A Vampire Conspiracy?

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.”