Highgate Cemetery

The Highgate vampire can be followed from a letter in February 1970 to a crowd at the gates on 13 March, and most of the steps were printed as they happened, which is why the folklorist Bill Ellis could devote a 27-page article in Folklore (1993) to the hunt. The first step was a ghost: David Farrant's letter to the Hampstead and Highgate Express described "a grey figure" seen for a few seconds inside the top gate of Swain's Lane and asked whether anyone else had seen anything; in his own account of 2010 he says he had "deliberately omitted any reference to a 'vampire'". The replies that followed described different things, and David Castleton, in his reconstruction of the affair, lists a tall man wearing a hat, a ghostly cyclist, a lady dressed in white, a face grimacing through the bars of a gate, a person wading into a pond and a pale gliding entity, and concludes that "there was little coherence in the types of spectres people claimed to have seen". The vampire came from Seán Manchester: on 27 February 1970 the same newspaper published an interview with him, "Does a Wampyre Walk in Highgate?", in which he said that "a King Vampire of the undead", an aristocrat who had practised black magic in medieval Romania, had been brought to England in a coffin in the early eighteenth century and buried on the site, and that recent Satanist rituals had woken him. Manchester later called the eastern European part a journalistic embellishment, although his book of 1985 still mentions a foreign nobleman's coffin. Farrant moved towards the same vocabulary a week later: on 6 March the paper reported that he had found dead foxes in the cemetery and thought a vampire might have been responsible. Television did the rest when, on the evening of Friday 13 March 1970, ITV broadcast interviews with Farrant and Manchester, among others who said they had seen figures in the cemetery, with live reporting from Highgate; according to IanVisits the two rivals said they were determined to seek out the vampire and exorcise it with a wooden stake through the heart. Within two hours, Castleton writes, hundreds of would-be vampire hunters were arriving and climbing the gates and walls despite the police. IanVisits puts the crowd at nearly 100 people, held back without success by some 40 officers. The crowd formed within two hours of the programme, and that timing places the trigger of the hunt in the broadcast. Farrant's position kept moving, and Castleton writes that, as the crowd searched, Farrant "complained that media hysteria and local superstition had turned the Highgate entity into a vampire", while still believing in the entity. Later that year he was caught at night in St Michael's churchyard, next to the cemetery, carrying a stake, and in September a court at Clerkenwell found him not guilty because the ground was not an enclosed area in the legal sense. His later theory was an evil presence travelling along a ley line. The setting supplied the physical evidence, and the hunts added to it. By the 1960s, Castleton writes, the cemetery was overgrown and neglected, vandals had pulled doors off vaults and holes in tombs showed coffins and in some cases bodies; Farrant, visiting before his vigil of December 1969, found vaults broken open, one coffin set alight and a skeleton wrenched from another. On the night of 13 March Manchester's group climbed into a catacomb through a window to perform an exorcism, and in August 1970, by Manchester's own account, they forced the doors of a family vault and opened a coffin. In 1974 Farrant was jailed after being convicted of interfering with remains and vandalising memorials in the cemetery, damage he attributed to Satanists. Part of the damage that seemed to confirm the story was done by the people hunting it.