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 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?

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 Ferrend.

Walking among the century-old headstones and Gothic mausoleums, Ferrend struggles to keep warm.

His teeth begin to chatter.

He zips his heavy coat all the way up to his chin, but Ferrent has no plans to leave the cemetery before dawn.

Not until he catches sight of the apparition.

Ferrend is the owner of a tobacco shop, but his true passion lies in the paranormal.

A self-described Wiccan priest, Ferrend 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, Ferrent 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 Hindgate Cemetery.

The first to approach Ferrent 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 Ferrent 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.

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.

Ferend's 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 Ferron 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 will 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, Farron 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 in 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 him 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 Ferrin's letter appears in The Ham and High.

In it, he describes three occasions where a ghost-like figure was seen inside the gates at the top of Swain's Lane.

Each encounter was brief, but Ferrin can't think of any other explanation besides a supernatural one.

His letter admits that he knows very little about apparitions, which is why he's querying the readers, asking if anyone has had similar experiences.

The Hammond High staff expect to receive some fun, light-hearted letters from readers responding to Farron's piece, but that's not at all what happens.

They receive response letters, all right.

But these letters are deadly serious.

Across North London, residents are actually corroborating Ferrent's claims, and people are now coming forward with similar experiences and Highgate Cemetery.

The joke, it seems, is on the ham in high,

because the community certainly isn't laughing.

And David Ferrent.

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The most prominent of the response letters received by the Hammond High comes from a self-styled exorcist named Sean Manchester, the president of the British Occult Society.

Not to be confused with Ferenc's British Psychological and Occult Society.

Manchester is a bishop of the Old Catholic Church, which is a conservative splinter group of Catholicism.

He also has a keen interest in the supernatural.

He writes in and reports that not only does he believe the hauntings in Highgate Cemetery, but he knows what's causing these occurrences in the first place.

In fact, he's been tracking supernatural encounters of this nature for years.

It's a bold claim, too bold to ignore.

And so, the very next week, the Hammond High hits news stance with the headline, Does a Vampire Walk in Highgate, splashed across the front page.

North London is immediately grepped with curiosity, not only about the vampire, but about the two masters of the occult who were hunting this creature, David Ferrend and Sean Manchester.

The two men are complete opposites.

and this only adds fuel to the media frenzy.

Ferrent is soft-spoken and not very charismatic in interviews.

For a man claiming to have seen a supernatural creature in a graveyard, he exhibits an astonishing amount of restraint and reason.

His story doesn't change, and he takes great care to remind reporters that the creature he saw was not necessarily a vampire.

He pleads caution to the press.

Ferrent comes across as a concerned citizen who isn't seeking attention.

He truly witnessed an inexplicable event in a graveyard and believes Londoners shouldn't be aware.

Sean Manchester, on the other hand, is a force of nature.

He's tall and dons Catholic bishop garments wherever he goes.

Wear ferrons preserved.

Manchester is bombastic.

In his interview with the Hammond High, Manchester doesn't hesitate to make evidence-free pronouncement that the creature in Highgate Cemetery is a king vampire of the undead, an ancient nobleman from Wallachia who had risen from the grave.

Moreover, Manchester claims to have numerous eyewitnesses to back up his theory with accounts going back to 1965.

According to Manchester, a schoolgirl named Elizabeth Wajdilla had reported to him that she was walking down Swain's Lane when she saw the tall figure in the graveyard.

In the weeks afterward, she began having nightmares.

She fell ill.

and believing she was fighting against an evil presence, she contacted Manchester for help.

When Manchester examined her, he found two puncture marks on her neck, the telltale sign of a vampire attack.

He immediately spread garlic around Elizabeth's apartment and placed strategic crucifixes to ward off evil.

Within days, her symptoms were gone, and she had effectively been saved from corruption.

And

as it turns out, Elizabeth's tale is hardly the only one Manchester claims to have been involved with.

He tells reporters that another young lady was also affected by the corruption at Highgate.

This girl named Jacqueline awoke one night in her bed to feel something cold and strong clutching her hand.

She pulled and tugged, but the thing kept its iron grip on her.

After a long struggle, she was able to wrench it free, and by the next morning, She awakened in her bed with deep, unexplained slices in the skin of her hand.

Manchester says that from that day onward, Jacqueline had found herself afflicted with a strange compulsion.

She felt drawn to Highgate Cemetery, as though something dark and powerful was beckoning her to go there, specifically to the western side of the graveyard.

He theorizes that the Highgate vampire is the one responsible.

Reporters aren't quite sure what to make out of these claims, but they do know one thing for certain.

They've hit absolute pay dirt with with Ferrend and Manchester.

It's as though the two men are an odd couple designed in a laboratory to sell newspapers.

And so, local news outlets continue interviewing both Ferrent and Manchester, with each of them giving alternate theories about the mysterious events at Highgate Cemetery.

Ferrend mentions to reporters that he's found corpses of foxes littered around the graveyard.

