it in 2014, show the window with a careful absence of insistence.

The Heaton family were textile manufacturers as well as farmers, and during the nineteenth century they moved increasingly into wool. With the death of Robert Heaton in 1898, the last surviving Heaton male, the hall was sold out of the family. The final descendant of the line, George Smith Heaton, son of Michael and Ellen Heaton of nearby Royd House, ended his life on the other side of the world: he died penniless at the Bendigo Benevolent Asylum in Victoria, Australia, on 12 February 1901. The house outlived them. In 2020 Country Life ran an article on the property after it was put on the market for one million pounds; the beams, walls, fireplaces and windows are described in the listing as gloriously authentic, which after four centuries is faint praise but accurate.