The night of 13 March 1970 witnessed scenes of utter pandemonium as people gathered in large numbers along the steep lane running alongside London's Highgate Cemetery. At 6.00 pm a television programme had confirmed that a vampire contagion was evident in the graveyard, and that a vampire hunt was imminent. Now the crowds multiplied in hopeful anticipation of locating the resting-place of the undead entity. Police were present to control those arriving, but it was an almost impossible task. By 10.00pm an assortment of independent amateur vampire hunters had joined the onlookers. Principal among the freelance brigade was a schoolteacher, fortuitously named Alan Blood, whom Matthew Bunson, as recorded in his The Vampire Encyclopedia (1993), felt was an important player in the unravelling case. Bunson, an American who had no contact with Blood, or indeed anyone else contemporaneous to the events at Highgate Cemetery, relied on yet another American, Jeanne Keyes Youngson of the New York Count Dracula Fan Club aka Vampire Empire who, in turn, was dependant on such as Allan Farrow.
Youngson’s influence on Bunson initiated the error in his and thereby subsequent accounts. The primary source, however, is the London Evening News, 14 March 1970, front page report “Mr Blood Hunts Cemetery Vampire.” The brief quotes attributed to Blood in this sensationalist report are notably rebutted by Blood himself in a longer interview given to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 20 March 1970. This latter interview, reproduced in Seán Manchester’s account about the case, has been totally ignored by commentators such as Bunson who seem to have scant regard for the facts in public archives.
An authentic account of Alan Blood’s part in the affair is given in Seán Manchester’s The Highgate Vampire (pages 77-79) from which the following is revealed: “By 10.00pm [on the night of 13 March 1970] the hundreds of onlookers were to include several freelance vampire hunters, including a history teacher, Alan Blood, who had journeyed from Billericay to seek out the undead being.” Blood had seen a report on television some hours earlier that evening and immediately set off for Highgate. On his arrival in Highgate Village, he entered the Prince of Wales pub on the High Street, whereupon he instantly recognised an unkempt individual who had been one of several interviewed by Sandra Harris as alleged witnesses of the vampire spectre. However, Seán Manchester, featured on the same programme as leading the investigation, was nowhere to be seen because he was already inside the cemetery with his research team. Blood was obliged to settle for Allan Farrow quaffing pints of ale in the Prince of Wales pub. He listened to claims of “a seven foot tall vampire that hovered by the cemetery gate,” and wanted to be shown exactly where this occurred. Farrow declined, and continued drinking his ale.
Blood left the pub and joined a steadily growing crowd of several hundred people in Swains Lane. When the pub eventually closed, Farrow allegedly also joined the throng outside the cemetery’s North Gate in the lane, but, like Blood, made no attempt to enter.
It was while in Swains Lane that, wearing a Russian-style hat with his beard, Blood was noticed by an Evening News photographer and a reporter. They spoke to Blood, and also to a 27-year-old Hampstead resident, Anthony Robinson, who had ventured to the cemetery gate “after hearing of the torchlight hunt.” Robinson is alleged to have told the reporter: “I walked past the place and heard a high-pitched noise, then I saw something grey moving slowly across the road. It terrified me. First time I couldn’t make it out, it looked eerie. I’ve never believed in anything like this, but now I’m sure there is something evil lurking in Highgate.” Yet it was Blood, who saw and did nothing, whose photograph was to appear on the front page of next day’s Evening News. He is described at the head of the report as “a vampire expert named Mr Blood who journeyed forty miles to investigate the legend of an ‘undead Satan-like being’ said to lurk in the area.” Yet Alan Blood had not claimed to be a “vampire expert,” and would readily confirm in a more soberly conducted interview with the Hampstead & Highgate Express, that he was “by no means an expert on vampires.”
None of which would stop American author Matthew Bunson publishing some twenty-three years later: “The focus of the media attention turned to [Allan Farrow] and Alan Blood, vampire experts who led the search. Both were convinced that a vampire was sleeping in one of the vaults and were determined to find it and kill it. While blamed for the desecration of tombs and arrested for trespass, Farrow [Farrow] was acquitted on the grounds that the cemetery was open to the public. As is typical of such incidents, stories based on rumour and on unconfirmed sightings soon spread, and the tabloids and newspapers ran exploitative reports. No vampire was ever publicly discovered.” (The Vampire Encyclopedia, page 121).
