Murdie Muddies the Waters

The Ghost Club was reactivated in 1882, holding secretive monthly meetings for people interested in the paranormal. It had strange traditions, such as keeping the names of deceased members on the membership roll, which was recited in full each year on All Souls Day (November 2nd). However, it was not well regarded by serious researchers: the physicist Oliver Lodge, an investigator of mediums, referred to it as a "superstitious body of very little importance." It was wound up in 1936. Two years later it was again relaunched, this time by the psychical investigator Harry Price. Meetings ceased again in 1948 following the death of Price, but were revived in 1953 by remaining members, of whom one was paranormal investigator Philip Paul. It now turned into an organisation that genuinely investigated as well as debated, a change that was reinforced when Peter Underwood took over the presidency in 1960. The club continued to be led by Underwood until 1993, when he resigned after a disagreement with colleagues and set up a rival organisation, the Ghost Club Society. Since then the club has had various Chairmen (the title of president having been abolished). The current Chairman is barrister Alan Murdie, who is also a member of the governing council of the Society for Psychical Research. Despite being a barrister, Murdie seems to have been completely taken in by "Della Farrant," the pretend "wife" of convicted felon David Farrant, and in 2014, at her invitation, happily wrote the Foreword to her slim volume Haunted Highgate, which has more holes in it than a colander. Curiously, Murdie takes a cynical approach where Seán Manchester is concerned, but evinces no similar scepticism over the charlatanry and shenanigans of David Farrant, the man convicted of desceration and Satanism at Highgate Cemetery, plus threatening people with black magic. This might be more to do with Seán Manchester's traditional religious approach than not, and the fact that he was a loyal friend of the president of The Ghost Club from 1960 to 1993 who made him an Honorary Life Member, and after 1993 conferred the same honour on him apropos the Ghost Club Society. Interviewed by Peta Banks, chief investigator of APPI, in 2013, Alan Murdie admitted: "We are dwarfed by what we don’t know." Yet he does not apply that axiom to vampires. Peter Underwood, on the other hand, did. He had met in his lifetime the vampirologists Montague Summers and Seán Manchester, both of whom evinced a traditional Catholic predisposition, something Murdie clearly does not empathise with. His sympathies lie elsewhere, and it is not with the likes of such clerics. 

Writing in the Fortean Times (Hallowe'en edition, November 2012) magazine about David Farrant, Murdie admitted "to entertaining a slight scintilla of unease regarding the conduct of the prosecution, based on the allegations for which he was originally arrested ... someone in authority had decided to stop Farrant's activities amid crusades against the scourge of modern vampirism, in the same way as the Witchcraft Act 1735 was brought out to suppress medium Helen Duncan in 1944."

Murdie's sympathies are crystal clear; yet, ironically, he lists as one of his sources Peter Underwood's The Vampire's Bedside Companion (giving the incorrect year of its publication) wherein the author of that anthology condemns Farrant in no uncertain terms. Seán Manchester also makes a contribution to the same work, indeed one fifth of the anthology, making no reference whatsoever to the charlatan.

"Della Maria Vallicrus" (later calling herself "Della Farrant") mysteriously emerged out of nowhere in 2010 to join a vendetta against Seán Manchester whilst espousing what you would expect to hear from someone on the Left-hand Path. On the matter of events at Highgate Cemetery a decade before she was born, “Della” had this to say on the Supernatural World forum: 

“I have my own reasons for deciding what really happened. I really have no choice but to believe them as I know them to be fact.” 

What possible reasons did she have for believing something told to her? How could she possibly know “them” to be “fact” when she was not present or even alive at the time? She was clearly under the influence of somebody or the other on the dark side. 

Addenda:

Oddly enough, following the death of David Farrant on 8 April 2019, the woman calling herself "Della" vanished from whence she came, like a puff of smoke. Back in 2014, she had invited Alan Murdie to write the Foreword to her only published work (Haunted Highgate), which comprises rehashed accounts from those she solicited by advertising in local newspapers and on the internet, while ripping off the odd individual who had confided their experience with view to getting some feedback on their unpublished manuscript for which advice was being sought, eg Jessica Oliver. 

