FACT AND FICTION CONCERNING THE HIGHGATE VAMPIRE CASE
[Extract from Seán Manchester's unpublished memoir Stray Ghosts]
© Seán Manchester, 2003
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
(T S Eliot)
The journey had been long and oftentimes difficult, and I wondered what the French vampirological and biblical scholar, Dom Augustin Calmet, would have made of it all. He entered the Benedictine Order in 1688, becoming ordained into the priesthood in 1696, after which he was offered consecration to the episcopate by Pope Benedict XIII, but turned it down. More than anything else, Calmet is remembered for his 1746 work on vampires: Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges des Démons et des Espits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, et de Silésie.
My own experience in this field, which, of course, commenced with the Highgate case, leaves me in absolutely no doubt that such things can be. Calmet’s attempt to establish the veracity of such predatory demonic entities lacked first-hand evidence. He seemed to concentrate on the collecting of vampire reports, which he certainly did not dismiss out of hand, and then offered his reflections on them. Calmet defined the phenomena as corpses that returned from their graves to disturb the living by sucking their blood and even causing death. The only remedy was to exhume the afflicted body, sever its head, and drive a stake through the heart. Cremation was also considered another effective alternative. Using that definition, he gathered all the accounts he could find, and it is these reports of collected data that take up the majority of space in his volume. He justifiably condemned the hysteria which accompanied several of the reported vampire incidents, and he also properly considered all the natural explanations that were offered for the phenomenon.
His findings were inconclusive. However, Calmet did not state that the reports could be explained away by natural causes, but he shrank from proposing an alternative answer. In other words, he left the entire matter unresolved. Yet he seemed to favour the existence of vampires by noting “that it seems impossible not to subscribe to the belief which prevails in these countries that these apparitions do actually come forth from the graves and that they are able to produce terrible effects which are so widely and so positively attributed to them.” Calmet had posed five possibilities for all the accounts he had considered. Three of these he dismissed. The remaining two consisted of the possibility that vampires are the result of the Devil’s interference, or just superstition. No firm conclusion was apparent until the third and last edition, published in 1751, where in his bestselling work he makes clear that he could conclude naught save that such creatures as vampires really did return from the grave.
In the wake of my mysterious and terrible discovery at Highgate Cemetery in August 1970 no such dilemma about their existence would ever assail me again; though I did speculate on explanations for the peculiar abilities attributed to this phenomena.
“They exist outside of normal time; therefore, when discovered after centuries, a [corporeal host] might appear three score years at most ― possibly much younger. … Time will do nothing thereafter to efface its condition … Our earthly bodies move in time. The vampire’s does not.” [The Highgate Vampire, Gothic Press, 1991, page 39.]
Much confusion surrounded the Highgate Vampire case when it first hit the headlines. This was due in part to fear, foolishness and fraud. The latter was (and still is) orchestrated by someone known at that time as "Allan," but whose actual Christian name is David.
“Allan,” having been made homeless following his eviction from a nearby flat in 1969, sought refuge in someone’s coal cellar. Partial to alcohol, “Allan” would later be arrested and held on remand for shenanigans not entirely unrelated to his drinking in August 1970. A handful of months before the arrest, he wrote to his local newspaper, at the behest of the person whose cellar he now occupied, to declare that he had seen a ghostly figure some nights as he “walked home past the gates of Highgate Cemetery.” Thus he became one of the many people I interviewed, and was included among those briefly interviewed in the press and on television throughout 1970. There is an obvious flaw in his overture to the press in as much as it is physically impossible to “walk home” from any of the pubs he frequented in Highgate Village and pass by the cemetery gates in Swains Lane. Any map of the area will confirm his cellar lodgings in Archway Road to be located in a completely opposite direction. But, then, “Allan” was less than serious when he wrote his letter. Indeed, the exercise was an attention-seeking prank. To that end, I suppose it succeeded. I learned these facts later from the person who had offered his cellar to “Allan.”
It would seem that “Allan” had discussed faking a news story with his new landlord. It was decided to invent a story about the escape and recapture of his macaw, Oliver, now in the care of someone else. This was hardly original. “Goldie” the eagle had escaped from London Zoo in 1965, only to be later recaptured. This became a national news story at the time. “Allan” thought he had found a bandwagon on which to catch a ride. The other person, unimpressed by the Oliver story, jokingly suggested a fake suicide attempt from Archway Bridge with a no less bogus “rescue.” This, too, was unoriginal because a news story about the actor and comedian Peter Sellers persuading a depressed person (about to jump off Archway Bridge) from committing suicide had also made the headlines. While “Allan” was thinking about how to go about manufacturing one or possibly both stories, he heard rumours of an alleged vampire in Highgate Cemetery on his visits to the Prince of Wales and various other pubs in the area.
The escaped bird and fake suicide attempt stories were ditched. “Allan” was determined to exploit the three-year-old word-of-mouth reports of a vampire by writing a letter to the editor of the Hampstead and Highgate Express in early 1970, ending with the frank admission: “I have no knowledge in this field and I would be interested to hear if any other readers have seen anything of this nature.”
Readers of the newspaper were certainly able to confirm plenty of sightings. The Highgate phenomenon was a story about to snowball. This had the unfortunate effect of dragging me into the forefront of something I had decided hitherto to keep a lid on. I felt that it was incumbent upon me to make some sort of statement in view of all the readers’ comments. Thus, on 27 February 1970, following batches of readers’ letters, I appeared on the front page to summarise the view of the British Occult Society and the newly-formed Vampire Research Society. It did not make easy reading. Two weeks later, I featured on Thames Television’s Today programme for the same purpose.
The rest, as they say, is history.