Apart from his reference to press exploitation, not a single statement in Bunson’s entry for “The Highgate Vampire” is accurate. The focus of the media did not turn to the amateur vampire hunter and Alan Blood. The latter, after 13 March 1970, completely disappeared off the scene. Farrow gained an appetite for attention-seeking, becoming a convert to a malefic form of pseudo-occultism by the end of that year, by which time he had repudiated the “vampire theory,” as he would later describe it. But, save his original claim in 1970 (in the form a letter to his local newspaper), he was not a “focus” with regard to the investigation which promptly dismissed his allegations of sightings as unsafe and his behaviour unwise. Blood never stated that he was “determined to find and kill” the vampire. Farrow did, of course, but later revoked this ambition. Nor was Farrow arrested for “trespass” ~ he was, in fact, arrested for being in an enclosed area for an unlawful purpose. And he was not merely “blamed for the desecration of tombs” in Highgate Cemetery. He was charged and found guilty of malicious damage to tombs following the longest “witchcraft” trial in two hundred years at London’s Central Criminal Court. He was to receive a prison sentence of almost five years. Many sightings of the Highgate Vampire were, indeed, confirmed, documented, and recorded.
Seán Manchester would add in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook (pages 66-67): “Interestingly, Jeanne Youngson’s name crops up in Bunson’s acknowledgements as having assisted with this book [The Vampire Encyclopedia]. Why does that come as no surprise? Peter Hough follows in Bunson’s errant footsteps in Supernatural Britain (1995) and repeats the misinformation that [Allan Farrow] ‘teamed up’ with Alan Blood (something neither ever claimed) whilst ignoring the actual investigation. When contacted through their respective publishers, neither deigned to reply. Their publishers also refused to answer any correspondence on the matter.” This refusal to address serious error placed on record is a matter of deep concern.
Bunson and Hough are followed by the journalist Tom Slemen whose latter-day paperback Strange But True (1998) claimed that “Alan Blood organized a mass vampire hunt that would take place on Friday 13 March, 1970. Mr Blood was interviewed on television. … The schoolteacher’s plan was to wait until dawn, when the first rays of the rising sun would force the vampire to return to his subterranean den in the catacombs, then he would kill the Satanic creature in the time-honoured tradition; by driving a wooden stake through its heart. … In an orgy of desecration [the crowd] had exhumed the remains of a woman from a tomb, stolen lead from coffins, and defaced sepulchres with mindless graffiti.”
None of which is true. Blood did not “organize a mass vampire hunt.” Indeed, Blood organised nothing. He was an interested onlooker. It was not the “schoolteacher’s plan to wait until dawn.” This was the published plan of Farrow. There was no “orgy of desecration” etc. No damage whatsoever occurred on the night of 13 March 1970. What Slemen is probably alluding to is an entirely different incident that took place five months later, as recorded on the front page of the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 7 August 1970, where the discovery of the headless body of a female and signs of a satanic ceremony were made by two fifteen-year-old schoolgirls as they walked through the graveyard on a sunny August afternoon. Police viewed it to be the work of Satanists and investigated it as such. Some weeks later Farrow was arrested prowling around the graveyard at night.
"Armed with a wooden stake and a crucifix Allan Farrow prowled among the tombstones of a graveyard. He was hunting the vampire of Highgate Cemetery. And 24-year-old Farrow told a court yesterday: 'My intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart.' Farrow pleaded guilty at Clerkenwell, London, to entering St Michael's Churchyard, Highgate Cemetery, for unlawful purposes. Farrow told police he had just moved to London when he heard people talking about the vampire of Highgate Cemetery. In a statement he said that he heard the vampire rises out of a grave and wanders about the cemetery on the look-out for human beings on whose blood it thrives. Police keeping watch for followers of a black magic cult arrested him. He was remanded in custody for reports. Last night Mr Seán Manchester, leader of the British Occult Society, said: 'I am convinced that a vampire exists in Highgate Cemetery. Local residents and passers-by have reported seeing a ghost-like figure of massive proportions near the north gate'." (Daily Express, 19 August 1970)
These are the known and recorded facts about the then 25-year-old schoolteacher Alan Blood who, on 13 March 1970 travelled from Billericay to Highgate in London, having seen a report on television earlier that evening, to satisfy his curiosity. He was not a vampirologist, nor ever claimed to be. He was one of hundreds who had turned up to see what was going on. After talking to the press he was not heard of again in this context. Yet his name entered a legend of its own.
The full story of the case can be read in Seán Manchester’s bestselling book, a reliable account by a first-hand witness, participant and investigative researcher.
Click on the link below for more details:
http://www.gothicpress.freeserve.co.uk/Highgate%20Vampire%20Book.htm