It's unclear what killed them, and perhaps that has something to do with the hauntings in their cemetery.

The reporter asks him if it's possible the perpetrator could have been a vampire.

Ferron runs a hand through his wild hair and grimaces.

He acknowledges that it is indeed possible, but it isn't his main theory.

Naturally, the reporters go straight to Sean Manchester next.

They ask him if he too has seen the foxes.

Manchester replies that he has indeed, and that by all appearances, they'd been drained of their blood.

Likely food for the king vampire.

The Hammond High publishes yet another article on the case, this time titled, Why Do the Foxes Die?

detailing Ferrin's story about dead foxes as well as Manchester's theory.

At his home, Ferrin reads the article with a clenched jaw.

He's growing annoyed with this Sean Manchester character, and he doesn't appreciate that he's becoming associated with him in this way.

What's clear to Ferenc is that Manchester does not fully appreciate the situation.

Ferrant was actually there.

He felt the temperature drop with his own skin.

He witnessed the creature with his own eyes.

He felt the creature's power.

Ferrent knows that the Highgate vampire discovery is the most important work he's ever done and will ever do in his life.

Meanwhile, Sean Manchester is turning it into a circus sideshow.

Ferron glances back down at the newspaper in his hands, and only then does he realize that he's been clutching the page with fists so tight that the paper is torn.

He relaxes his hands, trying to put thoughts of the article out of his mind, but he can't do it.

And at last, Farron reaches an inescapable conclusion.

Something needs to be done about Sean Manchester.

On Friday, March 13th, David Ferron shows up again to Highgate Cemetery.

Unlike his previous visits to the graveyard, this one's taking place in broad daylight.

This time, he's not alone either.

A TV crew is setting up their cameras and microphones outside the cemetery gates when he arrives.

The public broadcaster ITV had invited Ferrend to give an interview and lend his expertise on camera.

The prospect of appearing on the BBC is anxiety-inducing for Ferrent, but it's too late for him to back out now.

The host of the program, Sandra Harris, has already spotted him through the crowd.

She's striding his way with her arm extended towards Ferrend for a handshake.

And so he takes a deep breath and proceeds to greet her.

Sandra shows him where to stand, when suddenly there's a commotion among the crew nearby.

Ferron whips his head over and sees a cameraman in clear distress.

The man clutches at his throat, his face going pale, yet there's nothing around his neck.

No visible source of an attack at all.

Ferron freezes, shocked by what he's witnessing.

Several other crew members rush over just in time to catch the distressed cameraman as he falls.

The onset EMT quickly disappears, and the man is loaded onto a stretcher and carried away.

David Ferrant looks over at his interviewer, Sandra Harris, and she's visibly shaken, but quickly composes herself.

She tells Ferrin that they'll begin as soon as they can bring in a new cameraman, and then she hurries away.

Ferrent reminds himself that this is why it's so important for him to do this interview.

It doesn't matter how camera-shy he might be.

There are dark forces at play here in Highgate Cemetery, and they're a clear threat to the community.

Determined, Ferenc steals himself.

Eventually, a new cameraman arrives.

Sandra and Ferrin are just about to begin when they're interrupted by yet another commotion among the crew.

Ferrin fears it's another supernatural attack, but this time the shouts are shouts of excitement.

The crew has noticed something.

Ferrant follows their gaze and his heart sinks.

Evidently, He wasn't the only supernatural expert who ITV was going to talk to today.

A tall man wearing bishop's robes strides their way, and he's immediately swarmed by the crew and onlookers.

The man is Sean Manchester.

He's carrying a briefcase which he hoists high and declares to be a vampire hunter's kit, essential for any would-be slayer of demons.

Ferent understandably rolls his eyes, feeling his face turn red at being forced to share airtime with this loony.

He had spent hours of time carefully researching and investigating, only to have a man in a bishop's costume swoop in as if he were the true authority.

When the interview finally commences, Ferron speaks in his usual unassuming manner, doing his best to inform the public of the facts.

He takes caution not to refer to the entity as a vampire, but rather a spirit that might have been awakened by recent Satanist activity.

Sean Manchester, on the other hand, has no such reservation.

He boldly declares that he knows what should be done.

He claims that this very night, on Friday the 13th, he and David Ferrent will return to the cemetery, hunt down the vampire, and slay it.

When asked how they'll do that, Manchester simply replies that he will first drive a stake through its heart with one blow, chop off its head with a gravedigger's shovel, then burn what remains.

The interviews air that evening, and the promise of a vampire hunt is enough to draw a crowd.

Dozens of people from North London and beyond show up for what is sure to be a night to remember.

Farron gets wind of this impromptu gathering shortly after the broadcast airs while drinking at a local pub.

There, he's approached by a man who's about his own age, who introduces himself as Alan Blood, a teacher from Chelmsford, a city over 20 miles away.

