In the Beginning

 

FROM SEÁN MANCHESTER'S MEMOIR

* * *

Anthony stood alongside a pretty, dark-haired woman, not his wife, who held a baby, not his, in her arms. They wanted the use of my flat for a brief period before going off together to goodness knows where. Anthony referred to the girl’s husband as “Allan,” which, though not his real name, was the name by which he was apparently known amongst friends. The girl, Mary, was someone I vaguely recognised as a barmaid from a pub on Archway Road where I had played saxophone in a jazz group on occasions. Now she and Anthony were asking me to collude in their “elopement.” Put on the spot, I made a split-second decision to resolve the dilemma by declining. Anthony was never quite the same again after that. He failed to return to the studio darkroom after the six months “elopement” ― something he described as the happiest months of his life ― and instead opted to take employment other than darkroom work, including another milkman’s job prior to becoming a newspaper vendor. Mary, now pregnant, returned to “Allan,” but left for the second time, to live with her parents by the late summer of 1969. She eventually filed for a divorce. Anthony returned to his wife and their Highgate flat in Archway Road.

The bizarre twist to this episode is that “Allan,” now having been made homeless following his eviction from a nearby flat, sought refuge in Anthony’s coal cellar. Partial to alcohol, “Allan” would later be arrested and held on remand for shenanigans not entirely unrelated to his drinking in the following year. A handful of months before the arrest, he wrote to his local newspaper, at the behest of Anthony, to declare that he had seen a ghostly figure some nights as he “walked home past the gates of Highgate Cemetery.” Thus he became one of the many people I sought to interview, and was included among those briefly interviewed in the press and on television throughout 1970. There is an obvious flaw in his overture to the press in as much as it is physically impossible to “walk home” from any of the pubs he frequented in Highgate Village and pass by the cemetery gates in Swains Lane. Any map of the area will show that his coal bunker lodgings in Archway Road were located in the opposite direction. But, then, “Allan” was less than serious when he wrote his letter in February 1970. Indeed, the exercise was an attention-seeking prank. To that end, I suppose it succeeded. I learned these facts later from Anthony without too much surprise, but some dismay. "Allan" gave Anthony the pseudonym "Tony Hutchinson" in newspaper and magazine articles.

Revelations later made by Anthony only served to confirm what I had already suspected. It would seem that “Allan” had discussed faking another news story. It was decided to invent a story about the escape and recapture of his macaw, Oliver, now in the care of someone else. This was hardly original. “Goldie” the eagle had escaped from London Zoo in 1965, only to be later recaptured. This became a national news story at the time. “Allan” thought he had found a bandwagon on which to catch a ride. Anthony, unimpressed by the Oliver story, jokingly suggested a fake suicide attempt from Archway Bridge with a no less bogus “rescue.” This, too, was unoriginal because a news story about the actor and comedian Peter Sellers persuading a depressed person (about to jump off Archway Bridge) from committing suicide had also made the headlines.

While “Allan” was thinking about how to go about manufacturing one or possibly both stories, he heard talk of an alleged vampire in Highgate Cemetery on his visits to the Prince of Wales and various other pubs in the area.

The escaped bird and fake suicide attempt stories were instantly ditched. “Allan” was determined to exploit the three-year-old word-of-mouth reports of a vampire by writing a letter to the editor of the Hampstead and Highgate Express in early 1970, ending with the frank admission: “I have no knowledge in this field and I would be interested to hear if any other readers have seen anything of this nature.” Some readers of the newspaper were apparently able to confirm plenty of sightings. Unfortunately, some of the correspondents had been put up to it by "Allan," whom they were acquainted with.

The Highgate phenomenon was a story about to snowball. This had the unfortunate effect of dragging me into the forefront of something I had decided hitherto to keep a lid on. I felt that it was incumbent upon me to make some sort of statement in view of all the readers’ comments. Thus, on 27 February 1970, following batches of readers’ letters, I appeared on the front page to summarise the view of the British Occult Society and the newly-formed Vampire Research Society. It did not make easy reading. Two weeks later, I featured on Thames Television’s Today programme with the same ambition.

