Us: We live in credulous times where people will believe any old disinformation they read on Twitter.
People on this day in 1970: Hold our beer, we’re breaking into Highgate Cemetery to stake a vampire.
Yes, it’s the anniversary of what Bill Ellis at Pennsylvania State University described in the journal Folklore as “London’s most extended satanism flap”. (That image above is from Ian Visits.)
In the late 60s and early 70s, Highgate Cemetery was very run-down, and people could get in easily — so they did, especially at night, for a spot of sex, drugs and/or vandalism.
It was also a time when Hammer films were at their height. The Devil Rides Out was released in 1968, and by 1970 things were getting a bit saucy, so maybe that was why tales of orgiastic bloodlust became somehow credible.
Plus, large parts of London in the 1970s looked like this
…so an undead nobleman from Wallachia wandering about the place would have brought some much-needed glamour.
Because that’s what was happening, apparently, according to one Sean Manchester, interviewed by the Hampstead & Highgate Express in February 1970 about the ‘wampyr’. There had been some strange sightings, and Sean had answers…
Some teenagers claimed to have seen the dead climbing out of their graves — and, obviously, they weren’t just making shit up for a laugh. No, graves were being vandalised not by eejits, but by satanists “in an attempt … to resurrect the King Vampire”.
There was another man involved, too. David Farrant had written to the same paper a couple of weeks earlier to say:
Farrant was a member of the British Occult Society, of which Manchester was president — although at some point Farrant became president of The British Psychic and Occult Society.
(There’s a very entertaining account of their lifelong feud, and ‘Bishop’ Sean Manchester’s general oddness, in 2020 Vice article, The Decades-Long Rivalry of London’s Two Vampire Hunters.)
Anyway, on the night of Friday 13 (uh-oh) March 1970, ITV decided this was an auspicious date to follow up the drivel the local paper had been printing, because it would, after all, fill a bit of airtime. So, both men (before they fell out) were interviewed on telly in front of the cemetery gates bibbling on about their vampire. Two hours later
Swains Lane was packed with a crowd of would-be vampire-hunters
They had, presumably, gathered to see if Manchester really would “exorcise the vampire in the traditional and approved manner”:
Manchester later claimed to have been there for the break-in, but the more you read about him, the more you wonder if he was a reliable witness, even to his own life. About 100 people did get in, no-one knows if Farrant and Manchester were still there, and the mob was driven out by police.
Farrant was caught trying to break into a church crypt “armed with a stake and hammer on the night of a full moon” later in the year, but vampire hunting fizzled out.
If there is a moral to this tale — which, frankly, strikes me as unlikely — it is that humans are idiots. Crucially, however, this is not new.
