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What’s the Story? The Highgate Vampire

Anyone living in Highgate with a nervous disposition would have been stocking up on garlic in the 1970s. Supernatural activity had been spotted in Highgate Cemetery and there were serious concerns that there was a vampire ope ...

Anyone living in Highgate with a nervous disposition would have been stocking up on garlic in the 1970s. Supernatural activity had been spotted in Highgate Cemetery and there were serious concerns that there was a vampire operating in the area. The media made a right meal of it.highgate vampire
The story was fuelled by two young men who became rivals over the ownership of the story. David Farrant claimed he saw ‘a grey figure’ patrolling the graves when he spent the night of December 24 1969 camped out in the cemetery. Sean Manchester went as far as to declare, according to an interview with the Ham & High Express, that this figure was a King Vampire of the Undead, a medieval nobleman who had practised black magic abroad and who had been brought to London in a coffin by loyal followers in the 18th century and finally buried on the site of Highgate Cemetery.

Egyptian Avenue - Highgate Cemetery
Egyptian Avenue – Highgate Cemetery
A heated and hysterical race between the two men to exterminate the supposed evil force was ramped up by the newspapers and even ITV joined in. Exorcisms, hunts, crosses, stakes and garlic were all part of night-time raids and in 1973 a ‘Magicians Duel’ was announced to take place on Parliament Hill between the rivals. It never happened but hostility between the men persists to this day, each claiming the other to be a charlatan, each upholding their published works to be the authentic, unexpurgated account of those heady days, or rather, nights, of vampire chasing.

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