THE HIGHGATE VAMPIRE SOCIETY (incorporating the Highgate Vampire Casebook Files)
THE HIGHGATE VAMPIRE SOCIETY
(incorporating the Highgate Vampire Casebook Files)
There are not many people who will not have heard of the famous - some would say ‘infamous’ - case of the Highgate Vampire.
It all really began in the late 1960’s/70’s when wide reports began coming into the British Psychic and Occult Society about a ‘tall dark figure’ with ’hypnotic red eyes’ that had been sighted in and around London’s Highgate Cemetery. This was sighted by many local witnesses, some of whom even claimed to have been ’attacked’ by this menacing figure which invariably disappeared without trace after the reported confrontations.
So persistent was the frequency of these sightings that it was not long before BPOS President, David Farrant, was called in to investigate, and not long after that (in 1970) that the Press picked up the story; mainly, due to the claims of certain others who attempted to ‘cash-in’ on the official investigation by claiming that the reported figure (maybe due to the reports of its ‘glaring red eyes’) must be a ‘blood-sucking vampire’.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it did not take long before events at Highgate got completely out of hand (small groups of amateur vampire hunters and film makers attempting to use any available publicity) and even resulted in David Farrant being taken to Court (he appeared before Magistrate Mr. Christopher Lea) charged with being in Highgate Cemetery one night with the intention of ‘hunting down’ a vampire! David Farrant was not in Highgate Cemetery for such a purpose and denied the charge of which he was acquitted, but not without the case attracting the attention of the world wide Press who established this apparition’s identity as a ‘fully-fledged vampire’. In fact, David Farrant had never stated that it was, although he did say when pushed on the matter that the reported entity seemed to take on vampire-like characteristics, or rather, that some reports about it had done so.
There were three more Court cases after this between 1970 and 1974 in which David Farrant was involved, not directly connected with Highgate Cemetery although the “Highgate Vampire” was brought into them, mainly by bolstering Prosecution claims that he (David) was a ‘black magician’ and a ‘vampire hunter’! He was, and is, neither, although the fact his name could be directly linked with the first ‘vampire hunting’ case in 1970, gave the police, and the Courts, and excellent opportunity to offer non-factual evidence relating to various conceptions of the occult. (As David Farrant stated in his last Court case in 1974, “We believe the persecution against Wicca [white witchcraft] from the Middle Ages still goes on today”)
Whatever the rights and wrongs of such an argument, it remains a fact that David Farrant well and truly (albeit inadvertently) put Highgate Cemetery and stories about vampires there ‘well and truly on the map’. He regrets that much; but again, I suppose he had no choice in the matter.
But in 1997, following a mass of speculation about the so-called Highgate Vampire and misguided controversy that had come to surround his name - not least because this had spread to a world wide interest in the case - David Farrant decided to form the Highgate Vampire Society, its purpose (as he said at the time) . . . “One of our main aims will be to become a repository for all the oral history and written data concerning the Highgate Vampire”. He also said that another main purpose was to take off some of the pressure from the British Psychic and Occult Society who literally had its hands full with dealing with numerous psychic investigations.
David was lucky in this respect because he had made the acquaintance of Kev and Chrissie Demant - two serious research historians of local history who had also happened to become interested in the case of the Highgate Vampire. They seemed to make a perfect team, and the quarterly magazine of the Highgate Vampire Society from its inception was called Suspended in Dusk with numerous contributions from Kev Demant and David Farrant and beautifully illustrated by Chrissie Demant. Indeed, Kev and Chrissie continued to post up articles and illustrations on the Highgate Vampire case, and David’s involvement in it, long after the Highgate Vampire Society was temporarily suspended in 2001 due to increased pressure in membership demand.
But that was only a ‘temporary blip’. Nobody can really remove the inherent interest in the Highgate case which may explain why the Society has now been re-launched; albeit by this current media on the Internet.
Unfortunately, Kev and Chrissie Demant (for nebulous reasons of their own), apparently no longer have any interest in the Highgate case (or anyone connected to it), so the present work and research of the HVS must go on without them. After all, the case of the so-called Highgate phenomenon is not really a private issue or one that can be affected by personal views or interpretations. It is a matter of public record and should thus be open to continued input and debate, and not one that should not be allowed to become clouded or influenced by any who have no knowledge of events (which they certainly do not ‘own’) as these actually occurred or happened. There are many such persons around (including sensationalistic authors and members of the Press) but their stories should really be shared in total, and not be allowed to become ‘dictorial’ in the sense that these necessarily represent the public view of things.
Hence the continuation of The Highgate Vampire Society. Sit back, and enjoy some early history.
A little more History.
Highgate Cemetery was constructed in 1839 and it was a very fashionable burial place for Victorians. By the 1960's Highgate Cemetery had fallen into neglect and decay. Stories started circulating that the cemetery was haunted and newspapers started reporting England's first Vampire in over a hundred years.
In 1963 two 16 year old convent girls were walking home at night after having visited friends in Highgate Village. Their return journey took them down Swain's Lane past the cemetery. They could not believe their eyes as they passed the graveyard's north gate at the top of the lane, for in front of them, bodies appeared to be emerging from their tombs.
Another incident, some weeks later, involved a couple who were also walking down Swains lane. The lady recorded glimpsing something hideous hovering behind the gate's iron railings. Her fiance also saw it, and both stood frozen staring at it for what seemed like several minutes. Its face bore an expression of absolute horror.
Soon others sighted the same phantom as it hovered along the path behind the gate where gravestones are visible either side until consumed in darkness. Some who actually witnessed the spectral figure wrote to their local newspaper to share their experience. Discoveries were made of animal carcasses drained of blood. Very soon it was being described as a vampire.
