There are two occult societies in this story and their names are almost identical. The British Occult Society and the British Psychic and Occult Society. One belonged to a man called Seán Manchester and the other to a man called David Farrant, and for half a century each insisted the other’s was a fraud, along with the other’s books, the other’s photographs, the other’s credentials, the other’s account of a night in March 1970, and the other’s right to speak about any of it.
They wrote a great deal. Manchester published his version in 1985 and revised it. Farrant answered in 1991 and kept answering, in pamphlets, in interviews, in letters to editors, and eventually in blog posts that ran for years. There were injunctions. There was a magicians’ duel arranged on Parliament Hill for Friday the thirteenth of April, 1973, which drew a crowd and did not take place. Farrant died in 2019 and the argument continued without him.
This is the strange thing about the Highgate Vampire, and the reason it is worth writing about at all. It is one of the best-documented hauntings in Britain. There is more paper on it than on almost any comparable case: newspaper coverage running for years, television footage, court records, two full-length books, and a mass of self-published material still sitting online today.
And it is, for that exact reason, one of the least knowable.
Because nearly every word of it was produced by one of two men with a direct interest in the other being wrong. The witnesses were interviewed by them. The sightings were collated by them. The photographs were taken by them. What looks at first like an unusually rich evidence base turns out, when you sort it, to be pleadings: two parties in a dispute, each submitting their case, for fifty years, to a court that was never convened.
Underneath all of it there is a real place. Highgate Cemetery is still open, still beautiful, and still burying people, around thirty or thirty-five a year. On the day you visit there will be fresh flowers on a stone somewhere.
And underneath the paper there is one thing that definitely happened, which almost nobody writing about this story bothers to mention. On the first of August 1970, a woman who had been dead for about a hundred years was taken out of her grave.
Nobody has ever established who she was.
The Place: Highgate, North London
Swain’s Lane runs uphill between the two halves of Highgate Cemetery, steep enough that cyclists use it for training and narrow enough that two cars meeting have to negotiate. On one side is the West Cemetery, behind a wall. On the other is the East. Waterlow Park is a two-minute walk away and there is a decent pub at the top. Archway station is fifteen minutes down the hill.
The cemetery opened in 1839, the third of what later got called the Magnificent Seven, the ring of large private burial grounds thrown up around London when the parish churchyards became a public health emergency. The London Cemetery Company bought seventeen acres on the slope, and the architect Stephen Geary laid it out with the surveyor James Bunstone Bunning and the landscape gardener David Ramsay. It was consecrated in May 1839. It sold well. By 1854 the company had bought another twenty acres on the far side of the lane, and the East Cemetery opened in 1860.
What Geary built is not a graveyard. It is a piece of theatre, and it was meant to be. From the chapel you pass along the Egyptian Avenue, a sunken passage cut into the hillside and lined with vaults, its entrance flanked by obelisks and lotus columns, and you come out into the Circle of Lebanon, a ring of family tombs sunk around the roots of a cedar that was already old when the cemetery was built. It came from the garden of the house that stood here before. Above and behind, the Terrace Catacombs run for eighty yards under the old terrace of Ashurst House. Julius Beer, who owned The Observer, built himself a mausoleum in 1878 modelled on one of the wonders of the ancient world, sited so that it interrupted the view from Highgate village.
Around a hundred and seventy thousand people are buried across the two sides, in something like fifty-three thousand graves. Marx is in the East, under a bronze head installed in 1956, and so are George Eliot, Douglas Adams, Malcolm McLaren, Patrick Caulfield and George Michael. Faraday is in the West, in the Sandemanian plot, and so are Christina Rossetti and Radclyffe Hall. Alexander Litvinenko was buried in the East in 2006 in a lead-lined coffin, because of what was in him.
And this is the part that matters most and gets said least. Highgate is not a museum. It is a working burial ground, with somewhere around thirty to thirty-five funerals a year, and it costs in the region of one and a half million pounds annually to keep open. The whole of it is a Grade I registered landscape and a Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation, so the ivy and the sycamore and the foxes are not neglect, they are policy. Whatever day you go, there will be fresh flowers on a stone somewhere, and there is a reasonable chance a funeral will be taking place while you are inside.
The History of the Highgate Vampire
Two things had to happen before anyone saw anything.
