The Real Lives of the Ghosts in my Stories: (2) The Highgate Vampire

In my short story Confessions of a Teenage Ghost-Hunter, the following passage appears...

"I used to belong to this outfit - called The Ghost Club - that used to meet in one of the Pall Mall clubs to discuss apparitions and hauntings. It was full of ghost story novellists and Madame Arcati (the Margaret Rutherford version of Blithe Spirits) look-alikes. Anyway, somewhere along the way I found myself on an expedition to look for a nest of vampires in Highgate Cemetery, in north London. This was the spooky, overgrown Western Cemetery with its crumbling family mausoleums and gothic vaults, rather than the smarter, tidier Eastern Cemetery that house's Karl Marx's grave."

"But vampires don't exist," says Georgia interrupting me mid-flow.
 
"I know that - and you know that from first-hand experience," I reply "but that doesn't stop people believing in them, acting as if they are real and going the whole Van Helsing nine yards with the pointy wooden stakes and everything."
 
"So did you find this vampire infestation?"
 
"We did, there was an underground vault that had been broken into and inside we could see one of the coffins had been prised open and its contents sowed with salt before being set ablaze. All that remained were some gobbets of melted lead, from the coffin lining, embedded with a flakes of charred bone. Oh yes, and there were about a dozen bulbs of garlic strewn around the tomb."
 
"Well that's one vampire, who never existed in the first place, that won't be returning to plague the living," says Georgia.
 
"Of course," I go on, "I was still a feckless youth back then, which is probably why I pulled a lump of the coffin-lead from the grave and took hit home as a souvenir. I used it as a paperweight."
 
Georgia winces, then pokes her fingers down her throat to simulate retching. "Where is it now?"
 
"I dumped it years ago. My first serious live-in girlfriend said it was gross, freaked her out and wanted me to get rid of it. As she was providing me with pretty much on-demand sex, as well as catering and laundry services, I certainly wasn't going to protest."
 
"Always the New Man, eh?" says Georgia.

The short story appeared in my collection This is the Quickest Way Down (Salt/Proxima Books 2011) and in the anthology A Dream of Stone and other ghost stories (Paraphilia 2011). But what’s the real story?
 
Once again this is a semi-autobiographical tale. I was a member of The Ghost Club. I did go on a vampire hunting trip to Highgate. There was a vault that had been broken open. There was a burned out coffin strewn with garlic. I did remove a piece of coffin-lead as a souvenir. (I know, I must have been going through a Goth phase.) And I did throw it away when it grossed-out my first live-in girlfriend. 
 
The year would have been 1972, just a couple of years after The Highgate Vampire story had been all over the national papers. You can find a comprehensive explanation here on Wikipedia - Highgate Vampire. However in summary during late 1969 and early 1970 there were numerous reports of supernatural activity in and around Highgate Cemetery, which in those days was in a dilapidated and vandalised state.

Two local amateur ghost-hunters/psychic investigators - David Farrant and Seán Manchester - separately studied the sightings, with Manchester subsequently claiming the graveyard was haunted by a Dracula-like vampire. After this events - fuelled by media interest - got out of hand, with the cemetery overrun on the evening of Friday 13th March 1970 by a mob of 'vampire hunters'. Several months later on 1st August (Lammas Day) the charred and headless remains of a woman's body were found near the catacombs Manchester believed housed the coffin of "a King Vampire of the Undead". (These are the words reported by the local Hampstead & Highgate Express newspaper although Manchester denies using this phrase.)
 
For reasons now no longer clear, a feud blew up between Farrant and Manchester - a rivalry and emnity that from their respective websites and the postings of their followers clearly continues to this day. Both claim they are exorcists and paranormal researchers - and both pour scorn on the other's expertise. During the 1970s they both challenged each other to meet for 'Magician's Duels' but they never did.

Manchester went on to write a number of books about the incident - including The Vampire Hunter's Handbook - and is now a bishop of the British Old Catholic Church (as distinct from the Roman Catholic Church). Farrant is also still active and has written extensively about the subject however in 1974 he was jailed for damaging memorials and interfering with the remains of the dead in Highgate Cemetery. Farrant claims he was framed and that the desecration was caused by unknown Satanists. Manchester, incidentally, also blamed Satanists for reawakening the vampire at the heart of this story.
 
And that is it. There undoubtedly were people practising Black Magic in Highgate Cemetery in the late 1960s and early 70s - and I've no doubt the desecrated coffin I encountered was their handiwork. However since then the cemetery has been extensively renovated and brought back into a more manageable state, reducing the case of the Highgate Vampire to an interesting historical footnote from 40 years ago.
 
The incident is also a classic example of what folklorists call legend tripping or ostension whereby real life comes to imitate art, in this case with the story echoing the original Bram Stoker Dracula novel. In fact, in a further twist of art imitating real life imitating art, the Hammer Horror movie Dracula AD 1972, starring Christopher Lee as the count and Peter Cushing as a descendant of Van Helsing, was inspired by the Highgate Vampire affair and set in contemporary London.