Whatever haunted North London’s Highgate Cemetery in 1970 was real enough to spark public hysteria — and a bitter lifelong feud between two real-life vampire hunters.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What sparked the London Vampire Panic?
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The mob is growing larger by the minute. More dangerous, too. You stand your ground, but secretly you're terrified. You and your men are woefully outnumbered by this crowd of lunatics. Suddenly, as though reading your mind, the mob surges forward. A wild-eyed man wielding a wooden stake is heading straight for you.
You tackle him, pinning him to the ground with your baton, but you can't stop the rest of them. Dozens of people are already swarming past you, scaling the high fence surrounding the graveyard. This is madness, you tell yourself. These people have been whipped into a frenzy over something that can't possibly be true. Surely they don't believe the rumors, or do they?
You look into the eyes of the man under your baton, and there you find your answer. He absolutely believes in. All of these people do, with every fiber of their being. And in that moment, a horrifying thought occurs to you, taking root in your mind. What if these people aren't crazy at all? What if they're right? What if there actually is a vampire in Highgate Cemetery?
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Chapter 2: Who is David Ferrant and what does he believe?
It's the night of December 21st, 1969. In North London, the historic Highgate Cemetery sits dark and completely silent. It'll be months before hysteria grips the city as the public becomes aware of what's really happening here. So tonight, there's no mob. In fact, there's only one living soul on the premises. A young man named David Ferrant.
Walking among the century-old headstones and gothic mausoleums, Ferrant struggles to keep warm. His teeth begin to chatter. He zips his heavy coat all the way up to his chin. But Ferrant has no plans to leave the cemetery before dawn. Not until he catches sight of the apparition. Ferrant is the owner of a tobacco shop, but his true passion lies in the paranormal.
A self-described Wiccan priest, Ferrant founded the British Psychological and Occult Society two years prior. The Society hasn't had much to investigate since its formation. Well, until tonight. In recent weeks, Ferrant's Society has received an inexplicable surge in attention.
Multiple people from the community have come out of the woodwork with stories about strange happenings in and around Highgate Cemetery. The first to approach Ferent is a middle-aged accountant, a well-respected professional in the community, and certainly not the type to believe in mystical nonsense.
He explains to Ferent that on his way home late one evening, he had cut through the graveyard and gotten lost. As he made his way through the cemetery's winding overgrown pathways, he heard a clanging bell. The accountant followed the noise, hoping it would lead him to a recognizable landmark.
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Chapter 3: What sightings led to increased attention at Highgate Cemetery?
Yet instead, he felt a chill descend, and suddenly floating before him was a seven-foot-tall figure, shrouded in darkness. The accountant tried to move, but discovered that he couldn't. He was rooted to the spot. A moment later, the figure disappeared into the night. The accountant gradually recovered his mobility, but he was left feeling drained, sapped of his energy.
Ferentz, intrigued by the accountant's claim, but doesn't see the need to take action. Well, that is, until a second person comes to him, and reports a strikingly similar encounter. This time, the witness is an elderly woman. She tells Ferentz how she'd been out walking her dog, when she too felt the temperature drop.
Next thing she knew, a floating shape was drifting towards her through the mist. The woman describes the creature as tall, with glowing eyes. These two independent accounts are too similar for Farron to ignore, and so he decides to spend a night in the cemetery and see for himself. Tonight is that night.
As Farron walks down Swain's Lane, the street separating the two main plots of the cemetery, he's doubtful that he'll actually see anything. By nature, he's a skeptical person and believes the two witnesses probably just saw someone in a costume or perhaps let their imaginations get away from them. Hours pass. Farron sneaks about, investigating the farthest reaches of the expansive graveyard.
But as he looks, he sees nothing out of the ordinary. Then, around midnight, he suddenly feels the already frigid air grow even colder. A sensation he'll later describe as walking into a refrigerator. His eyes dart around frantically, scanning the darkness. At last, his gaze lands on the creature. It isn't similar to how the accountant and old woman described it. It's exactly as they described it.
