Highgate Cemetery

OVERVIEW

A Victorian garden cemetery in north London, opened in 1839 with the East side added in 1860; Karl Marx, George Eliot and Michael Faraday are buried here. Its catacombs and Egyptian Avenue were derelict by the late 1960s, when it became the setting of the Highgate Vampire affair — the best-documented piece of modern British vampire lore, written up by the folklorist Bill Ellis in the journal Folklore in 1993.

HISTORY

On 6 February 1970 David Farrant wrote to the Hampstead and Highgate Express that he had seen 'a grey figure' passing the cemetery on Christmas Eve 1969; the following week other readers described a tall man in a hat, a spectral cyclist, a woman in white, a face at the gates. Farrant and Sean Manchester each announced he would deal with the entity; ITV interviewed both on Friday 13 March 1970 and within two hours a crowd of self-appointed hunters had climbed the locked gates and walls despite the police. Tombs were broken open in the months that followed and Farrant was later convicted over damage in the cemetery.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The 1970 sightings are on record in the newspaper letters; what they were is not. Ellis reads the episode as legend-tripping fed by the press and by Hammer films. The Friends of Highgate Cemetery, who restored the site from 1975, do not promote the story, and the cemetery is a burial ground first.

VISITING

The East cemetery is open by ticket; the West by guided tour only. It is a working cemetery: no night visits, no 'hunting'.