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Highgate Cemetery |
A tale to be taken with a pinch of garlic
A new collection of London legends prompts Gerald Isaaman to recall the day he unleashed an unstoppable vampire myth
London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City.
By Steve Roud. Random House
PUT Highgate Cemetery Vampire into Google and you will have enormous fun reading endless entries for the phantom that allegedly still roams the Gothic graves of the Victorian Valhalla.
And I consider myself responsible, indirectly that is, for a story that has haunted Highgate for at least the past 40 years.
I was reminded of the event while browsing through a fascinating new book of London tales of lore and legend – some mindless, others intriguing and a few possibly true, admirably put together by Croydon librarian Steve Roud.
The book includes remarkable sagas about the origin of the Mother Redcap pub in Camden Town, duels to the death in Southampton Fields, Bloomsbury, the naming of Bleeding Heart Yard, in the heart of Hatton Garden’s diamond trade, and the wicked ghosts of Islington’s Cloudesley Square and Berkeley Square, Mayfair.
What caught my attention was the one about Highgate Cemetery, which recounts the story of the Highgate Vampire and is attributed to 1970 reports in the Ham & High, where I was then the editor.
It recalled the fantastic events of a few months that year and the following one, which culminated in a TV programme inviting people to decide for themselves what was going on. That resulted in 300 young people, allegedly armed with home-made stakes and Christian crosses, storming the cemetery that night to kill the demon vampire lurking among the decaying tombs.
What nonsense it all was – and, indeed, still is: two of the major competing figures involved, David Farrant and Sean Manchester, have websites making enduring vampire claims.
It all started innocently enough when the paper received a letter about ghosts, which was published with a note beneath, inviting readers to send in their ghost experiences. And in they poured.
Up popped David Farrant with his tale of “Ghostly Walks in Highgate”, revealing three occasions when he saw, just outside the cemetery gates, a “ghostly dark figure in Swains Lane” with “hypnotic red eyes”.
Further letters followed detailing late-night supernatural events in the cemetery. These new ghosts were variously described as a tall man in a hat, a spectral cyclist, a woman in white, a face glaring through the bars of a gate, amid bells ringing and strange voices calling.
Among them too was a challenge to David Farrant from Sean Manchester, another vampire hunter, who claimed that “a King Vampire of the Undead” was to blame. It seems a medieval nobleman who practised black magic in Wallachia had been brought to England in a coffin which was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Manchester arrived at the office wearing a black cloak lined with scarlet silk and carrying a cane, as if he was about to transform himself into Dracula.
It was a real hoot, and we played the story for laughs.
Then, as Mr Roud recounts: “The rapid escalation of media coverage, from local press to national press to national television, turned a small local event into a major flap. It was the TV coverage that did the real damage, by airing reports with a spurious ‘let the viewer decide’ angle, and giving some very silly ideas a national platform.”
So it was that publicity provided the oxygen to keep alive a fictional story of a vampire terrorising Highgate, and one that exists today, long after after so-called expert scientific investigations, books galore and outrageous new explanations have, literally, gone round the world.
What added to the folklore was the fact that the upkeep of the cemetery, where Rod Stewart once dug graves, was out of control at that time, and even became a haunt for nocturnal lovers.
As the immaculately authoritative Roud writes: “It should be pointed out that, contrary to widespread assumption, vampires are not a widespread feature in British tradition, and are, in fact, relatively recent intruders, apart from apparently isolated tales recorded by William Newburgh in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum in the late 12th century.
“The word vampire is not found in English before the 1730s, and blood-sucking living-dead creatures only became well known in this country with the publication of popular Gothic novels such as Varney the Vampire (1845-47) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).”
Since 1981, the cemetery has been well cared for by the Friends of Highgate Cemetery – a charitable trust – with hardly a whisper about strange happenings.
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