Blood, a self-proclaimed self-proclaimed vampire expert, said that he saw the ITV report and immediately brought a handful of students down to join in on the vampire hunt.

Farron sighs and explains that there aren't favorable conditions to conduct a psychic investigation tonight, as the cemetery will soon be overrun with thrill seekers and hoodlums.

The teacher agrees on principle, but he and his students still decide to take part in the search, just in case.

Farron wishes them good luck, but elects to stay behind, still seeing that Sean Manchester has gotten his good name mixed up in all of this hysteria.

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, Sean 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 Luisa, who claimed to have a similar supernatural experience to Jacqueline's.

In Luisa'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 shut 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, 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.

What the girl describes sounds so improbable that the constable isn't sure he heard her right.

And so he decides to go check himself, himself, just to be sure.

The police officer assures himself that these school children probably just happened across a dead fox and got spooked.

After all, the Highgate Cemeteries seem to be sparking a lot of wild claims these days.

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 a body from the graveyard and did exactly what Manchester said should be done to a vampire.

This corpse has been stanked, 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 Ferrent.

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In September of 1970, David Ferrent appears before the court.

He's confident that he had committed no crime and insists that the police had it out for him.

He and members of the British Psychological and Occult Society had assembled in Highgate Cemetery in order to conduct a Wiccan ritual which would banish the evil spirit from Highgate for good.

However, he keeps this explanation to himself.

He knows the nuance of pagan and Satanism would be lost on the court.

And instead, he defers to his lawyer to mount a defense.

After a brief trial, the charges against Ferrend are dismissed.

The court rules that since Highgate Cemetery is not technically an enclosed space, Ferrend can't be guilty of trespassing.

There is no proof that Ferrent had any intent to interfere with the graves themselves.

And so the matter was settled.

Well, at least, it should have been.

Despite his close encounter with the law, David Ferrend has every intention of continuing his activities.

However, some members of his society begin to suspect that Ferrent isn't as interested in rooting out the mystical forces of darkness as he is in taking down his human foe, Sean Manchester.

Though Ferrend and Manchester had nominally worked together in the early spring of 1970, their alliance was tenuous at best.

Ferrend has never cared for Manchester's bluster and Manchester's disdainful of Ferrent's wicked beliefs.

Both men carry out their own hunts, Manchester for the vampire.

and Ferrent for rogue Satanists.

And it's here where they begin deriding each other in the press.

In 1974, David Ferrend is arrested again.

This time, the police claimed that Ferrent had defaced the graves of the dead and conducted ungodly ceremonies therein.

The evidence presented includes pictures of satanic symbols drawn on the floor of a mausoleum, pictures of a headless corpse in a car, as well as scandalous photographs of naked women in coffins.

Moreover, someone's been sending voodoo don'ts and taunting messages to police officers.

Farron blames the vandalism on Satanists and claims that the naked women were symbols of purity as part of innocent wiccan rituals.

But the damage was already done.

With all the hysteria in the air, the jury finds Farron guilty of defacing the graves and the court sentences him to five years in prison.

Throughout the trial and the decades following, Farron maintains his innocence, but does eventually admit that he was the one who sent voodoo dolls to the police.

He only ends up serving two years and eight months, but his time behind bars does little to quell his feud with Manchester.

In 1978, shortly after Ferron's release, flyers appear in London's underground stations, advertising the most outlandish escalation yet: a wizard's duel between David Ferrant and Sean Manchester.

It's not the first time the two occultists have threatened a duel.

Similar threats were hurled five years prior in 1973.

Now, though, it seems like one might actually happen, and the public holds its collective breath.

Ultimately, it's unclear whether the wizards' duel ever came to pass, at least with wands or swords.

However, their public feud sees a dramatic escalation around this time and is, in reality, fawn with the pen.

In 1985, Sean Manchester self-publishes a book entitled The Highgate Vampire.

In it, he takes credit for killing the vampire with a wooden stake after the creature took the form of a massive spider.

His book also takes aim at Farron's personal life.

He claims that at the time of the first sightings, David Ferrin's wife had just left him for a different occultist.

So Farron was in a bad place in life when his fixation began.

Unsurprisingly, Ferrin 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.

Ferron and Manchester's feud far outlives the Highgate vampire mania.

Manchester runs a blog for years, where he often took swipes at Ference, calling him a charlatan and a trend chaser.

Ferent 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 Highgate vampire.

He retires from the media in 2013, but re-emerges for one occasion, to comment on the death of David Ference in 2019.

Here, he claims that he wished to finally bury the Hatchet,

but Della Ference, David's widow, refuses to accept his condolences.

With Ference 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 Sean 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 Ferrent and Manchester until the very end.

Late Nights with Nexpo is created and hosted by Me, Nexpo.

Executive produced by me, Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Lovitt.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen.

This episode was written by Matt Tiemstra.

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 Cole Locasio.

Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel.

Artwork by Jessica Kloxton Kiner and Robin Fane.

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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