Recording or Revising the Facts?

[Vampirologist]

A new book, titled Vampires by Raymond H Miller, features photographs from the Vampire Research Society's archive of Highgate Cemetery during the time of the infamous vampire contagion.

Aimed at a younger audience, this book is in four sections the second of which is titled Do Vampires Exist? A third of this section is devoted to the case of the Highgate Vampire which commences with 1967 - the year Raymond H Miller was born - and two convent schoolgirls walking down Swains Lane at night. Pictures of one of the schoolgirls and the eerie gate she passed are included; as are pictures of the VRS founder entering the vampire's tomb in August 1970 and that same tomb sealed up shortly afterwards. There is also a photograph of Lusia next to the entrance to the terrace catacombs in Highgate Cemetery.

If you already possess a copy of The Highgate Vampire this new publication offers nothing that you have not already seen or read about. What strikes me as odd, though, is the total absence of any bibliographical notes for the second section dealing with the Highgate case. Therefore, there is no acknowledgement of the source of the Highgate Vampire material, while sections one, three and four are fully credited with source references. This is something of an oversight on the part of Raymond H Miller. Even the websites listed at the back of the book include such silliness as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but, alas, no mention of the Vampire Research Society website.

Perhaps referring the target age group for Vampires to detailed vampirological source material is frowned upon by those with an agenda quite removed from our own? Even so, I personally found the inclusion of two colour photographs of parts of a corpse in a mortuary both distasteful and entirely inappropriate for youngsters of any age. The decision to expose the young readership to death while shielding them from too much evidence of the supernatural is unfortunately all too symptomatic of the times in which we find ourselves.

[Vampirologist]

What has happened to the quote on page 596 in the 2003 reprint of Colin Wilson's book The Occult? The original quote was from a 1970 article titled "Vampire Hunt Among the Tombs" in the Daily Express, which in the first edition many years ago Colin Wilson faithfully reproduced. However, in the 2003 UK reprint he has supplanted this with something that bears no resemblance to what was actually published at the time.

Let's be clear, the apparent revisionism under question is not anything other than the news article from 1970. It does not include the author's comments, only the original article which, therefore, should remain unchanged.

The index to The Occult still contains the names "Seán Manchester" and "Allan Farrow" for page 596, but this no longer reflects what is found on page 596 in the 2003 edition. All mention of Seán Manchester has been removed and Allan Farrow has transmogrified into a name not used in the original article. In the reprint, Farrow (now named as someone else) is said to have "founded the British Occult Society," but the 1970 Daily Express article correctly attributes the leadership of the British Occult Society to Seán Manchester. The original article makes absolutely no mention of the Farrow character in connection with the British Occult Society. Nor should it. Farrow was not a member or in any way associated with the British Occult Society.

Peter Underwood, who was an honorary life-member of the British Occult Society until its dissolution in 1988, is a close colleague of both Colin Wilson and Seán Manchester, which makes this tampering with a newspaper article all the more puzzling.

The new name for Farrow does not appear in either Wilson's index or the Daily Express article. The name "Allan Farrow" does appear, but only in the context of someone who had appeared at Clerkenwell Court charged with entering Highgate Cemetery in August 1970 for an unlawful purpose.

The original Daily Express article stated: "Farrow told police he had just moved to London when he heard people talking about the vampire of Highgate Cemetery." Nowhere in the article is Farrow associated with the British Occult Society, much less is he described as that organisation's "founder."

So why did Colin Wilson alter the Daily Express report?

[Vampirologist]

Carol Page, an American journalist, wrote the following to Seán Manchester on 20 October 1989: “It is clear that you have a great deal of knowledge and experience with the subject [of vampirology] and I will gladly devote an entire chapter in my book to your work.” They met in a London suburb for a little under two hours on 15 November 1989. This was the only time they held a conversation. It became apparent that Page was out of her depth and knew nothing about either vampirology or vampiroidism. Despite employing Seán Manchester’s work to provide, albeit in altered form, one fifth of the text for her book, she failed to mention him in her acknowledgements and would not supply him with a complimentary copy when her book was published. She requested the loan of some photographs, two of which were not returned, and none of which were used as her book contains no illustrations. Page wanted inside information about the subculture, and anything vaguely sensational. She was to be disappointed. It was explained that Seán Manchester is a researcher into supernatural phenomena and that his published work The Highgate Vampire might best inform her about his modus operandi. During the meeting, conducted in an indoor café, Page wore exceptionally dark sunglasses (as in the picture above) which made it impossible to see her eyes. Seán Manchester had no real wish to constantly look only at his own reflection and, therefore, averted his gaze from time to time. Page makes an issue of this in her book. She is indescribably petty. It is indeed incredible that her book ever came to be published. Save for the text devoted to defaming the VRS president, her effort dwells on a few vampiroids she met plus a catastrophic television show beamed by satellite from Budapest to the USA on which Seán Manchester, while invited, declined to appear. His instinct, once again, proved correct.