The gray shape looms seven feet tall and floats in midair. Its eyes are two points of hellish red light, but the rest of its face is indistinct. Just as the witnesses foretold, Farron feels rooted to the spot, frozen in place. Realizing that he's under a psychic attack, Farron murmurs a Kabbalistic prayer, hoping it'll ward off evil.
And immediately after, the figure promptly vanishes into the night. Now, left standing alone again in the cemetery, slowly thawing out of his frozen state, Theron knows the time for skepticism is over. He has seen enough. The stories are true, and the public needs to know what's happening here. Weeks later, early February.
It's a slow news day at the offices of the Hampstead and Highgate Express, a North London weekly newspaper known as the Ham and High. The dreary clack of typewriter keys fills the air as staff members prepare the next issue for publication. But then the incoming mail arrives. An editor comes across a letter that's too outrageous not to share with his colleagues.
It's from a local man claiming to have seen an apparition in Highgate Cemetery. The staff figures that it must be a prank, but they decide to publish it anyway. The letter gave them a good laugh after all, so why not give their readers something to chuckle about as well? What's really the harm in that? And so, on February 6th, 1970, David Ferrant's letter appears in the Ham and High.
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Chapter 4: What are the claims made by Sean Manchester?
Highgate Cemetery is closed in the evenings, but that doesn't stop roughly 100 people from showing up with stakes, crucifixes, and beer cans, eager to take part in the hunt that night. The locked gates do little to deter them. They surge over the walls, climbing the fences, and rush inside to hunt the creature.
Police cars roll up, and dozens of constables charge in, trying to keep the public at bay. At least 40 officers are there, blowing on their whistles and shouting at the top of their lungs. They restrain some of the public, but there are simply too many to be held back. Naturally, Shawn Manchester is there, soaking up the attention.
With a glint in his eye, he watches the chaos unfold from the sidelines. Finally, once the police have their hands completely full, he makes his move. With a nod to a handful of his disciples nearby, their group scales a fence and slips off into a deserted part of the cemetery, the western side, the part which sleepwalkers like Jacqueline had found alluring.
Unlike the mob, Manchester knows precisely where he'll find the vampire. He quickly refers to a photo in his pocket. This picture was given to him by a young woman named Louisa, who claimed to have a similar supernatural experience to Jacqueline's. In Louisa's case, she was drawn to a specific sepulcher on the western edge of the cemetery.
The photograph in Manchester's pocket identifies the exact tomb that beckoned to her. When Manchester locates the sepulcher, he finds it shunt and locked, but that doesn't deter the stalwart vampire hunter. The cemetery is poorly maintained, ravaged by the unfeeling hand of time. Manchester examines the catacomb and notices that the roof is somewhat fallen in.
He climbs up the side, then he and his disciples lower themselves down by ropes. It's dingy and dark inside. The only way they can see is by the dim beams from their electric flashlights. Fumbling around, eventually they find a large black coffin that feels somewhat out of place in this Victorian catacomb.
Together, Manchester and his cohort take out their weapons and heave the lid off the casket, ready to stake the beast in its heart. The lid falls off the coffin and lands with a bang on the floor. The group lets out a collective gasp at what they find. The box is empty. Whatever soul was housed here had escaped.
Manchester and the others anoint the coffin with garlic and holy water, hoping that with no home to return to, that the hauntings just might cease. Once they've left the cemetery, Manchester alerts the press to his daring encounter. He tells reporters that although he and his followers didn't stink the vampire, they have hindered the beast for now.
Only time will tell whether this monster ever shows its face again. Months go by, and it looks as though the vampire frenzy might finally be dying away. But now, the phone rings at a North London police station. A constable answers. The voice on the other end sounds young. It's a schoolgirl who says that she and her friends just walked across something in Highgate Cemetery. Something disturbing.
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Chapter 5: How did the media react to the vampire claims?
