Enter David Farrant

"Cemeteries and graveyards are largely unhaunted." — Alan Murdie (Foreword, Haunted Highgate)

"Only one ghost haunts Highgate Cemetery, and his name is David Farrant." — †Seán Manchester

David Farrant, when arrested on the night of 17 August 1970, gave the police and later the magistrate's court the name "Allan Farrow" which he continued to use throughout his stay on remand at Brixton Prison until his release. Hence prison correspondence from Farrant being in the name of "Farrow." He had not yet attempted to hijack the name of the British Occult Society. That would come later, but when he was contacted by the BBC to discuss his arrest and reconstruct events leading up to it, he told them he was associated with the BOS.

For the record, David Farrant (aka Allan Farrow) has at no time in his life been associated or otherwise connected to the British Occult Society, and many times the BOS was obliged to publish retractions following his fraudulent claims in that regard. He persisted with them for the rest of the decade, first claiming to be a member, then its president, then its founder, and, even more bizarrely, its high priest. He was not taken seriously, but when he used these titles during his appearances at the Old Bailey in the summer of 1974, court reporters were obliged to quote him exactly as he described himself, albeit with the prefix "self-styled," by which time he had long since ditched the curious pseudonym of "Allan Farrow."

Farrant has provided on YouTube a video interview with a certain Redmond McWilliams, who, though not knowing Farrant for very long, regards him as one of his "dearest friends."

The final part of the interview finds Farrant rewriting history over his BBC television appearance on 15 October 1970 where he pulled out a wooden stake and a cross from within his trousers and went about reconstructing his pseudo-vampire hunting antics on the night in question when he was arrested by police patrolling Highgate Cemetery at midnight in search of black magic devotees. They instead stumbled across Farrant with his cross and stake.

In his interview with his close friend McWilliams, Farrant claims his appearance on the BBC was not a reconstruction (when the narrator makes it absolutely apparent that it was), but instead something the BBC asked him to do. He also claims that the stake was not for the purpose of hunting a vampire, but to use to inscribe a circle with a piece of string. He fails to explain why he needed a cross for this purpose, or why a witch, as he later claimed to be, would have need of a Catholic rosary suspended around his neck. He also claims that he was misrepresented in the press and that the police set him up and fabricated his statement where he openly admitted to hunting a vampire when they arrested him. Quite what the BBC, the press or the police would have to gain by misrepresenting him in this way is not explained other than everyone was supposedly out to get him. Such paranoid deflections were not evident back in 1970 when Farrant boasted to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 6 March 1970: "The odd thing is there was no outward sign of how they died. Much remains unexplained, but what I have recently learnt all points to the vampire theory being the most likely answer. Should this be so, I for one am prepared to pursue it, taking whatever means might be necessary so that we can all rest." Now Farrant says he was just "humouring" the newspaper and has never in his life believed in such things.

Click on the newspaper cutting from October 1970 at the top of this page to hear Farrant completely revise his activities during that year. Jump to the timeline 20:44 of the thirty-four minutes' video to view original footage of Farrant pulling a cross and stake out of his trousers on the BBC programme, and listen to him evade McWilliams' question, blame the police for "framing" him and then have the audacity to claim that the only reason he was filmed vampire hunting during the reconstruction was because that is "what they wanted." There was no string attached to the stake, as he now claims, adding that the police removed it, and in a series of extracts from interviews spanning many years he can be heard admitting to the very thing he now denies. These interviews are available on a CD titled The Devil's Fool where relevant excerpts from broadcast and private interviews can be heard.

Was there a conspiracy to frame Farrant, or was he jumping on a bandwagon for the sake of his own self-aggrandising publicity in a pathetic attempt to emulate those seriously engaged in the pursuit of the vampiric presence haunting London's most famous cemetery? After all these years is he suffering from delusional paranioa, or is he still churning out claims and statements he knows to be false? Or could it be an alternating mixture of both deluson and lies? Whatever the case, a polygraph test is something he has so far avoided.

Apart from some publicity stunts arranged by David Farrant, sometimes involving the self-proclaimed "master of the black arts" John Pope-de-Locksley, there is no such group as the "British Psychic and Occult Society." It was completely invented by Farrant in 1983. It does not exist.

When interviewed at the time, ie February and March 1970, Farrant made no claim of belonging to a group. He made it quite clear he was alone when he had three sightings of the "ghost" (as stated in his published letter in February 1970). This reduced to "two sightings" by the time he was interviewed for Thames Television in the following month. Much later, it became only one sighting. Throughout all the early 1970 interviews, Farrant made clear that he was acting alone and had "no knowledge in this field."

