GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: The Highgate Vampire Re-Visited

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

I read with interest a month or ago Richard Freeman’s mention of the Highgate ‘vampire’. After many years researching the case, and attempting strip away the drama to reveal the bare bones, it seems that the spectre is still active in the cemetery. Although guided tours are now enforced, and the cemetery is fortified, the legend of the ‘vampire’ has never diminished, and yet it remains one of the world’s greatest, yet understated of mysteries.

It seems unlikely that much of what has been written in the past about the events was true. However, there were indeed reports of a tall, dark and possibly red-eyed spectre which mainly loitered around the North Gate of the Western cemetery. There were a handful of fox deaths, but probably unrelated, and much of what else occurred, from the finding of a skeleton in a vehicle, to a monster spider which, when staked, turned into a woman, zombies, Satanism, attacks on reporters, etc, etc, all seems rather sensationalised. Whatever took place in that gothic burial ground, certainly fed upon the news coverage, it gorged itself upon the snowball effect of media and public frenzy, and indulged itself on mass hysteria. The drama dissipated eventually around the early ‘70s.

Then, in the summer of 2005 came a strange report from a local resident of Highgate. He’d been living in the village for more than a decade and never experienced anything odd, let alone heard of the horrors of the past. During this season, he’d walked home late from a local public house, up Swains Lane, which runs alongside the cemetery and divides the Western and Eastern cemeteries. As he approached the vicinity of the North Gate he could make a darkly adorned figure. It was a warm night and the ‘man’ seemed to have a long overcoat on and a black hat perched upon his head. The witness added: “As I drew level with him and was about to walk pass, I could swear I heard him say to me "Good evening, sir." In what sounded at first like a strange accent, but which I later thought, just sounded "old fashioned".

"The other peculiarity about his greeting was it didn't seem to come from his direction as such, but rather seemed to be whispered right next to my ear. Which, given the ordinariness of the words, still gave me a jolt. I continued past him for about a further 50 yards down the lane and just as I was about to turn right into my road - something made me turn round. Looking up the rise from where I was standing, he was now on the other side of the road, nearer to Highgate Cemetery West. From my position, I couldn't see his feet, but the next moment he seemed to glide straight back across the road at right angles to me a go clean through the cemetery gates on the opposite side of the lane (East Cemetery) and disappear.”

Another witness, a woman, recalled how she saw a black figure by the North Gate recently, which she took at first to be a branch broken from a tree, but as she approached in her car, she noticed it was a tall man in a black coat and hat. Whatever lurks in Highgate it’s not a monster and never has been, but it could well be a very malevolent spirit. Or, if you believe the tour guides who speak of the original legend, a Hammer Horror extra!!!