The Truth Staked

Click on image to listen to podcast.

The material regarding Highgate Cemetery does not commence until forty minutes into the HPANWO Radio podcast where David Farrant trots out familiar contradictory nonsense about himself, eg that he "was involved in a mystical order many years ago" etc. What absolute poppycock!

The purpose of the wooden stake was apparently to drive into the ground to make a circle for magical purposes, Farrant alleges somewhat unconvincingly to Ben Emlyn Jones interviewing him. Yet documentated material from the time reveals him to be "vampire hunting" with a cross and stake.

He claims early on in the interview that he denied the entity was a vampire back in 1970. Completely untrue. Farrant, more than anyone else, jumped on what he perceived to be a publicity bandwagon and stated in an interview given to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 6 March 1970, that his intention was to do everything in his power to rid the place of its vampire. Moreover, on 17 August 1970, he was arrested at midnight in Highgate Cemetery by police who found him to be in possession of a sharp wooden stake, a Roman Catholic crucifix and similar religious items, eg rosaries etc. 

Interviewed by BBC television's "24 Hours" programme two months later on 15 October 1970, David Farrant confirmed that he was vampire hunting when arrested, and indeed reconstructed the events of that night which involved him creeping about in the same graveyard with a cross in one hand, a wooden stake in the other, plus a rosary around his neck - all for the benefit of the television camera.

"He actually pulled a wooden stake out of his trousers," says Farrant, referring to Seán Manchester. The images show Farrant a few moments after pulling a wooden stake out of his trousers on the BBC transmission. He lied to Ben Emlyn Jones about the reason he was shown with a cross and stake. When the original programme is watched it is clear he was reconstructing his behaviour on the night of his arrest at Highgate Cemetery two months earlier. He was an unaccompanied amateur "vampire hunter" seeking publicity and not the undead. Click on either colour image for confirmation of this.

David Farrant can be seen above demonstrating his "vampire hunting" prowess. What nobody realised at the time is that he had orchestrated his own arrest on 17 August 1970 by having the police anonymously alerted just before he entered the graveyard. This was to ensure maximum publicity in the media. It worked, and he was acquitted of being in an enclosed area for an unlawful purpose because Highgate Cemetery is not an enclosed area. Next time he wasn't so lucky. Farrant was found guilty of indecency in a churchyard in November 1972 at Barnet Magistrates' Court.

When the layers of pretence are slowly peeled away, the man underneath is revealed to be charlatan.

The David Farrant Fictionalised Story

"The David Farrant Story" is a short video made by Max and Bart Sycamore who, while using BBC archive footage from 1970 of Seán Manchester in some parts, do not actually identify, ie name, him.

Unlike the Sycamore brothers, Seán Manchester was acquainted with Farrant in the 1970s and early 1980s, which is why this biography can be dismissed as a fantasy originating with Farrant himself.

David Farrant provided all the "facts." However, this is still no excuse for the Sycamore brothers employing misleading and incorrect newspaper articles throughout the video. For example, when examining Farrant's first imprisonment on remand at Brixton in 1970 for supposedly vampire hunting in Highgate Cemetery they chose to show completely unrelated and irrelevant press cuttings from November 1972 which reveal him in Barnet's Monken Hadley churchyard where he was arrested and later found guilty of indecency. His "assistant" Victoria Jervis was similarly found guilty of indecency. She would reveal two years later under oath that what was claimed about her by Farrant, eg that she was a witch, was totally false, and that she had been duped into becoming "involved."

This 1972 case was about necromancy, not vampires. Yet one might be forgiven for thinking it related to the vampire arrest at Highgate Cemetery two years earlier. Why didn't the Sycamore brothers use cuttings from the massive coverage available about the other case two years earlier?

Probably because the photographs showed Farrant brandishing a large cross and a wooden stake!

Early on in the video, Farrant disingenuously claims that in 1966 he was engaged in some sort of "psychic investigation" with the "British Psychic and Occult Society." What makes that claim both fraudulent and absurd is that David Farrant was not a resident in the UK at that time, and, of course, the "British Psychic and Occult Society" did not exist. In fact, it has never existed, save in name. The "BPOS" was not used as his title and nomenclature for a non-existent "society" until 1983.

David Farrant was living in France and Spain throughout 1966. He met his first wife, an Irish girl called Mary Olden, while still on the Continent where he made her pregnant. They returned to England in the summer of 1967 and married in August. Their son was born in November of that year.

Mary attested under oath at the Old Bailey when subpœnaed by her husband in 1974 during his notorious criminal trials for tomb desecration and threatening police witnesses etc that his self-proclaimed association with witchcraft, the occult and psychic investigation was bogus, and that his nocturnal jaunts with friends in Highgate Cemetery were "giggles in the graveyard after the pubs had closed." When asked if her husband and his friends were involved in witchcraft and the occult, she said: "No, I am as sure as I can be about that." She she should know because she was there and was present in the graveyard when they "mucked about." These friends also used her flat as a hotel.

This is the David Farrant that Seán Manchester eventually revealed when the layers of pretence had been peeled away; this is the man he unearthed after years of knowing him; someone who believed in nothing spiritual or supernatural; someone who was a complete charlatan. Farrant's primary motivation was gratuitous attention seeking, as many others have found, sometimes to their cost. The press have their own agenda, and seldom allow the truth to get in the way of a sensational story.

The people to shoulder blame are those who provide David Farrant with the publicity he craves. They are his "dealers." He is the hopeless addict, and his fatal addiction is for manufactured self-publicity.

Directly above is a Daily Mirror newspaper report the Sycamore brothers could have used instead of the misleading articles about an indecency case in November 1972. Click on it to view Farrant reconstructing for BBC television in October 1970 what he was doing when he was arrested in Highgate Cemetery. To view "The David Farrant Story" by the Sycamore brothers, click on the image showing David Farrant as a teenager with his mother (from the video) at the top of the page.