Some of the people who wrote to a local newspaper in early 1970, claiming to have seen a "ghost" similar to Farrant's alleged phantom, were known friends of Farrant. Most have admitted that he put them up to it; albeit he tended to use their names and addresses while writing the "ghost sighting" letters himself.

When Farrant learned about the Highgate Vampire from conversations he had with people in local pubs in and around Highgate Village, he opined in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 6 March 1970, that the death of foxes in the cemetery was probably caused by a vampire; moreover, that he would do everything he could to track it down and destroy it, "taking whatever means might be necessary."

Seán Manchester warned on Today, Thames Television, 13 March 1970, against Farrant's plan to pursue the vampire "because he did not have sufficient knowledge" and was acting alone. His warning and advice was also published in the Hampstead & Highgate Express on the same day. Farrant ignored that warning, and less than a handful of months later, on August 17th, he was arrested in Highgate Cemetery at midnight by police searching for black magic devotees.

David Robert Donovan Farrant aka Allan Farrow was held on remand at Brixton Prison. Thus began a history of attention-seeking charlatanry, arrests and prison sentences. It also began his immense resentment toward Seán Manchester with attendant falsehood, fabrication, defamation and vendettas.

In the Beginning ...

The banner headline "Does a wampyr walk in Highgate?" appeared across the front page of Hampstead and Highgate's most prestigious newspaper in February 1970. The editor himself had written the piece after meeting privately with the president of the British Occult Society and founder of the then fledgling Vampire Research Society. He allowed himself to get slightly carried away by introducing the journalistic embellishment "King Vampire of the Undead" - a term that Seán Manchester did not employ, as stated by him on page 72 of The Vampire Hunter's Handbook, but what else did the editor get wrong that day? Apparently more than you might imagine!

After warning that a vampire might be active in Highgate Cemetery, the article goes on to correctly describe Seán Manchester as a photographer (he had run his own photographic studio throughout the previous decade) and the president of the British Occult Society (a position he held from 21 June 1967 to 8 August 1988 when the BOS was dissolved). He is then quoted accurately enough before reference is made to a King Vampire of the Undead which is not attributed to him in actual quotes but attributed nonetheless.

A very important residence in Highgate somehow manages to transform into a different house in London's West End. For house "in the West End" one should actually substitute Ashurst House, which once stood at the western end of the site now occupied by Highgate Cemetery, as would have been explained by Seán Manchester who told the editor at the time that Ashurst House was sold and leased to a succession of tenants of whom one was a mysterious gentleman from the Continent who arrived in the wake of the vampire epidemic that had its origins in south-east Europe. This is not quite the same as what was reported and, of course, does not have anything like the same sensationalist impact as "King Vampire from Wallachia" which Draculesque adornment the newspaper clearly preferred.

There then follows reference to a group of Satanists attempting to"resurrect the King Vampire." This time the reference to a King Vampire is included in quotes even though the term was not uttered.

Next we are misinformed that the British Occult Society had "no formal membership" but instead corresponded with "50 to 100 interested people." Completely untrue. The BOS had a formal membership of over three hundred people with at least one hundred actively involved in ongoing research and investigation.

Then we learn that the British Occult Society "believes in countering magic by magic" when all that was said is that the supernatural will not submit to scientific methods to measure and prove its existence.

The newspaper correctly states that some BOS members had "spent nights in Highgate Cemetery" which was obviously for the purpose of observing the strange nocturnal goings-on in the place as had been reported by people in the previous decade and was still being reported up to the time of the article.

Readers are then offered in quotes "the traditional and approved manner" by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pestilence without it being properly clarified that this is how clergy dealt with the problem in centuries past and was not on the agenda as far as the British Occult Society/Vampire Research Society was concerned with regard to Highgate Cemetery.

That Montague Summers' books bore some influence on Seán Manchester's understanding of vampirism is mentioned in tandem with the suggestion that Bram Stoker's novel is based on fact. That Stoker was influenced by genuine cases and read about real vampires before writing Dracula is not in doubt, but the clumsy journalism of the Hampstead and Highgate Express clouds what is trying to be conveyed by the man they are interviewing in the pursuit (presumably) of economising on words for the sake of space.

Finally, we come to a quote attributed to "one of Britain's busiest exorcists, the Rev John Neil-Smith" (they couldn't even get his name right - it was actually Christopher Neil-Smith) by attributing to him the following: "I believe the whole idea of vampires is probably a novelistic embellishment." He said nothing of the sort.

The Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith (1920-1995) was an Anglican priest, originally from Hampstead, most celebrated for his practice of exorcism and his paranormal interests.[1] Like Seán Manchester, whom he knew, Reverend Neil-Smith believed that evil is an external reality and should be treated as such rather than as an abstract concept.