Alan Murdie jumped at the chance to accommodate "Della Farrant," someone he had never met, writing at the conclusion of his 1¼ page Foreword: 

"She restores much-needed balance to the study of ghosts in the Highgate district, as well as providing a wealth of fascinating new stories and material for readers to analyse, ponder and enjoy." 

Can anyone really be that blinkered and naïve? Apparently so.

Alan Murdie, along with Gareth Medway, was drafted in to co-write an obituary for David Farrant in Fortean Times #383, September 2019. Both evince enmity toward myself; particularly Medway who is openly hostile and willing to take matters to the extreme. Murdie merely accepted fabrications he was told at face value. Both these individuals were sympathetic toward late David Farrant. Gareth Medway who regarded himself to be a very close friend, and was/is "vice-president" of the barely existent "British Psychic and Occult Society" founded by Farrant in the early 1980s. Medway describes himself as “a priest of The Fellowship of Isis, a historian of the occult and the author of Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism,” which is an apologia for Satanism. 

Murdie did not know Farrant in person; whereas Medway did and is transparently a traveller on the Left-hand Path of the dark occult, Murdie's personal beliefs are unknown. No amount of digging unearths anything about them. Quite why he took against Seán Manchester is also difficult to fathom. Seán Manchester has never met or had any form of contact with Murdie, a lawyer and part-time ghost-hunter, or Medway, a dabbler in the dark arts.  Medway knew Farrant rather well, collaborated in his pranks, and distributed merchandise exclusively aimed at mocking and ridiculing Seán Manchester. The image below shows Medway entering into the "satanic spirit" of Christmas with his Muswell Hill friend, plus a papier mache "decapitated head" of Seán Manchester, including biretta, on their celebratory festive table. This also appeared in a video published by Farrant on YouTube.

Notwithstanding the anticipated downpour of error in an otherwise uninspired drizzle of monotonous charges, convictions and sundry offences, this has to be the most boring obituary of an infamous figure that one could ever hope to read. It tells you absolutely nothing you did not know beforehand. The only tit-bit which came out of the blue, and was hitherto a closely guarded secret among his intimates, is that Farrant worked for a short period of time at Stormont Tennis & Squash Club, 3 Lanchester Rd, London N6 4SU, which is situated within a walk of where he lived at 142 Muswell Hill Road, N10 3JE. Driven to recounting this dreary detail does nothing to compensate for the absence of anything interesting or fresh. The co-authors of Fortean Times' Necrolog predictably trot out familiar and, of course, exploded fabrication, but what is rather more telling are the omissions.

We are told, for example, that David Farrant married Mary Olden in September 1967 at "St Stephen's Church on Highgate Hill," and that he is survived by his son, Jamie, granddaughter, Lauryn, and "three wives." What about Danny whom Mary gave birth to in August 1969 while living with her husband at their flat on the corner of Southwood Avenue and Archway Road from where he was soon to be evicted, ending up in a coal cellar? Mary thence repaired to her parents in Southampton, taking both Jamie and Danny with her. The next time she saw Farrant was at The Old Bailey in 1974.

Danny Farrant has been completely air-brushed out of the picture.

The marriage between Mary Olden and David Farrant took place at St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church on Highgate Hill; not St Stephen's Church situated on Rosslyn Hill. The couple had a full-blown Roman Catholic Nuptial Mass despite the fact that Farrant himself was not Catholic.

David Farrant had two wives whom he married twelve years apart. The first, Mary, summoned by her husband when he was in custody and standing trial at the Old Bailey, attested that he was not an occultist, played no part in the occult, and was certainly nothing to do with the British Occult Society. Murdie and Medway nonetheless state in their obituary that Farrant founded the British Occult Society in 1967. The BOS was founded significantly prior to that year, but it was in that year that Seán Manchester was elected its president. Farrant was courting his wife in France and Spain at the time, returning to England to marry her in September 1967.

One fact emerges at the obituary's conclusion as the name is spelled out in full:

David Robert Donovan Farrant.

The inclusion of "Donovan" by Seán Manchester in books, articles and sundry comments had always been disputed; indeed, dismissed as false. However, the death certificate reveals it to be genuine; just as the records will show he had two wives only: Mary whom he married in 1967, and Colette in 1979.