The Highgate Vampire

Over the past 37 years, many popular books on ghosts have mentioned a vampire which purportedly haunted Highgate Cemetery in the early 1970s. The growth of its reputation is a fascinating example of urbanlegend-building, which can be traced through contemporary media reports and subsequent books by two participants, Sean Manchester and David Farrant.

The Highgate Cemetery i s an old Victorian-style cemetery located on the beautiful North London hill site where 165,000 people are spread over 37 acres. It is rumoured to have been the source of inspiration for the famous scene of the cemetery in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'.

Sean Manchester,self-proclaimed vampire hunter and then President of The British Occult Society , relates in his autobiographical ' The Highgate Vampire ' . The whole affair started when a pair of female teenage students from La Sainte Union Convent saw what they described as graves opening and bodies rising in the north gate

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section.

On 21 December 1969 another student, David Farrant, decided to spend 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 Swains Lane besides.

The description of these ghosts included 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, a common feature in genuine folk traditions about eerie places.

A second local man, Sean Manchester, was just as fired as Farrant to identify and eliminate what he and Farrant believed was a paranormal creature 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 and later leased the home of Sir William Ashurst (Lord Mayor of London in 1694) on the site that later became Highgate Cemetery.

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 Wampyr walk in Highgate?'

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Later, Manchester, which public profile rose significantly, claimed to have been contacted by Elizabeth Wojdyla, one of the two convent girls who sought his help because she has anaemia and nightmares about an animalistic man outside her window. Manchester asserts that he cured her by creating a protective shield with such items as garlic, salt and silver crucifix. He was also contacted by a woman named Anne on behalf of her sister, pseudonymously named Luisa, who had two pin-pricks on her neck and a compulsion to visit Highgate cemetery while sleepwalking.

The ensuing publicity was enhanced by a growing rivalry between Farrant and Manchester, each claiming to be the one to expel or destroy the vampire. Manchester declared to the press that he would hold an 'official' vampire hunt on Friday 13 March. 2 hours after ITV broadcasted interviews with both Manchester and Farrant, a mob of 'hunters' from all over London and beyond fenced over gates and walls into the locked cemetery, forcing police to intervene.

These freelancers included rival vampire hunter David Farrant, John Pope, (who in 1973 tried to summon the spirit of Count Dracula with a magic ceremony in his hotel room); a history teacher propitiously named Alan Blood; and a local resident named Anthony Robinson, who insisted he heard a high-pitched noise and saw a grey shape during the proceedings.

In later years, Manchester wrote his own account of his deads that night (The Highgate Vampire 1985; 2nd rev. ed. 1991). According to his narrative, he and some companions entered the cemetery, unobserved by the police, via the damaged railings of an adjoining churchyard, and tried to open the door of one particular catacomb to which a psychic sleepwalking girl had previously led him; but unable to open the massive door, Manchester asked his associates to lower him in with a rope to the columbarium where he found three empty coffins. Quickly, he purified them with salt, garlic and holy water against to prevent from the possible return of any resident vampires.

This affair escalated in August 1970, when the charred and headless female body of murdered victim was found not far from the catacomb. The police suspected that it had been used in black magic. Soon after this incident, there was a noticeable surge in both Farrant's and Manchester's activities.

Farrant was found by police in the churchyard beside Highgate Cemetery one night in August, carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. He was arrested, but when the case came to court it was dismissed.

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A few days later Manchester returned to Highgate Cemetery, but in the daytime, when visits are allowed. He claimed in his book (neither press nor police were present) that this time he and his companions did succeed in forcing open, inch by inch, the heavy and rusty iron doors of the family vault to find out that one of three empty coffins was missing.

Led by Lusia as a psychic link, he then broke into the catacomb nearest where this woman's body had been discovered.

There he found an extra coffin within which, even more remarkably, was a vampire, with clotted gore in the corners of its mouth and the complexion of a three-day-old corpse. He was about to drive a stake through the body it contained when a companion persuaded him to desist. Reluctantly, he shut the coffin, put garlic and incense in the vault, and came out from it. The

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vault was then bricked up at his request after numerous safeguards to neutralize the vampire were installed. During the next few months dead animals (mainly mutilated foxes and cats) continued to appear in Waterslow Park, and an escaped mental patient was found wandering the cemetery covered in his own blood.

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. In 1975 Manchester wrote a chapter about it in a book edited by Peter Underwood, a well-known popular writer on ghost lore. Three years later, in 1977, Manchester along with his two assistants, claimed to have discovered a vampiric corpse (he implies that it was the same one) in the cellar of a supposedly haunted house situated at the corner of Crescent Road and Avenue Road in Crouch End, North London.

According to Manchester, the trio had to withstand mysteriously destroyed equipment, inexplicable noises, suddenly mouldy food and being trapped inside their car by a terrifying evil force. But this time, Manchester gave no chance to the creature, driving a stake through his heart, and dragging the coffin out into the yard, where they cremated the viscous slime left after the vampires body degenerated. Since, there have been no more strange happenings in the Highgate cemetery.

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Did the Highgate Vampire ever exist ?

Unfortunately, there is little evidence and testimonies from trustworthy sources. As to proof, there are many photographs in Manchester's books and other publications, including one purporting to be the Highgate Vampire as it began to decompose. But technically aware minds are rarely convinced by photos.

The Friends of Highgate have denied that Manchester's activities were ever given any credence, much less that any action was taken as a result of his raves when asked about the wall that was built then pulled down at the entrance of the catacomb.

Moreover, the story seems too good to be true, full of melodramatic details mirroring the Dracula mythos: the sleepwalking girl; the vampire transported to England in a coffin; a coffined corpse 'gorged and stinking with the life-blood of others', with fangs and burning eyes; his own role as a Van Helsing figure.

The feud between Manchester and Farrant remains vigorous to this day; each claims to be a competent exorcist and successful vampire killer; each pours scorn on the other's alleged expertise.

Both have published books about the Highgate events, in every medium available, each denying the role and somehow contradicting the other one. They continue to investigate paranormal events (Manchester found another vampire around Robin Hood's Grave at Kirklees, Yorkshire).

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