From Interloper to the Devil's Own

David Farrant claims the year 1964 for his initiation into witchcraft, but when asked about this matter in interviews given over previous decades he told newspaper reporters that he had been initiated by his spiritualist mother when a minor. The age of thirteen was sometimes given. This age wavered in the telling to different journalists, but any “initiation into witchcraft” was obliged to remain prior to 1959 (when he would have been thirteen) because this is the year his mother died. Farrant nowadays claims he was initiated by a someone called “Helen,” but fails to confirm the identity of “Helen.” Such conjecture becomes academic for those who are familiar with his story, as they would be more than aware that his “wicca” was phoney all along. In 1982 he eschewed wicca, explaining he had outgrown witchcraft. In truth, witches, pagans and sundry occultists of every imaginable variety had grown thoroughly sick and tired of having Farrant associate his infamous name as a  publicity-seeking charlatan with them; especially as he was more than willing to threaten folk with black magic.

Farrant married his pregnant wife, Mary, in a Roman Catholic Church in August 1967 where a nuptial Mass took place. She gave birth to a son, Jamie, three months later. Albeit a strange choice for a wiccan, when Mary appeared as a defence witness during his Old Bailey trials in June 1974, she affirmed that she had no knowledge of his interest in witchcraft. His Highgate Cemetery antics were described by his wife under oath as being nothing more than a bit of a laugh and a joke. In the early months of 1970, when he began his attention-seeking shenanigans, he was often photographed in attitudes of prayer before Christian crosses. He posed for photographs wearing crucifixes, rosaries and holding Holy Water. He was still doing so in August 1970, six years after he was supposed to have been initiated according to the latest date offered by him of 1964. A photograph taken in 1970 shows him holding a wooden stake in one hand, a bottle of Holy Water in the other and wearing a cross around his neck. It is reproduced on page 54 of The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook. These are strange accoutrements for a self-proclaimed pagan witch to brandish. Yet there is no question or doubt that from autumn 1970 onward Farrant turned to something diabolical to hold the media’s interest. Dr J Gordon Melton records: “In the summer of 1970, David Farrant, another amateur vampire hunter, entered the field. He claimed to have seen the vampire and went hunting for it with a stake and crucifix — but was arrested. He later became a convert to a form of Satanism.” (The Vampire Book: Encyclopedia of the Undead by J Gordon Melton, Gail Research, 1994, page 298).

The Highgate phenomenon was nevertheless a story about to snowball. This had the unfortunate effect of dragging me into the forefront of something I had decided hitherto to keep a lid on. I felt that it was incumbent upon me to make some sort of statement in view of all the press speculation. Thus, on 27 February 1970, following batches of readers’ letters, I appeared on the front page of the Hampstead & Highgate Express to summarise the view of the British Occult Society. It did not make easy reading for a lot of people. Two weeks later, I featured on Thames Television’s Today programme for the same purpose.

Farrant also made an appearance on the same transmission, along with several youngsters who allegedly witnessed a vampiric spectre at Highgate Cemetery. Sandra Harris, interviewing Farrant, asked: “Did you get any feelings from it? Did you feel that it was evil?” He replied: “Yes, I did feel that it was evil because the last time I actually saw its face and it looked like it had been dead for a long time.” Sandra Harris asked: “What do you mean by that?” Farrant answered: “Well, I mean it certainly wasn’t human.” This was his total contribution to the Today report. He was captioned “David Farrant” - his real name - and he made no claim to any association with the British Occult Society. Needless to say, he was not a member, associate or participant in the activities of the British Occult Society, which existed purely for the purpose of investigating the occult and supernatural phenomena. It did not countenance nor engage in witchcraft, magical ceremonies and occult rituals. 

The following year found Farrant fraudulently claiming membership. The claim was immediately refuted in the media by the organisation. Farrant next absurdly claimed to be both “president and founder.” Disclaimers followed press reports whenever he was so described, invariably with the editor adding the prefix “self-styled.” In 1983, weary of being exposed in the press as an interloping charlatan who had hijacked the name of an extant organisation, along with the title of its current president, Farrant altered the name of his non-existent “society” to the “British Psychic and Occult Society.” Nobody was fooled. He had spoken in the media about his “thousands of followers” (Hornsey Journal, 23 November 1979), and even went so far as to proffer the notion of a number as high as twenty thousand members (Finchley Press, 22 February 1980). In the same report the following appeared: “On Monday, Seán Manchester, president of the British Occult Society, disclaimed any connection between Mr Farrant and the society. Questioning Mr Farrant’s claim to have 20,000 ‘followers,’ … Mr Manchester believes that Mr Farrant’s activities - including the libel action [which Farrant lost] - have been publicity-seeking.”

