Highgate Cemetery

By the 1830s London's parish churchyards were dangerously overcrowded, and Parliament allowed private companies to lay out large new cemeteries on the city's fringes. Highgate opened in 1839 as one of these, later grouped with Kensal Green, Brompton, Nunhead and the rest as the Magnificent Seven. The West Cemetery, the original section, was designed as a showpiece of Victorian mourning: the Egyptian Avenue, lined with vaults and entered through a great neoclassical arch, leads to the Circle of Lebanon, a ring of tombs sunk around an ancient cedar, with the Terrace Catacombs above. The East Cemetery opened across Swains Lane as the West filled up, and it is there, in 1883, that Karl Marx was buried.

The cemetery company's fortunes declined through the twentieth century, and after the Second World War the grounds became neglected and overgrown, with tombs broken open and the site a magnet for vandals and, by the late 1960s, for people dabbling in the occult. This was the setting for the vampire stories. In 1975 the Friends of Highgate Cemetery was formed to rescue the place; the charity now owns and runs it, has cleared and restored much of the West side, and continues to operate it as a working burial ground and a nature reserve.

The Highgate Vampire affair itself belongs to 1969–74. It began with a claimed sighting in December 1969, peaked with the mob at the gates in March 1970, and ended in the courts, with one of its central figures jailed in 1974 for offences in the cemetery, and the other claiming to have destroyed the vampire in a house in Crouch End the year before.

The Highgate story is unusual in that most of it happened in public and in print. The original letters and replies in the Hampstead and Highgate Express in February and March 1970 are the primary record of the sightings, and the paper kept following the affair: on 15 October 1971 it reported that Farrant, despite a police warning, said he might return to the cemetery to "exorcise a vampire" and confront a black magic sect. The Thames Television report of 13 March 1970 and the crowd it produced were widely covered at the time.

Farrant's trial in June and July 1974 was a sensation. Then aged 28 and describing himself as high priest of the British Psychic and Occult Society, he was convicted of damaging memorials in a place of burial, entering enclosed premises for an unlawful purpose and interfering with the remains of the dead, and sentenced to a combined four years and eight months; he maintained that the damage had been done by Satanists rather than by him, and was released in 1976 after a hunger strike. Manchester, who styled himself a bishop, went on to write his own account of destroying the vampire. The two men denounced each other in books, pamphlets and, later, online, and the feud was still running when Farrant died in April 2019, aged 73.

The sceptical view is straightforward: neither man ever produced evidence of anything beyond a frightened crowd, a derelict cemetery and their own considerable talent for publicity. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery do not trade on the vampire and their tours focus on the architecture, the wildlife and the people buried there. Yet visitors still report an odd atmosphere in the West Cemetery, and Swains Lane after dark still empties quickly.

Highgate Cemetery is open daily except Christmas Day and Boxing Day, generally from 10am with seasonal closing times, and an admission ticket covers both sides for the day; check the cemetery's website for current hours and prices before you go. The East Cemetery, with Karl Marx's tomb, can be wandered freely with a ticket. The West Cemetery, home to the Egyptian Avenue, the Circle of Lebanon and the Terrace Catacombs, can only be entered on a guided tour led by volunteer guides, so book a tour slot in advance, particularly at weekends.

The cemetery does not run ghost or vampire tours, and it asks visitors to remember that it is a working burial ground where families still come to grieve; night-time visits are not permitted and the gates are locked. The steep paths, steps and uneven ground in the West Cemetery make access difficult for wheelchairs, and there is no car park; Archway is the nearest tube, with a stiff walk up Swains Lane, and buses serve Highgate village.

Highgate village itself, with its pubs and Georgian streets, is the pleasantest place to base yourself, with Hampstead, Kentish Town and Camden a short bus or tube ride away for a wider choice of hotels and rooms in north London.