The first was money. The London Cemetery Company had been in trouble for decades. Burial income dropped, the maintenance did not, and by the 1960s the West Cemetery had gone effectively wild. Vaults were open. Coffins were visible. The undergrowth was head-height in places, the walls were easy to get over, and the police had a chronic and unwinnable problem with people going in at night. A cemetery that had been designed as a stage set had become one, unstaffed and unlit.
The second was Hammer. In 1969 the West Cemetery was used as a filming location for Taste the Blood of Dracula, released the following year, and the crew shot in the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon. It was not a one-off. Highgate turns up in The Body Beneath, The Abominable Dr Phibes, Tales from the Crypt, From Beyond the Grave and more besides. For a stretch of years around 1970, one of London’s real burial grounds was also the standing set for British vampire cinema, and the two audiences overlapped completely.
On Halloween night 1968, at Tottenham Park Cemetery a few miles away, someone opened a recent grave, arranged flowers from other plots into a circle, and drove an iron stake through the coffin lid into the body inside. Nobody was ever charged. The papers ran it.
Then, on 6 February 1970, the Hampstead and Highgate Express published a letter from a young man named David Farrant, who said that walking past the cemetery on Christmas Eve he had seen a grey figure, believed it was supernatural, and wondered whether anyone else had seen anything. A week later the paper printed the replies. A tall man in a hat. A spectral cyclist. A woman in white. A face at the gate. Something wading into a pond. Bells. Voices. Hardly any two of them described the same thing.
On 27 February the paper printed Seán Manchester. Manchester ran the British Occult Society, described himself as an exorcist, and had a considerably better story. What was in the cemetery, he said, was a King Vampire of the Undead, a nobleman who had practised black magic in medieval Wallachia, shipped to England in a coffin in the early eighteenth century by followers who bought him a house in the West End, buried on ground that later became Highgate, and lately woken up by modern satanists. The right remedy was a stake, a beheading and a fire, which he noted was now illegal. The headline asked whether a vampyr walked in Highgate. Manchester said afterwards that the Wallachian detail was the paper’s embellishment.
Farrant, who ran the British Psychic and Occult Society, did not accept the vampire and did not accept Manchester. He maintained the figure was a ghost and that the vampire framing was press invention. What he did not do was stand down.
On Friday 13 March 1970 both men appeared in an ITV report broadcast in the early evening. Manchester announced he would be at the cemetery that night. Within about two hours a crowd came over the walls and gates from all over London, past a police cordon that was never going to hold, carrying stakes and crosses and torches. That is not folklore. It was filmed, and it was reported, and the police record exists.
Manchester’s own account of the night, published fifteen years later, has him and companions getting in through damaged railings from an adjoining churchyard, failing to force a particular catacomb door, going down through a hole in its roof on a rope, finding empty coffins, and leaving garlic and holy water.
On 1 August 1970, near the same catacombs, the remains of a woman were found. She had been dead about a hundred years. She had been taken out of her coffin, decapitated, staked, and partly burned. Police treated it as black magic. No one was ever convicted of it. Nobody has ever established her name, and in fifty years of writing about the Highgate Vampire, almost nobody has asked.
Two weeks later Farrant was arrested in a churchyard nearby carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. That case was thrown out. Others were not. In 1973 there were rumours that he and Manchester would settle it with a magicians’ duel on Parliament Hill on Friday the thirteenth of April; a crowd turned up and nothing happened. Manchester later said he had located and destroyed the vampire, in a cellar in Crouch End, and that his assistant had failed to film it.
In June and July 1974, Farrant stood trial at the Old Bailey. He was convicted of damaging memorials and interfering with human remains at Highgate, along with other offences, and sentenced to four years and eight months. He served roughly two, and he denied the desecration charges for the rest of his life, insisting satanists had done it. You will sometimes read that he served five years. He did not; that was the sentence, not the time.
Manchester published The Highgate Vampire in 1985 and revised it in 1991. Farrant published Beyond the Highgate Vampire in 1991. Then both of them kept going, for another quarter of a century, in books, pamphlets, interviews, forum posts and duelling blogs, each documenting the other’s failings in immense detail. Farrant died in April 2019. The argument did not.
