Red Alert ~ Red Rant

Seán Manchester's comments provided balance and addressed an injustice. He was not talking about the case he investigated. The issues he raised focused on the inappropriateness of a registered charity, which is obliged to be impartial, inviting extremely partial speakers to discuss his case; speakers, moreover, who have a history of stalking, trolling and publishing abuse about him.

The only person who is ever maligned is Seán Manchester, and he is maligned, libelled and has hatred incited against him by the very same speakers who have been invited to the ASSAP event.

Redmond McWilliams reverts to type with his other rant about David Farrant being "central to the Highgate Vampire case." Farrant, to be clear, played no part whatsoever in the Highgate Vampire case. He was not even resident in the UK when Seán Manchester first became aware of the eerie goings-on at Highgate Cemetery, and knew nobody connected to the case when he did return from the Continent. The only ball Farrant started rolling was unwanted publicity due to his "ghost" hoax.

Seán Manchester, as Redmond McWilliams knows because it is a matter of public record and stated in published works, did not utter the "Wallachian King Vampire" remark. Like so much else, it is a false attribution. The banner headline "Does a wampyr walk in Highgate?" appeared across the front page of the Hampstead & Highgate Express newspaper on 27 February 1970. The editor himself had written the piece after meeting privately with Seán Manchester who was at that time the president of the British Occult Society and founder of the then fledgling Vampire Research Society. 

The editor allowed himself to get carried away by introducing the journalistic embellishment "King Vampire of the Undead" - a term that Seán Manchester did not employ, as stated by me on page 72 of The Vampire Hunter's Handbook: A Concise Vampirological Guide. Another quote attributed to "one of Britain's busiest exorcists, the Rev John Neil-Smith" (they couldn't even get his name right - it was actually Christopher Neil-Smith) is also misquoted: "I believe the whole idea of vampires is probably a novelistic embellishment." He said nothing of the sort. The Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith (1920-1995) was an Anglican priest, most celebrated for his practice of exorcism and his paranormal interests. Like Seán Manchester, whom he obviously knew, Neil-Smith believed that evil is an external reality and should be treated as such rather than as an abstract concept. A vicar at St Saviour's Anglican Church at Eton Road in Hampstead, London, he performed more than three thousand exorcisms in Britain. In 1972, the Bishop of London authorised him to exorcise demons according to his own judgement. Two years earlier, he was misquoted in the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 27 February 1970, saying that vampires are "probably a novelistic embellishment," but Reverend Neil-Smith claimed to have actually exorcised vampires, as confirmed in a book written by Daniel Farson and Angus Hall which records: "Yet not far from Highgate Cemetery lives a man who takes reports of vampirism seriously. The Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith is a leading British exorcist and writer on exorcism. He can cite several examples of people who have come to him for help in connection with vampirism. 'The one that particularly strikes me is that of a woman who showed me the marks on her wrists which appeared at night, where blood had definitely been taken. And there was no apparent reason why this should have occurred. They were marks like those of an animal. Something like scratching.' He denies this might have been done by the woman herself. She came to him when she felt her blood was being sucked away, and after he performed an exorcism the marks disappeared." Christopher Neil-Smith clearly believed in vampires. 

Ironically, Redmond McWilliams dredges up "desecrated tombs," something his pal David Farrant was charged and found guilty of committing, resulting in him receiving a two years' prison sentence for desecration at Highgate Cemetery in the early 1970s. McWilliams also mentions "nocturnal satanic cults." But didn't his own friend and collaborator Farrant also subscribe to their existence at Highgate Cemetery? The police certainly did: especially after clear evidence was found in August 1970. Then, finally, the name of Bill Ellis is evoked. Yet Ellis' article in the Folklore Society journal, and book that followed, Raising the Devil, lays ostensive behaviour and legend-tripping at the door of David Farrant whom he met in London in July 1992. Ellis also wanted to meet Seán Manchester, but once it was learned that the American professor was consorting with Farrant it was ruled out of the question. Even so, Bill Ellis and Seán Manchester were in agreement over Farrant's part in it all.