The North London cemetery of Highgate is is home to several famous interred people, including Karl M

The North London cemetery of Highgate is is home to several famous interred people, including Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, and Bob Hoskins, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was supposedly host to another individual, the alleged Highgate Vampire.Now, the rumours began in various young people claiming to have seen a variety of supernatural events around the (at the time) rather run down cemetery, including two girls saying they saw the dead rise from their tombs, another claiming to have been visited by a strange presence in the night, and others saying that a tall, red-eyed man could be seen wandering around the grounds. Things took an unfortunate turn in early 1970, however, when some jerk began killing animals, such as foxes, in a manner that some deemed to be ritualistic.This led to stories in the local newspapers quickly gathering a lot of national attention, eventually leading to two paranormal investigators arriving at the scene, and with the two men immediately forming a lasting rivalry with each other which lasted for years afterwards.On the one hand, there was self-proclaimed magician David Farrant, who was president of the Psychic and Occult Society, was keen to find a supernatural explanation for the animal deaths and paranormal stuff… And on the other, was Sean Manchester, a self-proclaimed vampire hunter, exorcist and bishop of the mysterious “Old Catholic Church”.It’s at this point that Farrant and Manchester seemingly began trying to one-up one another, with Manchester seemingly responding to Farrant’s claims to have seen a large grey ghost in the graveyard with a proclamation of his own, that the sightings and deaths were due to a “king vampire“ being present in the graveyard. And not just any king vampire, but a medieval sorcerer who was buried in the cemetery after moving to England from Wallachia, the home of Dracula himself, who obviously had been raised from the dead by a modern Satanist and was now stalking the living!The public, already on edge due to the supposed ghost sightings and animal “sacrifices“, promptly flipped out after a television interview involving Manchester, Farrant and other “witnesses“ claimed that multiple supernatural entities resided in the graveyard. This led to mobs of vampire hunters swarming Highgate Cemetery looking for monsters to kill, only not finding any, obviously.This did not, however, stop people from decapitating, burning and staking the corpse of a woman buried in the cemetery several months later.Both Farrant and Manchester claimed to have either intended to kill vampires in the cemetery, with Farrant getting arrested after being discovered with a crucifix and stake in the cemetery grounds (the case was dismissed before going to court), while Manchester claimed that he and broken into the tomb of a vampire with the help of a psychic assistant and was GOING to stake it, but was dissuaded by his companion (he put up incense instead).As public interest in the case began to decease, so did the amount of supernatural sightings. This did not, however, stop Manchester from challenging Farrant to a magicians duel in 1973 (which disappointingly didn’t go ahead), while Farrant was himself jailed for two years in 1974 for supposedly vandalising memorials and interfering with dead remains (he insisted he was framed by Satanists).Manchester and Farrant would trade public insults and jabs for years afterwards, up until Farrant’s death in 2019, as the two man attempted to spin the narrative of what exactly was going on in Highgate Cemetery for their own purposes for literally decades. -- source link

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