Meanwhile the actual cemetery was rescued by other people entirely. The West Cemetery closed to the public in 1975. That same year a group of local volunteers formed the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, and in 1981 the Friends took on both sides. They cleared what needed clearing, left what needed leaving, secured the boundaries, and reinterred the remains they found out of place. They have run it ever since, on ticket money and volunteer labour, and they have never shown the slightest interest in the vampire.
The Legend
Strip out the two societies and what is left is a fairly ordinary Victorian cemetery ghost list, most of it predating 1970. A tall figure in a hat. An old woman with long white hair moving among the graves, searching, in the local telling, for the graves of her murdered children. A skeleton by the gate. The cyclist. The face at the railings. Reports of that kind attach to almost every large abandoned burial ground in Britain.
The Highgate Vampire is different in kind, because it did not accumulate. It was proposed, in a newspaper, by a named man, on a datable Friday, with a full biography attached: Wallachia, black magic, an eighteenth-century coffin, a house in the West End. It arrived complete.
What it looked like depends entirely on which book you read. Manchester’s is a figure of considerable Gothic firepower, with burning eyes, and it ends its existence when he stakes it and it turns to slime. Farrant’s is a grey presence, tall and dark, more or less a conventional apparition, and it never becomes a vampire at all except in the press and in his rival’s imagination.
Around this there is a supporting cast. Foxes found dead near the cemetery, drained of blood, or at least described that way. A young woman, whose name Manchester published in his book without any obvious need to, who sleepwalked toward the cemetery and had marks on her neck, and whom Manchester diagnosed as a victim. Sightings collected by one society or the other, from correspondents contacted by one society or the other, and printed by the society that collected them.
That is the corpus. It is large, and it is detailed, and every part of it comes with a name attached to it, and the names are always the same two.
The Skeptics
The sceptical case here is not hard to make. It is almost too easy, and the interesting part is what remains standing afterwards.
Start with the setting. A large Victorian cemetery, unlit, unstaffed, structurally derelict, with open vaults and visible coffins and undergrowth over head height, at a moment when the country was saturated in vampire cinema and one of the biggest vampire films of the year had been shot inside it. People walking past that place at night saw things. Of course they did. The replies printed in the Ham and High in February 1970 are the tell: eight or nine correspondents, no two describing the same phenomenon, none of them describing a vampire. That is not a haunting. That is a public invitation to report anything odd, answered as such.
The animals do not hold up either. Foxes turn up dead in urban cemeteries constantly, from mange, from cars, from other foxes. A dead fox with a torn throat found by someone who has just read about a vampire in the local paper becomes a fox drained of blood, and it stays that way in every retelling afterwards. No veterinary examination was ever published.
The timeline is the strongest thing the sceptic has. There is no Highgate Vampire before 27 February 1970, and after 27 February 1970 there is one, and the difference is a single letter to a local newspaper from a man who ran an occult society and offered to deal with it. Every subsequent sighting was reported into a landscape where the story already existed and where two organisations were actively soliciting accounts.
Then there is the newspaper itself, which was not a neutral party. The Ham and High’s editor later acknowledged that they had played the story for laughs. The rivalry was good copy for years, and the national press picked it up when it turned surreal. Everyone involved got something out of the coverage continuing.
And then there is the fact that ought to close the case, and which comes with a complication.
At Farrant’s Old Bailey trial, a woman who had been involved with him gave evidence under oath that she had written false letters to a local paper in order to generate publicity for him. Sworn testimony, in a criminal court, that part of the correspondence underpinning the affair was fabricated to order. It is difficult to imagine a more damaging fact.
Here is the complication. The place that fact is most reliably found today, quoted at length, is Seán Manchester’s own writing. It is genuine trial evidence and it reaches the reader through the hands of the other litigant, who had every reason to reproduce it and no reason to reproduce anything that cut the other way.
That is the shape of the whole problem, and it is why I keep circling it. The single best sceptical fact about the Highgate Vampire is delivered to us by a man whose own account involves a Wallachian nobleman and a corpse dissolving into slime. You cannot use one half of a source and discard the other without a reason, and the reason has to be external, and there is very little external.