Having by now met Seán Manchester and absorbed his work from cover to cover, Page wrote on 23 February 1990: “The chapter about your work is based on your book, The Highgate Vampire, and the transcript of the interview we did in November.” It is nothing of the sort, needless to say. Her letter continued: “I told [Julian Henriques of the BBC] that I did not think any look at the modern vampire ‘scene,’ if you will, was complete without a look at Seán Manchester and his work. I hope that is all right with you.” This was written by Page an entire three months after she had met Seán Manchester, and long after she had read and absorbed the contents of The Highgate Vampire. She concluded her letter with the following sentence: “Your work in this area is important and I congratulate you for taking the time to do it.” (To obtain a copy of this letter, send a SAE in the UK, or an IRC if outside the UK to the Vampire Research Society, 5 John Street, Penmachno, Betws-y-coed, Gwynedd LL24 0UH, North Wales, United Kingdom).

However, when she came to write her book she wrongly attributed the damage to tombs at Highgate Cemetery, not to those persons actually convicted of such crimes, but to the VRS president whom she portrays in what can only be described as defamatory terms. Seán Manchester has not been convicted of any crime or misdemeanour. She also claims that he has been banned from entering Highgate Cemetery. This, again, is completely untrue as the Friends of Highgate Cemetery will gladly confirm. It is hardly surprising that her publishers are not interested in reprinting her book. It misinforms and offends.

The catalogue of distortions and half-truths in her book will not be dignified with too much repetition, save that one of the milder inaccuracies ~ the false attribution that Seán Manchester considers Lady Caroline Lamb to be a vampire ~ is not untypical of the journalistic style employed. Her attention to what is a matter of public record took a very poor second place to the agenda which Seán Manchester describes in his vampirological guide as being reliant on “squalid sensationalism, silly gossip and malicious falsehood.” He also raises the very significant point that “Page sought no comment” from him “on any of the charges she brings.”

Readers of her book were quick to voice their disapproval. A representative sample follows:



“I would treat anything this woman said with the utmost scepticism.”

~ Clare Emmett, Norwich, Norfolk, England.



“Regarding Highgate Cemetery, as I recall, the criminal damage was done by [name deleted], not Manchester who I believe was on record then as attempting to counter [the true offender’s] odd behaviour.”

~ Phædra Kelly, Freshwater, Isle of Wight, UK.



“I have pretty much concluded that Ms Page doesn’t care about what she has written, she is only waiting for royalties.”

~ Dorion Cable, Detroit, Michigan, USA.



“She is snide and condescending, both to the people she interviews and to the reader. She incessantly states her own opinions, interpretations, and snotty comments at every opportunity.”

~ Chad Savage, San Francisco, California, USA.



“She’s not at all objective and it definitely colours the way she writes. She takes things I said so far out of context that even though I said certain things they have a totally different meaning than I meant. Carol took one isolated incident and exaggerated it and made me out to be bi-sexual, which I am not. … Sexual preference is a big thing to her, all through the whole book. It seems what Carol wanted to write about was sex, not ‘vampires.’ … I don’t appreciate being used as a tool to sell her book.”

~ Shannon, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

(Shannon, like Seán Manchester, was interviewed by Carol Page for Blood Lust.)



Even Rob Brautigam, not someone known to support Seán Manchester, commented at the time: “Those guys at ‘prestigious’ Harper Collins [publishers] must have been asleep on the job when they decided to accept such a worthless book for publication.” Jeanne Youngson, who had collaborated with Page throughout the production of the book, wrote in her Count Dracula Fan Club newsletter in January 1992: “I’m sure some people envy Carol Page. It’s not often one can get a book published and get paid for it while shooting down people one doesn’t like.”

Meanwhile, Seán Manchester has, of course, exposed the whole Blood Lust saga in a chapter of his concise vampirological guide, The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook. He closes his response to Page with this comment: “Having acquiesced to her request for some of my time and having been made the subject of one fifth of her text, my only reward was to be labelled ‘depraved’ and ‘the true evil that occurred in Highgate Cemetery’.” It is indeed a most curious way for a new author to show gratitude for help given.

[Vampirologist]

Publication in 1991 of the larger revised edition of The Highgate Vampire in the UK was accompanied by two other books, both released in America, that also discussed the Highgate case and the man who conducted it some two decades earlier. The American editions were seriously flawed and Carol Page, author of one of them, received complaints, as did her publisher, from many she interviewed. The other book by Rosemary Ellen Guiley was less harsh. Guiley, unlike Page, accepted that material on offer from the “Count Dracula Fan Club” (now known as the “Vampire Empire”) about Seán Manchester was unsafe and unreliable. Yet her work remains poorly presented and sometimes misleading with regard to her references to Seán Manchester and the Highgate Vampire case.

Soon another American was having a stab at the Highgate Vampire case in an article written for the UK’s Folklore Society. Described as an “academic report,” Bill Ellis’ The Highgate Cemetery Vampire Hunt, published in 1993, proved to be another catalogue of misrepresentation and error. Though Ellis possessed a copy of The Highgate Vampire, he chose to ignore much of its contents and instead listened to someone he interviewed in July 1992 who was nothing to do with the case. The outcome was a complete travesty that is examined in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook. Ellis’ article nevertheless has serious implications because its author is a university professor no less, and his article was published in Folklore, another university society’s journal.

