Faith, Blood and Bull

My faith early on offered a very valuable and necessary repository at a time when I still had a lot to learn about vampirism, demonology and indeed exorcism. My knowledge grew as I became trained and seasoned with the happenings at Highgate that were manifesting toward the end of that decade; hastened by my being flung into the deep end while investigating the unearthly experiences of Elżbieta Wojdyla and Barbara Moriaty, two convent girls who had first reported spectral figures in early 1967. Plus, of course, Lusia and innumerable others who were subjected to related eerie happenings at the turn of the 1970s.  

Interviewing Elżbieta during the summer of 1969 brought me into contact with her boyfriend - Keith Maclean. He would become an integral part of the Highgate case at its inception. This meeting and Elżbieta's recorded testimony was pivotal in my involvement in the case.

A massive vampire hunt at Highgate Cemetery on the night of 13 March 1970, following reports in local and national newspapers, plus my television appearance at 6.00pm, led to a huge crowd of concerned people gathering outside the cemetery gates. I had made an appeal on the Today programme requesting the public not to get involved, lest they put in jeopardy the investigation already in progress. Not everyone heeded my words. Over the following months a variety of freelance vampire hunters descended on the graveyard only to be frightened off by its eerie atmosphere and what they believed might have been the vampire. Those seeking thrills served only to endanger all concerned and frustrate the investigation. Simon Wiles and John White armed themselves with a crucifix and a sharpened stake, and set off to see if they could locate the vampire’s tomb. Like others who followed their example, Wiles and White were soon arrested by police patrolling the cemetery who found a rucksack containing an eight inch long wooden stake sharpened to a fine point. White later explained at Clerkenwell Court: “Legend has it that if one meets a vampire, one drives a stake through its heart.” He was wearing a crucifix round his neck and Wiles had one in his pocket. They were eventually discharged. Thus began an unwelcome trend.

One man, fortuitously named, was a 25-year-old history teacher from Billericay called Alan Blood. He descended on Highgate after seeing the Today report, but at least had the good sense not to enter the by now infamous graveyard. Though described by the Evening News, 14 March 1970, as a “vampire expert,” Blood, in a later interview given to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 20 March 1970, stated that he was no such thing. “I have taken an interest in the black arts since boyhood, but I’m by no means an expert on vampires,” he said. Following a drink in the Prince of Wales, Blood joined the crowds outside the cemetery’s north gate. But he did not enter.

By 8.00pm on the night of 13 March 1970 scenes of utter pandemonium were taking place as people gathered in large numbers along the steep lane running alongside Highgate Cemetery. Police leave was cancelled to control those arriving, but it was an almost impossible task. By 10.00pm an assortment of independent amateur vampire hunters had joined the onlookers. Alan Blood was amongst the crowd. Matthew Bunson, as recorded in his The Vampire Encyclopedia (1993), felt Blood was a significant player in this publicised case. Bunson, an American who had no contact with Blood, or indeed anyone else contemporaneous to events at Highgate, relied on another American - Jeanne Keyes Youngson of the New York Count Dracula Fan Club (later known as Vampire Empire) - who, in turn, was entirely dependant on David Farrant and those influenced by him.

Youngson’s influence on Bunson initiated the error in his and thereby subsequent accounts. The primary source, however, is the London Evening News, 14 March 1970, front page report “Mr Blood Hunts Cemetery Vampire.” The brief quotes attributed to Blood in this sensationalist report are rebutted by Blood himself in the Hampstead & Highgate Express that was published later. An authentic account of Alan Blood’s part in the affair is given in The Highgate Vampire (pages 77-79) from which the following is revealed: “By 10.00pm the hundreds of onlookers were to include several freelance vampire hunters, including a history teacher, Alan Blood, who had journeyed from Billericay to seek out the undead being.” He had seen the report on television some hours earlier and immediately set off for Highgate. On his arrival in Highgate Village, he entered the Prince of Wales pub on the High Street for a drink, whereupon he recognised an unkempt individual who had been one of several alleged witnesses interviewed by Sandra Harris. By this time I was already inside the cemetery with my research team. Blood thereby was obliged to settle for Farrant quaffing pints of ale in the Prince of Wales pub. He listened to claims of “a seven foot tall vampire that hovered by the cemetery gate,” and wanted to be shown exactly where this occurred. Oddly enough, Farrant declined and continued to drink his ale, remaining in the pub until it was time to walk home in the opposite direction to the cemetery.

Blood left the pub to join the steadily growing crowd of several hundred people in Swains Lane. It was while there, wearing a Russian-style hat, that Blood was noticed by an Evening News photographer and a reporter. They spoke to him, and also to 27-year-old Hampstead resident Anthony Robinson who had ventured to the north gate “after hearing of the torchlight hunt.” Robinson is alleged to have told the reporter: “I walked past the place and heard a high-pitched noise, then I saw something grey moving slowly across the road. It terrified me. First time I couldn’t make it out, it looked eerie. I’ve never believed in anything like this, but now I’m sure there is something evil lurking in Highgate.” Yet it was Blood, who saw and did nothing, whose photograph was to appear on the front page of next day’s Evening News. He is introduced at the head of the report as “a vampire expert named Mr Blood who journeyed forty miles to investigate the legend of an ‘undead Satan-like being’ said to lurk in the area.” Alan Blood, of course, claimed nothing of the sort, and would confirm in a more soberly conducted interview that he was “by no means an expert.”