But strangely, as soon as the constable enters the cemetery, he stops cold. The schoolgirl was telling the truth. There, lying on the path directly in front of him in broad daylight, is a body. It's not a fox or any other common urban pest. It's no apparition either. It's an actual human corpse, burned black beyond all recognition. And for some reason, this body is missing its head.
More police arrive. They rope off the scene. Forensic specialists determine that it's the body of a woman and that it was no homicide. This woman had been dead for quite some time. It seems that someone unearthed the body from the graveyard and did exactly what Manchester said should be done to a vampire. This corpse has been staked, beheaded, and burnt. The constable is incredulous.
This vampire nonsense has gotten out of hand. The acts of trespass and mild vandalism had been bad enough, but this was entirely too far. The media frenzy has all led up to this, actual desecration of the dead. The police step up their presence around Highgate Cemetery, and it isn't long before they catch the next uninvited guests.
Less than three weeks later, on the 17th of August, 1970, the police hear noises from within the cemetery. They're not quite sure what's going on, but it sounds like a whole group of people. They blow their whistles and rush in, sweeping their flashlights across the gravestones. And up ahead, they hear footsteps, the sound of people fleeing.
Objects clatter and the trespassers try to scuttle away, but for one of them, it's already too late. The London police are able to corner a young man with wild hair and thick sideburns, carrying only a wooden stank and a cross. The cops arrest him on the spot, and as they're handcuffing him, they actually recognize him. They've seen his face in the paper several times over the last few months.
The trespasser, as it turns out, is David Ferrant.
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Chapter 6: What tensions arose between Ferrant and Manchester?
Unsurprisingly, Ferran takes issue with Sean Manchester's account, and so he publishes his own book, Beyond the Highgate Vampire, which disputes claims that there ever was a vampire in the graveyard, going forth to insinuate that Sean Manchester's previous account was chock full of lies and embellishments. Ferrant and Manchester's feud far outlives the high-gate vampire mania.
Manchester runs a blog for years, where he often took swipes at Ferrant, calling him a charlatan and a trend chaser. Ferrant himself created a webcomic called The Adventures of Bishop Bonkers, clearly ridiculing Manchester. As the decades wore on, Manchester became bored of talking about the high-gate vampire.
He retires from the media in 2013, but reemerges for one occasion, to comment on the death of David Ferentz in 2019. Here, he claims that he wished to finally bury the hatchet, but Della Ferentz, David's widow, refuses to accept his condolences.
With Ferentz passing, the Highgate vampire investigation loses one of its main eyewitnesses, and it begins to seem as though the question may never be answered. What exactly was behind the events at Highgate Cemetery around 1970? Throughout the investigation, the sightings of the vampire were all relatively consistent, at least until Shawn Manchester started expanding upon it.
Once the media frenzy caught hold, it swiftly became impossible to distinguish real eyewitness testimony from creative license. The frenzy surrounding the Highgate Vampire is not a unique phenomenon. It would seem to share DNA with the satanic panic of the early 1980s, for example.
But what makes the Highgate Vampire so appealing, and why the story continues to resurface again and again to this day, is the bitter feud that it created. A lifelong enmity between two eccentric yet passionate men. Whether they liked it or not, it's impossible to untangle the story of the Highgate Vampire from the men who sought to defeat it.
So maybe it was a vampire that drew so many North Londoners to Highgate Cemetery in the late 1960s and 70s. Or perhaps it was a zeitgeist, or simply a legend that spun out of control. Whatever it was, though, the haunting was real in one form or another, and it followed both Ferent and Manchester until the very end. Late Nights with Nexpo is created and hosted by me, Nexpo.
Executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Our head of writing is Evan Allen. This episode was written by Robert Diemstra. Copy editing by Luke Baratz. Audio editing and sound design by Alistair Sherman. Mixed and mastered by Schultz Media. Research by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, and Stacey Wood. Fact-checking by Abigail Shumway.
Production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Colt Locasio. Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel. Artwork by Jessica Claxton-Kiner and Robin Vane. Theme song by Ross Bugden. Thank you all so much for listening to Late Nights with Nexpo. I love you all, and good night.
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