This had also been my assessment in early 1970 when I first made his acquaintance while interviewing witnesses to the widely reported Highgate phenomenon. It was the conclusion of almost everyone. The eminent researcher Peter Underwood would comment in a book published five years after Farrant had launched himself in the media: “Publicity of a dubious kind has surrounded the activities of a person or persons named Farrant and his - or their - association with Highgate Cemetery. … Mr Allan Farrant was caught climbing over the wall of Highgate Cemetery carrying a wooden cross and a sharpened piece of wood. … According to the Daily Mail Allan Farrant saw ‘an apparition’ eight feet tall in the cemetery that ‘just floated along the ground’ when he was on watch one morning waiting ‘for the vampire to rise.’ He believed that there had been a vampire in Highgate Cemetery for about ten years. … Less than a month later a Mr David Farrant was guiding Barry Simmons of the London Evening News on a night-tour of Highgate Cemetery armed with a cross and wooden stake which he carried under his arm in a paper carrier bag. In fact the whole project seems to have been a somewhat dismal and depressing effect - even the cross, created from two pieces of wood, was tied together with a shoelace.” (The Vampire’s Bedside Companion written and edited by Peter Underwood, Leslie Frewin, 1975, pages 77-79).

In a home-produced, stapled pamphlet, somewhat unimaginatively titled Beyond the Highgate Vampire, self-published a quarter of a century later, Farrant strongly denied his vampire hunting antics with a cross and stake. He merely wanted to measure out a circle, he rather unconvincingly claimed, with the wooden stake and a piece of string.

 

Even so, pictures of Farrant brandishing his “vampire hunting” items had been appearing in the British press since 1970. A nine inch tall photograph of him, holding a cross in one hand and a stake in the other, appeared on the front page of the Hornsey Journal, 28 June 1974, beneath a banner headline stating: “The Graveyard Ghoul Awaits His Fate.” The picture’s caption read: “Farrant on a ‘vampire hunt’ in Highgate Cemetery.” The report began: “Wicked witch David Farrant, tall, pale and dressed all in black, saw his weird world crumble about him this week. Farrant, aged 28, the ghoulish, self-styled High Priest of the British Occult Society [sic], was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of damaging a memorial to the dead at Highgate Cemetery and interfering with buried remains. … Mr Richard du Cann prosecuting, accused Farrant of ‘terrible’ crimes and at one stage described him as a ‘wicked witch.’ … One of the witnesses for the prosecution was Journal reporter Roger Simpson. Farrant had given him a photograph of a corpse in a partly-opened coffin. Because of the nature of the picture, the paper decided not to publish it, and it was handed to the police.” However, the son of the investigating policeman in this case recklessly showed his father’s confidential file to all and sundry at the Prince of Wales, a Highgate pub.

In court Mary Farrant, subpoenaed by her husband, recoiled in horror and almost fainted when shown images of open coffins - later to become Black Museum exhibits - and, along with her husband, implied that Farrant's erstwhile landlord had something to do with it, according to a court report in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 21 June 1974. It is true that Anthony had taken some of the photographs showing Farrant wielding a stake and holding a cross in Highgate Cemetery, plus the picture of him peering at a damaged coffin (wearing Anthony’s jacket, as he did not possess a decent one of his own), but there is no evidence to support the claim that photographs, like the Black Museum exhibits, originated with Anthony who had allowed Farrant to sleep in his coal cellar from August 1969, when Farrant was evicted from his Archway Road flat, to August 1970 when he was arrested and held on remand at Brixton Prison.

The public relations damage inflicted on the British Occult Society by Farrant’s phoney association was due to his obsessive manufacturing of news stories with claims of “occult powers” and “witchcraft ceremonies.” In countless published interviews given by him to the press he boasted of sacrificing cats, invariably adding that they were “stray cats” and that they were “anaesthetised” before having their throats slit. “We rarely sacrifice animals in rituals but this sacrifice was essential to our belief as we derive power from blood. The power we gain is used for good as against evil,” he told Roger Simpson in an article for the Hornsey Journal, 31 August 1973, adding: “Hundreds’ of years ago a naked virgin would have been sacrificed but obviously we couldn’t do this now so we had to have an animal for the important ritual.”

