The Vampire of Highgate Cemetery

Unexplained : True Tales of Unexplained Mysteries with Bestselling Author Steph Young

Steph Young

History, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality

4.2 • 605 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It all seemed to begin when local man David Farrant wrote a letter to the Hampstead and Highgate Express on February the 6th 1970, in which he explained that he had been passing the cemetery on Christmas Eve 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. Suddenly 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 tall, but this was soon dispelled when I saw two red eyes meeting mine. Those eyes were not human…’ Tales of Mystery Unexplained Podcast – The Highgate Vampire

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Vampire of Highgate Cemetery.
0:14.3	Highgate Cemetery in North London is a magnificent Gothic graveyard full of intricately
0:20.7	designed mausoleums,
0:22.7	stone angels and Egyptian sepulchus. It's home to, among others, the founder of communism,
0:29.5	Karl Marx, several past mayors of London, many sculptors and artists, including Henry Moore,
0:36.8	famous engineer Michael Faraday,
0:39.1	and literary figures including female novelist Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George
0:45.9	Elliot. Elizabeth Siddell, who was Ophelia in the famous painting by John Everett, Millais,
0:53.3	is also laid to rest here.
0:55.5	And more recently, the singer George Michael.
0:58.8	The cemetery's grounds are full of tall, thick, mature trees and shrubbery, and naturally populating
1:04.8	wildflowers which form a natural haven for birds and small animals like foxes.
1:10.4	The cemetery is open only for guided tours, for safety reasons.
1:14.9	Some of the slopes are very steep, particularly in the West Cemetery, and the paths can be
1:19.7	very uneven.
1:21.5	And as it is also a nature reserve, it's to protect the delicate flora and fauna in the
1:27.2	cemetery. In the Victorian era, it was highly protect the delicate flora and fauna in the cemetery.
1:28.5	In the Victorian era, it was highly fashionable to be buried here in a grand, gothic mausoleum,
1:34.8	but it was in the 70s that the cemetery came to prominence in the public interest,
1:39.5	although not really for the right reasons.
1:42.5	It was claimed that a vampire had been shipped over from
1:46.5	Romania centuries ago by a nobleman of the highest order, who buried the vampire in a mausoleum
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