A vicar at St Saviour's Anglican Church at Eton Road in Hampstead, London, he performed more than three thousand exorcisms in Britain since 1949. In 1972, the Bishop of London authorised him to exorcise demons according to his own judgement.[2] Two years earlier, he was misquoted in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 27 February 1970, saying that vampires are "probably a novelistic embellishment," but, as Seán Manchester subsequently pointed out, Reverend Neil-Smith claimed to have actually exorcised vampires, as confirmed in a book written by Daniel Farson and Angus Hall which records:

"Yet not far from Highgate Cemetery lives a man who takes reports of vampirism seriously. The Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith is a leading British exorcist and writer on exorcism. He can cite several examples of people who have come to him for help in connection with vampirism. 'The one that particularly strikes me is that of a woman who showed me the marks on her wrists which appeared at night, where blood had definitely been taken. And there was no apparent reason why this should have occurred. They were marks like those of an animal. Something like scratching.' He denies this might have been done by the woman herself. She came to him when she felt her blood was being sucked away, and after he performed an exorcism the marks disappeared. Another person who came from South America 'had a similar phenomenon, as if an animal had sucked away his blood and attacked him at night.' Again, the Reverend Neil-Smith could find no obvious explanation. There is a third case of a man who, after his brother died, had the strange feeling that his lifeblood was being slowly sucked away from him. 'There seems to be evidence this was so,' says Neil-Smith. 'He was a perfectly normal person before, but after the brother's death he felt his life was being sucked away from him as if the spirit of his brother was feeding on him. When the exorcism was performed he felt a release and new life, as if new blood ran in his veins.' Neil-Smith rules out the possibility of a simple psychological explanation for this, such as a feeling of guilt by the survivor toward his brother. 'There was no disharmony between them. In fact he wasn't clear for some time that it (the vampire) was his brother.' The clergyman describes a vampire as 'half animal, half human,' and firmly refutes the suggestion that such things are all in the mind. 'I think that's a very naive interpretation,' he says. 'All the evidence points to the contrary'." [6]

The Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith, contrary to editor Gerald Isaaman's false attribution of 27 February 1970 in a local Hampstead newspaper, concluded that there really are such a things as vampires.

References:

1. a b Beeson, Trevor (2006). "The Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith". Priests And Prelates: The Daily Telegraph Clerical Obituaries. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0826481000.

2. Sands, Kathleen R. Demon possession in Elizabethan England. Praeger Publishers. "At around the same time, Father Christopher Neil-Smith, an Anglican priest, received a standing license from the Bishop of London authorizing him to exorcise freely according to his own judgment." 

3. Neil-Smith, Christopher. Praying for daylight: God through modern eyes. P. Smith.

4. Cramer, Marc. The devil within. W.H. Allen. "with the noted exorcist, the Rev. Christopher Neil-Smith, author of an anecdotal book entitled The Exorcist and the Possessed."

5. Spence, Lewis. Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology.Kessinger Publishing.

6. Mysterious Monsters (Aldus Books, 1978) by Daniel Farson and Angus Hall. 

In his book The Highgate Vampire, Seán Manchester states that the vampiric source of the Highgate infestation first showed up shortly after the infamous vampire plague of the early 1700's, the same era as Arnold Paole and Peter Plogojowitz. He further states that an Eastern European nobleman occupied Ashurst House in the early 18th century. This all seems to make sense, and it suggests that Tamás Orszag of Hungary is the most likely candidate for the identity of the Highgate Vampire.

A composite of the Highgate Vampire's appearance can be gleaned from various statements in the Vampire Research Society's archive and, of course, on public record in Seán Manchester's The Highgate Vampire.*

Accounts provided by witnesses in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 13 February 1970 & 20 February 1970, describe "a most unusual form [that] just seemed to glide across the path ... a pale figure ..."; "Many tales are told about a tall man who walks across Swains Lane and just disappears through a wall into the cemetery ..."; " ... a 'form' moving behind some gravestones ... the thing made no sound and seemed to disappear into nowhere ..." *

Jacqueline Beckwith, a teenager living in North Hill, awoke one night with something icy cold clutching her hand which soon went numb. The next morning revealed "deep tears in the flesh where she had forced [her hand] free." *

A ghost hunter by the name of Thomas told of "a dark shape [which] moved across the path directly in front of us." On an earlier occasion he had started to walk home with his fiancee down the lane running alongside and eventually between Highgate Cemetery. "Something was standing behind the iron railings of the gate ... upon its face was an expression of basilisk horror." *

Once again, "the thing behind the gate appeared to dissolve into the shadows of the night." 

* (The Highgate Vampire, pages 49, 54, 65, 66, 67, 68, 85, 86 & 142, Gothic Press edition)