The Vampire of Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery in North London is a magnificent Gothic graveyard

full of intricately designed mausoleums,

stone angels and Egyptian sepulchres.

It's home to, among others, the founder of communism, Karl Marx, many sculptors and artists,

and literary figures including female novelist Marianne Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Elliot,

and more recently, the singer George Michael.

The cemetery is open only for guided tours, for safety reasons.

Some of the slopes are very steep, and the paths can be very uneven.

In the Victorian era, it was highly fashionable to be buried here in a grand Gothic mausoleum,

but it was in the 70s that the Semitue came to prominence in the public interest,

although not really for the right reasons. It was claimed that a vampire had been shipped over

from Romania centuries ago by a nobleman of the highest order,

who buried the vampire in a mausoleum in the cemetery.

A group of naive occultists had raised the vampire and set it loose in the grounds of the cemetery.

Local man David Ferrant wrote a letter to the Hampstead and Highgate Express on February 6, 1970, in which he described that he had been passing the cemetery on Christmas Eve in 1969 when he had glimpsed a fleeting figure.

He said, I had an awareness of some kind of presence. I decided to wait a minute to try to find

some material thing, such as a tree moving in the wind that could have accounted for it. Staring

into the blackness, there was a distinct impression of something moving. What appeared one

minute to be a solid black shape would suddenly alter its form.

Something caught my eye, and clearly visible, was a tall, dark shape. I wanted to assume it was

someone wandering through the cemetery, despite that the figure appeared to be over seven feet

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