Ellis, for all his scholarly prowess, did not meet or correspond with anyone connected to the thirteen-year investigation into the case of the Highgate Vampire for his Folkore article which is void of any balancing material and is little more than a polemic. He relied on someone who could tell him nothing useful because this person was either out of the country or languishing in jail at the time of all major incidents, bar the mass vampire hunt (which entire night he spent largely in a local pub). By the time Ellis conceded (in correspondence to Seán Manchester in early 1996) that he might have made erroneous assertions in his Folklore article, these same errors had been plagiarised and reproduced in even more exaggerated form by a UK journalist for a book ostensibly about possession. Both are members of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, yet this journalist reproduced the misleading content of Ellis’ article without the latter’s knowledge or permission, for a publisher who refused to discuss the matter when called to account by Seán Manchester. The 1993 article, significantly expurgated, was to manifest seven years later as chapter eight of Raising the Devil (University Press of Kentucky, 2000). Still titled The Highgate Cemetery Vampire Hunt, this chapter is Ellis’ attempt to rewrite those events. It pays scant regard to recorded evidence in public annals.

Next we discover Matthew Bunson whose encyclopedia, published in 1993, concentrates on an amateur vampire hunter with barely a mention of the actual VRS investigation that took place. In 1995 Peter Hough repeats the same material found in Bunson’s work without so much as mentioning the bona fide investigation that took place. Neither of these authors, nor their publishers, responded to any of the correspondence they were sent by the Vampire Research Society or its founding president.

When Jean Marigny’s Vampires: The World of the Undead, 1993, came to be translated for the UK and USA editions, reference to the Highgate Vampire case (which had been reliable and accurate in the French edition), and the accompanying case file photographs, were all expurgated without the knowledge or consent of Professor Marigny. The New York publisher responsible for the translation and surprising deletion refused to answer any correspondence from Seán Manchester and the VRS.

When Leonard Ashley published his duplicated comments (from Page’s Blood Lust) about the Highgate case some five years later in The Complete Book of Vampires, he had not met nor corresponded with Seán Manchester at any time in his life. Neither Ashley, nor his New York publisher, responded to any correspondence sent by Seán Manchester when he objected to being described as “deceased.” The UK publisher, however, once alerted to what they were reprinting, wisely had all reference to Seán Manchester and Highgate Cemetery removed from their 1999 edition. They accepted that the book would otherwise be unsafe.

Liverpool journalist Tom Slemen, made his offering to the growing mountain of disinformation in a paperback published by Parragon in 1998 where Alan Blood becomes the “organiser” of the “mass vampire hunt that would take place on Friday 13 March 1970.” This might be something of a shock to Blood who stated at the time that he would not enter the cemetery under any circumstance and had insufficient knowledge to deal with the suspected contagion. Slemen then goes on to state that “Mr Blood was interviewed on television.” Alan Blood was not interviewed on television. It was Seán Manchester who was interviewed for Thames Television’s Today report on 13 March 1970. Next we are misinformed that Blood’s “plan was to wait until dawn, when the first rays of the rising sun would force the vampire to return to his subterranean den in the catacombs.” This was not Blood’s plan at all. It was an amateur vampire hunter’s plan, as described on the Today programme. Not deterred by these glaring errors, Slemen then proceeds to describe the antics of “a self-appointed vampire hunter [who] scaled the wall of Highgate Cemetery, armed with a cross and a wooden stake.” The lone vampire hunter is quoted saying: “The Highgate Vampire has to be destroyed. He is evil.” This same person would later appear on another television programme, in the same year that Slemen’s paperback was published, to say that he did not believe in the existence of vampires and did not believe in the existence of the Devil. Slemen, a disc jockey as well as a journalist, put this misinformation from his paperback onto his website. Needless to say, neither book nor website make any mention of who really organised the mass vampire hunt in March 1970. The real investigation is totally ignored.

Elizabeth Miller’s treatise on the novel Dracula, in the year 2000, refers to what readers are told is an argument proffered by Seán Manchester, but, in fact, is a quote from the error in Carol Page’s Blood Lust published nine years earlier. Amazingly, Professor Miller (yes, another professor!) wrote to the VRS on 18 July 2000: “As for quoting from Carol Page, I suspected her book was not reliable, which is why I made it quite clear that your remarks were ‘as quoted in’ her book. That is the accepted method of handling such situations in the scholarly community.” But it is by no means clear. No mention is made in the text (where this quote appears) of either Page’s book, or, moreover, that it is unreliable. Seán Manchester responded to Miller’s publisher: “Why on earth did this woman use a source which, by her own admission, is unreliable when she could have contacted me to be told what she wanted to know? This, at least, is the accepted method of handling such situations in the literary community.”

These examples are merely the tip of an iceberg of mounting disinformation offered to the public about the VRS, its president and, in the examples given above, the Highgate Vampire case. Does a conspiracy exist to cover up the truth about vampires? It is only conjecture, needless to say, but the Vampire Research Society believes that there is sufficient prima facie evidence to support the contention that true cases of vampirism are being, to quote our old friend Montague Summers, “carefully hushed up and stifled.”