None of which prevented American Matthew Bunson publishing some twenty-three years later: “The focus of the media attention turned to David Farrant and Allan [sic] Blood, vampire experts who led the search. Both were convinced that a vampire was sleeping in one of the vaults and were determined to find it and kill it. While blamed for the desecration of tombs and arrested for trespass, Farrant was acquitted on the grounds that the cemetery was open to the public. As is typical of such incidents, stories based on rumour and on unconfirmed sightings soon spread, and the tabloids and newspapers ran exploitative reports. No vampire was ever publicly discovered.”(The Vampire Encyclopedia by Matthew Bunson, Thames and Hudson, 1993, page 121). 

Apart from the reference to press exploitation, not a single statement in Bunson’s entry for “The Highgate Vampire” is accurate. The focus of the media did not turn to David Farrant and Alan Blood. The latter, after the night of 13 March 1970, completely disappeared off the scene. Farrant was certainly to become infamous for publicity-seeking in the wake of the vampire panics, by which time he had repudiated the “vampire theory,” as he would come to describe it. Yet, save for his letter to a newspaper editor in February 1970, he was not a “focus” with regard to the investigation, which promptly dismissed his allegations of sightings as unsafe and his behaviour unwise. Blood never stated that he was “determined to find and kill” the vampire. Farrant, of course, did, but later revoked this ambition. Nor was Farrant arrested for “trespass” - he was, in fact, arrested for being in an enclosed area for an unlawful purpose. And he was not merely “blamed for the desecration of tombs” in Highgate Cemetery. Four years later he was charged and found guilty of malicious damage and descration to tombs following the longest so-called “witchcraft” trial in two hundred years at the Old Bailey. He was to receive a prison sentence of almost five years. 

Sightings of what became known as the Highgate Vampire were confirmed, documented, and recorded.

I would add in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook (pages 66-67): “Interestingly, Jeanne Youngson’s name crops up in Bunson’s acknowledgements as having assisted with this book [The Vampire Encyclopedia]. Why does that come as no surprise? Peter Hough follows in Bunson’s errant footsteps in Supernatural Britain (1995) and repeats the misinformation that David Farrant ‘teamed up’ with Alan Blood (something neither ever claimed) whilst ignoring the actual investigation. When contacted through their respective publishers, neither deigned to reply. Their publishers also refused to answer any correspondence on the matter.” This refusal to address factual inaccuracy in their books is peculiar to many publishers in the USA.

Bunson and Hough were followed by Liverpool disc jockey and freelance journalist Tom Slemen whose paperback Strange But True (1998) erroneously claimed that “Alan Blood organized a mass vampire hunt that would take place on Friday 13 March, 1970. Mr Blood was interviewed on television. … The schoolteacher’s plan was to wait until dawn, when the first rays of the rising sun would force the vampire to return to his subterranean den in the catacombs, then he would kill the Satanic creature in the time-honoured tradition; by driving a wooden stake through its heart. … In an orgy of desecration [the crowd] had exhumed the remains of a woman from a tomb, stolen lead from coffins, and defaced sepulchres with mindless graffiti.” (Strange But True by Tom Slemen, Paragon Books, 1998).

None of which is true. Blood did not “organize a mass vampire hunt.” Blood organised nothing at all. He was just an interested onlooker. It was not the “schoolteacher’s plan to wait until dawn.” This was the supposed plan of Farrant who was even present, but did get arrested for supposedly carrying out five months later. There was no “orgy of desecration” etc. No damage whatsoever occurred on the night of 13 March 1970. What Slemen is almost certainly alluding to is an entirely different incident that took place many months later, as recorded on the front page of the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 7 August 1970, where the discovery of the headless body of a female and signs of a satanic ceremony were made by two fifteen-year-old schoolgirls, as they walked through the graveyard on a sunny August afternoon. Police viewed this desecration to be the work of diabolists and investigated it as such. Weeks later, Farrant was arrested prowling around the graveyard at night.

These misleading reports by Bunson, Hough and Slemen contaminated some other accounts, needless to say, but few would be more inaccurate than Leonard R N Ashley’s in The Complete Book of Vampires (1998). This occultist and colleague of Jeanne Youngson stated: “A typical, if overblown, time was around 1970, when David Farrant got in trouble charged with disturbing the neighbours if not the corpses and trespassing.” Referring to me as “the now late Seán Manchester,” Ashley falsely describes my presence in the cemetery as being “attended by as many press and television reporters as he could muster for the event.” He added: “I never met Seán Manchester.” (The Complete Book of Vampires by Leonard R N Ashley, Souvenir Press, 1998, pages 80-81). On the same page, Ashley sings the praises of Youngson.

For the record, neither Bunson, Hough, Youngson, nor Slemen met me. None of these people communicated with me in any form, not even through a medium, which, if Leonard R N Ashley is to be believed, was the only way available. No newspaper or television reporter attended anything I conducted at Highgate Cemetery on that or any other night. Moreover, my reluctance to deal with the media is precisely what led the more unscrupulous among them resorting to David Farrant. 

The tomb of the vampire was located in August 1970, as revealed in the 24 Hours programme - a  BBC television film documentary, transmitted on 15 October 1970 - and later confirmed in Peter Underwood's anthology The Vampire's Bedside Companion (1975) and Exorcism! (1990), plus J Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book: Encyclopedia of the Undead (1994), and my own The Highgate Vampire (1985, 1991). Three years and three months following the BBC documentary, the primary source was effectively exorcised with the help of my research team. Several 35mm photographs, some of which are reproduced in The Highgate Vampire book, were taken of the corporeal form in its final moments of dissolution. These images have been examined, transmitted and discussed on various television programmes in the UK in the 1990s.