What survives independent checking is a short list. The cemetery was derelict. A film was shot in it. A grave was staked at Tottenham Park in 1968. Letters appeared in the Ham and High in February 1970. A television broadcast went out on 13 March 1970 and a crowd got into the cemetery within hours. Human remains were desecrated on or before 1 August 1970. A man was tried and convicted in 1974 and served two years. Two books were published, six years apart, contradicting each other.
Everything else, every sighting, every measurement, every photograph, every witness statement, every claimed exorcism, comes to us pre-processed by one of two interested parties. Not falsified, necessarily. Processed. Collected by them, framed by them, published by them, and only ever quoted by anyone else afterwards.
My Thoughts
There was no vampire. I do not think that needs an argument, and I am not going to pretend to hold the question open for the sake of balance.
What I find genuinely difficult about the Highgate Vampire is what it does to the idea of evidence, because this case has more of it than almost any comparable British haunting and is less knowable than any of them.
I have written about places in this series where the record is thin. Highgate is the opposite. There are two full-length books, decades of press, court transcripts, television footage, thousands of pages of self-published material still online. By volume it dwarfs Borley. And every extra page made the thing harder to see, because the pages were produced by two men who were not investigating a phenomenon so much as competing for the deed to it.
That is the part I keep coming back to. At some point around 1970 the grey figure stopped being something people saw and became something people owned. Once that happened, everything written about it changed function. A witness account was no longer testimony; it was an exhibit filed by a party. A photograph was not evidence; it was a submission. A book was a pleading. And when both parties have spent fifty years attacking the other’s exhibits and never once submitting to a body with the power to weigh them, what accumulates is not knowledge. It is a case file for a hearing that never happened.
I said at the Castle of Good Hope that documentation determines who gets to become a ghost. Highgate is the same instrument producing the opposite result. Here documentation did not preserve the ghost. It dissolved it, by attaching it so firmly to two named men that it can no longer be discussed apart from them. You cannot get at the Highgate Vampire any more. You can only get at Manchester’s and Farrant’s.
And I do not think either of them is the villain of this, exactly, which is what makes me uncomfortable rather than merely disapproving. Farrant went to prison for two years for something he denied until he died, and he may or may not have done it. Manchester believed, as far as I can tell, that he was performing a duty. Both of them wanted the thing they were describing to be real, which is a very human failure and not a criminal one. Neither of them dragged a woman out of the ground.
Somebody did, though.
On the first of August 1970 a woman who had lain in that cemetery for around a hundred years was pulled from her coffin, beheaded, staked and burned, and the reason is that a story had been going round for five months about what you are supposed to do to a vampire. She was buried at Highgate by people who loved her, at a cost they could probably not easily afford, in a cemetery specifically designed to make the promise that this was permanent. She had a name, a family, a plot number, and a burial register entry, and all of that still exists somewhere in the Friends’ records.
Fifty years of writing about the Highgate Vampire, and I cannot find a single account that goes and looks it up. She is a plot point. She turns up in the story as evidence of how far things had gone, and then the narrative moves on to the magicians’ duel, which is the funny bit.
That is the thing I would want to say to anyone about to go and buy a ticket. The Friends will show you the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon and the cedar tree, and they will not mention any of this, and they are right not to, because they spent fifty years putting the place back together after it. Somewhere on the path you will pass a stone with supermarket flowers on it, laid that morning by someone whose grief has nothing to do with any of us.
So here is what I cannot resolve. Two men spent half a century arguing about who had the better claim to a ghost, and the argument produced a library. The woman in the ground produced nothing, because she was not a claim, and nobody has ever needed her to be one.
If we know her name is written down and we have never bothered to read it, in what sense is she the one who was forgotten?
Visitor Information
Highgate Cemetery is on Swain’s Lane, London N6 6PJ, split either side of the road. Archway on the Northern line is the nearest tube, about fifteen minutes uphill; Highgate station is a similar walk from the other direction, and the C11 and the 143, 210 and 271 buses all stop nearby. There is no visitor car park and the surrounding streets are permit-controlled, so do not drive.
From March to October it opens daily from 10:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:30; from November to February it closes at 16:00, with last entry at 15:30. It is closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. A day ticket is currently £10 for an adult, while guided options are usually around £18. Access arrangements, events and prices can change, so check the official Highgate Cemetery visitor information before travelling.
