HIGHGATE VAMPIRE

Opening

In 1969 and 1970 Highgate Cemetery in north London became a public panic. Reports of a tall dark figure among the tombs, animal mutilations in the neighbourhood, opened vaults, and two rival hunters, David Farrant and Seán Manchester, who could not agree on what should be done with a body they had not got. Newspapers ran it. Crowds climbed the walls on Friday nights. Police took names. A television crew stood among the stones and made the place worse.

What can be held is damage: broken coffins, vandalism, a cemetery already in decline, a fox or a dog that looks like a cloak if you want it to. What cannot be held is a corpse that both men staked. Manchester later wrote books. Farrant went through the courts on weapons and tomb charges. The dead of Highgate stayed dead.

Timeline

1969Letters to local papers about a figure in Highgate. Swain's Lane after dark. Farrant watches. Manchester watches. They are not friends.

Early 1970Animal stories, vaults found open, coffins disturbed. 13 March 1970 a mass of people go over the walls after television talk. Police and cemetery staff spend the night pulling the living out of the dead's ground.

Later 1970Attempted hunts, a supposed exorcism, arrests. Farrant in court on indecency and later on a wider set of charges tied to tombs and weapons. Manchester builds a narrative of a Romanian noble that the cemetery ledger does not print.

The cemetery is repaired in decades of money and friends' work. The story does not get a body. It gets paperbacks.

Key figures

David Farrant is the watcher who ended in court. His nights in the cemetery are real even when the figure is not proved.

Seán Manchester is the rival priest-shaped narrative. His books are later life. His 1970 presence is not nothing.

Cemetery staff and the police own the broken vaults and the crowd-control night.

The dead in those vaults are the only people who did not file a statement.

Physical and documentary trail

The record:

One: published reports of a tall figure and of animals found dead near the grounds.

Two: opened vaults and disturbed coffins logged by staff and police.

Three: the March 1970 invasion of the cemetery by a crowd after broadcast talk.

Four: court paper on Farrant and the press file.

There is no photographed figure that a lab will call a body. There is no exhumation both hunters signed. There is no Romanian name in the burial register that matches Manchester's later noble.

Things you might not know

• It started with a letter. On 6 February 1970 David Farrant wrote to the Hampstead and Highgate Express saying he had glimpsed "a grey figure" in the cemetery on Christmas Eve 1969.
• Television filled the cemetery in two hours. ITV broadcast interviews early on the evening of 13 March 1970. Within two hours a mob of would-be hunters had climbed into the locked grounds.
• A body was found that summer. On 1 August 1970 the charred, headless remains of a woman were found near the catacomb.
• Farrant went to prison. In July 1974 he was jailed for four years and eight months for offences including damaging memorials and interfering with remains.
• A magicians' duel was announced. Rumours spread of a duel between the rivals on Parliament Hill on Friday 13 April 1973. It never took place.
• The feud lasted almost fifty years. It ended only when Farrant died in April 2019.

Competing explanations

A real unknown presence using a ruined cemetery. This is what the hunters sold. It has crowds. It has no corpse.

Foxes, decay, vandalism, and two men amplifying each other through newspapers. Fits the broken vaults and the Friday nights.

A hoax that escaped its authors. Possible once television stood in the lane.

Later life of the case

The Highgate Vampire outlived the panic in paperbacks, documentaries and the long public feud between its two hunters, which only ended with Farrant's death in 2019. The cemetery itself was rescued by the Friends of Highgate Cemetery and is now a protected site and a tourist attraction. For the older English vampire story the Highgate hunters drew on, see Croglin Grange.

Finding

Highgate Cemetery was broken into in public in 1969 and 1970, vaults were opened, a crowd went over the walls, and two rival hunters never produced a body they both agreed they had.

What still will not resolve: a photographed figure that is more than a cloak on a fox, or a ledger name that matches the noble in the later books.