Highgate Cemetery and the Highgate Vampire

Highgate Cemetery opened on a steep hillside in north London in 1839, one of the “Magnificent Seven” commercial cemeteries built to relieve the city’s overflowing churchyards. Victorian Londoners filled its West side with a dense, romantic landscape of catacombs, vaults, the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon; the East side, opened later, holds the tomb of Karl Marx. By the 1960s the cemetery company had gone bankrupt and the West Cemetery was an overgrown, broken and frequently vandalized wilderness of ivy and toppled monuments.

In February 1970, David Farrant wrote to the Hampstead and Highgate Express saying that on Christmas Eve 1969 he had glimpsed a gray figure while passing the cemetery, and asking whether anyone else had seen anything. Readers replied with a medley of local ghosts: a tall man in a hat, a phantom cyclist on Swain’s Lane, a woman in white, a face glaring through the gate bars, bells and voices. Another local man, Sean Manchester, declared that the figure was a vampire — a medieval nobleman supposedly awakened by occultists — and the press seized on the story.

Farrant and Manchester became bitter rivals, each vowing to destroy the creature. After ITV broadcast interviews with them on Friday, March 13, 1970, a crowd of would-be vampire hunters swarmed over the walls into the locked cemetery that night while police struggled to keep order. In the months that followed, vaults were broken into and human remains were disturbed; that August Farrant was arrested in the neighboring churchyard carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake, though the case was dismissed. In 1974 he was jailed for damaging memorials and interfering with remains, which he blamed on satanists. The two men’s feud ran in books, letters and broadcasts until Farrant’s death in 2019.

Folklorist Bill Ellis, in the most thorough study of the case (Folklore, 1993), showed how a handful of vague ghost reports, two attention-seeking rivals and eager journalists built a modern legend in real time. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, founded in 1975, rescued the cemetery from decay; today it is a carefully tended nature reserve and burial ground, and visitors are asked to treat it with respect.

A tall gray figure among the graves and at the gates, a man in a hat, a woman in white, a phantom cyclist on Swain’s Lane, a face at the bars, bells and voices — reported in 1970 letters to the local paper — and, according to Sean Manchester alone, a vampire.

The West Cemetery’s catacombs and vaults, the north gate and the stretch of Swain’s Lane between the two halves of the cemetery; St Michael’s churchyard next door.

The scare inspired Dracula A.D. 1972, decades of books by Farrant and Manchester, comics, podcasts and a 2025 London stage play, The Highgate Vampire. Highgate’s Victorian splendor also draws visitors to the graves of Karl Marx, George Eliot and many others.