Staying overnight in London? Compare places to stay in London. If you book through this link, Shin Stories may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Take the West tour if you can get on it. The volunteer guides are the reason the place makes sense: they know the families, the trades, the sculptural conventions, and why a particular vault is where it is. The tour runs a little over an hour, the ground is steep, and the paths are uneven and slick after rain, so wear shoes you do not mind ruining. There is a small café on the West side and toilets on both.
Two things to hold in mind. Access can be restricted at short notice for funerals and in bad weather, and that is not an inconvenience to be worked around; it is the cemetery doing its actual job. And photography is fine for personal use but tripods and professional kit need permission in advance, which is worth knowing given how the Friends came to be protective in the first place.
Which brings me to the only request I would make. Nobody who works there wants to talk about the vampire, and after fifty years of clearing up after it, that is entirely reasonable. Do not ask a volunteer guide to do the bit. Go for the Egyptian Avenue and the cedar and the Beer mausoleum and the extraordinary, deliberate Victorian confidence of the whole thing, and if you pass fresh flowers on a stone, leave a wide berth and say nothing.
Before You Go
The Dark Atlas is a journey through twenty of the world’s most compelling haunted places, and Highgate is number twelve. The episode that goes with this article does something the article cannot: it sets the two accounts against each other directly, in their own words, and lets you hear how far apart they are.
Everything else is here. The full history of the cemetery and its collapse, the sourced account of what happened between February 1970 and the Old Bailey in 1974, what actually survives independent checking and what does not, and the visitor guide above. All of it, and every source, at shinstories.co.uk.
Follow The Dark Atlas on Spotify. Location thirteen is in Romania, where the vampire in this story was supposed to have come from. It has nothing to do with vampires at all.
Sources
Books and Academic Works
Some book links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate Shin Stories earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
Bill Ellis, “The Highgate Cemetery Vampire Hunt: The Anglo-American Connection in Satanic Cult Lore,” Folklore 104:1–2 (1993), 13–39. The essential scholarly treatment, and the only one that takes the affair seriously as legend-formation rather than as anecdote.
Seán Manchester, The Highgate Vampire (British Occult Society, 1985; revised edition, Gothic Press, 1991).
David Farrant, Beyond the Highgate Vampire (British Psychic and Occult Society, 1991).
David Farrant, Dark Secrets: A True Story of Satanism, Black Magic and Modern Day Witchcraft (2001).
Peter Underwood (ed.), The Vampire’s Bedside Companion (Leslie Frewin, 1975), containing Manchester’s earliest published account.
Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (Yale University Press, 2018).
Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection from Count Dracula to Vampirella (Thames & Hudson, revised edition 2016).
Felix Barker and John Gay, Highgate Cemetery: Victorian Valhalla (John Murray, 1984).
Ian Dungavell, Highgate Cemetery: Saved by Its Friends (Friends of Highgate Cemetery, 2019).
James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Sutton, 2000).
Catharine Arnold, Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Simon & Schuster, 2006).
Journalism and Contemporary Reporting
Hampstead and Highgate Express, February and March 1970: Farrant’s letter of 6 February, the replies of 13 February, and “Does a Vampyr Walk in Highgate?” of 27 February. The primary documents of the entire affair.
“Vampire feud still gets the blood up,” Hampstead and Highgate Express, syndicated reprint, March 2019.
“The Decades-Long Rivalry of London’s Two Vampire Hunters,” Vice, 2019.
“Highgate Cemetery and the Tale of the Highgate Vampire,” Kentishtowner, 31 October 2012.
David Castleton, “The Highgate Vampire: Did a 1970s Nosferatu Stalk a London Cemetery?”, davidcastleton.net.
Official and Institutional Sources
Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, highgatecemetery.org: visiting, tours, burial and the cemetery’s own history.
Historic England, Highgate Cemetery, registered park and garden, Grade I.
London Borough of Camden, Highgate Cemetery: Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation.
Further Reading, with a caveat
Taste the Blood of Dracula (dir. Peter Sasdy, Hammer Films, 1970), shot in the West Cemetery the year before the panic began.
The personal websites of Seán Manchester and of the late David Farrant remain online and both are extensive. They are listed here because they are the primary sources for most of what is written about the Highgate Vampire, and they should be read exactly that way: as the case papers of two people who spent fifty years contradicting each other, and not as an account of what happened.
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