A front page headline story in the Hornsey Journal, 28 September 1973, revealed: “Farrant, as the Journal reported, admitted slitting a ‘stray’ cat’s throat at the height of a bizarre witchcraft ritual … in Highgate Woods recently.” There are innumerable quotes where Farrant threatens and describes his animal sacrifices, eg headline of the Hornsey Journal, 7 September 1973: “I will sacrifice cat at Hallowe’en: Farrant,” and the same newspaper, 16 November 1979: “Ritual sex act and cat sacrifice,” followed by a report opening with the words: “Self-styled ‘high priest’ David Farrant told a High Court jury this week of the night he performed a ritual sex act in an attempt to summon up a vampire in Highgate Cemetery. He also admitted that he had taken part in the ‘sacrifice’ of a stray cat in Highgate Wood.” In a squalid and revealing report, where Sue Kentish interviewed him for the News of the World, 23 September 1973, he is quoted as saying: “I did not enjoy having to kill the cat, but for one particular part of the ritual it was necessary. The sacrifice of a living creature represents the ultimate act in invoking a deity. I do not see animal sacrifice as drastic as people have made it out to be. … And, at least, I anaesthetised the cat before I had to kill it.”

While serving a four years eight months prison sentence, Farrant wrote an article for New Witchcraft magazine (#4), in which he states: “In magic, blood is symbolic of the ‘life force’ or ‘spiritual energy’ which permeates the body and in this context is used in many advanced magical ceremonies. It would not be sacrilegious to compare this to the use of wine as symbolic of blood in the Catholic Communion. Accordingly, at approximately 11.45pm, I drew blood.” His lengthy description of summoning a “satanic force” is nothing short of an open admission to his engagement in unabashed diabolism: “We then lay in the Pentagram and began love-making, all the time visualizing the Satanic Force so that it could - temporarily - take possession of our bodies.” The insertion “temporarily” unconvincingly manifested years after the event.

In my first complete account of the Highgate case, I tendered the following opinion: “I have found not a single shred of evidence to suggest that the least of these things are true.” I became less confident in that view, and accordingly expurgated it from the 1991 edition of The Highgate Vampire. The simple fact of the matter is that I do not know how far he is capable of going, or has gone. He had broken the law before I ever met him, using two British passports - the phoney one being in the name of “Allan Aden Ellson.” To own this passport meant that he had acquired Crown property through deception by falsifying information on the application form. Had it been known at the time by the authorities, he would have been arrested and charged with an offence. He was causing a lot of personal inconvenience and was clearly a depraved individual. But how really diabolical was he?

Shortly before and following his imprisonment in 1974, I attempted to gain Farrant’s confidence in order to discover the truth about his alleged “occult” activities. The conclusions I arrived at are published in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook, a work that covers this area comprehensively: “My personal view is that he has become possessed by demonic influences. His behaviour, by any standard, is extremely obsessive.” His self-styled organisation, rarely consisting of more than one or two members, I deduce “did not have the same appeal [as other witchcraft groups], owing to the ‘high priest’s’ total lack of occult knowledge and contradictory statements.”

From the very beginning - when most of his acquaintances knew him as “Allan” (due to him idolising the film actor Alan Ladd) - to the final moment I spoke to him (a last brief meeting, after a gap of five years, which took place at Highgate Wood at dusk on 24 January 1987, as recorded in From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, pages 73-74), Farrant, in the absence of any corroborating witness, would ridicule witches, occultists and also members of all mainstream religious faith. He was particularly hostile toward Christianity. For him witchcraft and the occult was only a means to an end. The impression I gained was that he actually believed in none of it. He saw those who took the occult and certainly the paranormal seriously as being worthy of contempt. His raison d’être was and remains an agenda where his manufactured publicity masks insecurities that probably stem from childhood. However, in dabbling in these dangerous areas, he opened himself to the very thing he scorns. Thus he became a tool of the dark forces he amateurishly released. Moreover, he became the Devil’s Fool.

“I don’t believe in the existence of the Devil,” (quoted when he was interviewed on the Michael Cole Show, UK Living, 20 December 1998) he would protest in later years. But the Devil, needless to say, did not lose sight of this useful pawn in an unrelenting struggle to harm me; a struggle that continues to this day.