In 1971 several years after the many publicised vampire sightings, a young girl claims she was actually attacked by the vampire in the lane outside the cemetery. She was returning home in the early hours of the morning when she was suddenly thrown to the ground with tremendous force by a "tall black figure with a deathly white face. At that moment a car stopped to help her and the vampire "vanished" in the glare of the headlamps.
She was taken to the police station in a state of shock, luckily only suffering abrasions to her arms and legs. The police immediately made a thorough search of the area, but could offer no explanation to the incident. More mysterious still was the fact that where the vampire vanished, the road was lined by 12ft walls.
Another interesting case is that of the man who was hypnotised by something in the cemetery. He had gone into the cemetery one evening to look around, and as the light began to rapidly fade he decided to leave, but became hopelessly lost. Not being a superstitious person he walked calmly around looking for the gate when suddenly he became aware of something behind him. Swinging around he became "hypnotised with fear" at the tall dark figure of the vampire confronted him. So great was the intensity of his fear that he stood motionless for several minutes after the vampire vanished. He later recalled that it was almost as if he had been paralysed with fear by some force.
Initial publicity
The publicity was initiated by a group of young people interested in the occult who began roaming the overgrown and dilapidated cemetery in the late 1960s, a time when it was being much vandalised by intruders [R. D. Altick, "To Be in England" (1969) .On 21 December 1969 one of their members, David Farrant, spent the night there, according to his account written in 1991. In a letter to the "Hampstead and Highgate Express" on 6 February 1970, he wrote that when passing the cemetery on 24 December 1969 he had glimpsed "a grey figure", which he considered to be supernatural, and asked if others had seen anything similar. On the 13th, several people replied, describing a variety of ghosts said to haunt the cemetery or the adjoining Swains Lane. These ghosts were described as a tall man in a hat, a spectral cyclist, a woman in white, a face glaring through the bars of a gate, a figure wading into a pond, a pale gliding form, bells ringing, and voices calling. Hardly two correspondents gave the same story.
The vampire theory
A second local man, Seán Manchester, was just as keen as Farrant to identify and eliminate what he and Farrant believed was a supernatural entity in the cemetery. The "Hampstead and Highgate Express" reported him on 27 February 1970 as saying that he believed that 'a King Vampire of the Undead', a medieval nobleman who had practised black magic in medieval Wallachia, had been brought to England in a coffin in the early eighteenth century, by followers who bought a house for him in the West End. He was buried on the site that later became Highgate Cemetery, and Manchester claimed that modern Satanists had roused him. He said the right thing to do would be to stake the vampire's body, and then behead and burn it, but regrettably this would nowadays be illegal. The paper headlined this: 'Does a Vampyr walk in Highgate?'
(Manchester has claimed, however, that the reference to 'a King Vampire from Wallachia' was a journalistic embellishment. Nevertheless, the 1985 edition of his book also speaks of an unnamed nobleman's body brought to Highgate in a coffin from somewhere in Europe.)
In his interview of 27 February, Manchester offered no evidence in support of his theory. The following week, on 6 March, the same paper reported David Farrant as saying he had seen dead foxes in the cemetery, 'and the odd thing was there was no outward sign of how they died.' When told of this, Manchester said it seemed to complement his theory. In later writings, both men reported seeing other dead foxes with throat wounds and drained of blood.
Farrant was more hesitant in identifying the phenomenon he had seen. In some interviews he called it simply a ghost or spectre, sometimes he agreed that it might be vampiric. It is the 'vampire' label which has stuck.
The Mass Vampire Hunt of March 1970
The ensuing publicity was enhanced by a growing rivalry between Farrant and Manchester, each claiming that he could and would expel or destroy the spectre. Manchester declared to his associates that he would hold an 'official' vampire hunt on Friday 13 March -- such Fridays are always ominous dates in British and North American superstition (Friday the Thirteenth), and are frequently chosen for items on occult matters in the media . ITV then set up interviews with both Manchester and Farrant, and with others who claimed to have seen supernatural figures in the cemetery. These were broadcast on ITV early on the evening of the 13th; within two hours a mob of 'hunters' from all over London and beyond swarmed over gates and walls into the locked cemetery, despite police efforts to control them [. Such behaviour exemplifies, in an extreme form, a fondness for legend tripping.
The Aftermath
There was more publicity about Farrant and Manchester when rumours spread that they would meet in a 'magicians' duel' on Parliament Hill on Friday 13 April 1973, which never came off. Farrant was jailed in 1974 for damaging memorials and interfering with dead remains in Highgate Cemetery -- vandalism and desecration which he insisted had been caused by Satanists, not him. Both episodes kept memories of the Highgate affair vivid. In 1975 Manchester wrote a chapter about it in a book edited by Peter Underwood, a well-known popular writer on ghost lore. The Highgate Vampire is now regularly featured in books and internet sites on occult subjects.
The feud between Manchester and Farrant remains vigorous to this day; each claims to be a competent exorcist and researcher of the paranormal; each pours scorn on the other's alleged expertise. They continue to investigate supernatural phenomena, and have both written and spoken repeatedly about the Highgate events, in every medium available, each stressing his own role to the exclusion of the other.
Seán Manchester, former patron of the Yorkshire Robin Hood Society, claimed to have discovered a vampire by Robin Hood's Grave on the Kirklees Estate which he visited in 1991. The "vampire nun of Kirklees" was assumed to be the prioress who allegedly had bled Robin to death.
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Page last updated: Apr 30 2012
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