What happened
In the late 1960s the Victorian Highgate Cemetery was overgrown, decaying and regularly visited by vandals. In February 1970 David Farrant wrote to a local paper that on Christmas Eve 1969 he had glimpsed a “grey figure” beyond the gates and asked whether anyone else had seen something similar. Readers sent in descriptions of ghosts, and Sean Manchester declared it was a vampire – in the press, even a “king of the vampires.” The rivalry between the two men, each promising to deal with the spectre, fuelled the media. On Friday 13 March 1970 ITV broadcast interviews with them, and within two hours a crowd of “vampire hunters” from all over London climbed over the walls of the locked cemetery despite police efforts to stop them. In the following months desecrated tombs were found, and the story ran in the press for years.
Witnesses
David Farrant, Sean Manchester, readers of the “Hampstead and Highgate Express” and participants in the night-time hunts; the most thorough account is by folklorist Bill Ellis (1993).
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians and folklorists see the affair as a media sensation built on local ghost stories, the rivalry of two self-styled occultists and the satanic-panic mood of the 1970s. There is no evidence of any “vampire.” The real consequences were grim: damaged tombs and interfered-with remains, for which Farrant was jailed in 1974 (he insisted Satanists were responsible). According to Ellis, the story inspired the film “Dracula A.D. 1972.”
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- Bill Ellis, The Highgate Cemetery Vampire Hunt: The Anglo-American Connection in Satanic Cult Lore (Folklore, 1993)
- Vice – The Decades-Long Rivalry of London's Two Vampire Hunters
More: Wikipedia (en)