“Allan” also made an appearance on the same transmission, along with several youngsters who had allegedly witnessed a spectre at Highgate Cemetery. Sandra Harris, interviewing “Allan,” asked: “Did you get any feelings from it? Did you feel that it was evil?” Now calling himself David (his given name), “Allan” replied: “Yes, I did feel that it was evil because the last time I actually saw its face and it looked like it had been dead for a long time.” Sandra Harris asked: “What do you mean by that?” “Allan” answered: “Well, I mean it certainly wasn’t human.” That was all he had to say on the Today report, yet its repercussions haunted him thereafter

Captioned “David F——” [his surname is deleted here to avoid awarding him any further publicity], he certainly made no claim to any association with the British Occult Society. Needless to say, “Allan,” or David, was not a member, associate or participant in the activities of the British Occult Society, which existed purely for the purpose of investigating occult and supernatural phenomena. The following year found David fraudulently claiming membership. The claim was instantly and publicly rebuffed by the British Occult Society. He next absurdly claimed to be both “president and founder.” Disclaimers followed press reports whenever he was thus described, invariably with the editor adding the prefix “self-styled.” Tired of being exposed in the press as an interloping charlatan who had hijacked the name of a long extant organisation, along with the title of its current president, in 1983 David altered the name of his “society” by inserting the word “Psychic” in its title. Nobody was fooled. He had spoken to the media about his “thousands of followers” (Hornsey Journal, 23 November 1979), and even went so far as to proffer the notion of a number as high as twenty thousand members (Finchley Press, 22 February 1980). However, in the same report was stated the following: “On Monday, Seán Manchester, president of the British Occult Society, disclaimed any connection between Mr F[——] and the society. Questioning Mr F[——]’s claim to have 20,000 ‘followers,’ Mr Manchester said: ‘I challenge you to find one serious occultist in the whole of the United Kingdom who will support any of Mr F[——]’s claims.’ Mr Manchester believes that Mr F[——]’s activities — including the libel action [which he lost] — have been publicity-seeking.”

This had been my assessment in early 1970 when I first made his acquaintance while interviewing witnesses of the widely reported Highgate spectre. It was also the conclusion of others. Eminent researcher Peter Underwood would comment in a book published five years after David had launched himself in the media: “Publicity of a dubious kind has surrounded the activities of a person or persons named F[——] and his — or their — association with Highgate Cemetery. … a Mr Allan F[——] was caught climbing over the wall of Highgate Cemetery carrying a wooden cross and a sharpened piece of wood. … According to the Daily Mail Allan F[——] saw ‘an apparition’ eight feet tall in the cemetery that ‘just floated along the ground’ when he was on watch one morning waiting ‘for the vampire to rise.’ He believed that there had been a vampire in Highgate Cemetery for about ten years. … Less than a month later a Mr David F[——] was guiding Barry Simmons of the London Evening News on a night-tour of Highgate Cemetery armed with a cross and wooden stake which he carried under his arm in a paper carrier bag. In fact the whole project seems to have been a somewhat dismal and depressing effect — even the cross, created from two pieces of wood, was tied together with a shoelace.” [The Vampire’s Bedside Companion by Peter Underwood, Leslie Frewin Books, 1975, pages 77-79.]

In a home-produced and stapled pamphlet, somewhat unimaginatively titled Beyond the Highgate Vampire, self-published a quarter of a century later, David denied vampire hunting with a cross and stake. He merely wanted to measure out a circle, he unconvincingly claimed, with the wooden stake and a piece of string. Even so, a nine inch tall photograph of him, holding a cross in one hand and a stake in the other, appeared on the front page of the Hornsey Journal, 28 June 1974, beneath a banner headline stating: “The Graveyard Ghoul Awaits His Fate.” The picture’s caption read: “F[——] on a ‘vampire hunt’ in Highgate Cemetery.” The report began: “Wicked witch David F[——], tall, pale and dressed all in black, saw his weird world crumble about him this week. F[——], aged 28, the ghoulish, self-styled High Priest of the British Occult Society [sic], was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of damaging a memorial to the dead at Highgate Cemetery and interfering with buried remains. … Mr Richard du Cann prosecuting, accused F[——] of ‘terrible’ crimes and at one stage described him as a ‘wicked witch.’ … One of the witnesses for the prosecution was Journal reporter Roger Simpson. F[——] had given him a photograph of a corpse in a partly-opened coffin. Because of the nature of the picture, the paper decided not to publish it, and it was handed to the police.”

The public relations damage inflicted upon the actual British Occult Society by David’s phoney association was due to his incessant manufacture of fraudulent news stories and claims of “occult powers” and “witchcraft ceremonies.” In countless published interviews given by David to the press, he boasted of sacrificing cats, invariably adding that they were “stray cats” and that they were “anaesthetised” before having their throats slit. “We rarely sacrifice animals in rituals but this sacrifice was essential to our belief as we derive power from blood. The power we gain is used for good as against evil,” he told Roger Simpson in an article for the Hornsey Journal, 31 August 1973, adding: “Hundreds’ of years ago a naked virgin would have been sacrificed but obviously we couldn’t do this now so we had to have an animal for the important ritual.”

A headline news story in the same newspaper, 28 September 1973, revealed: “F[——], as the Journal reported, admitted slitting a ‘stray’ cat’s throat at the height of a bizarre witchcraft ritual … in Highgate Woods recently.” There are countless quotes in the press where he describes his animal sacrifice threats and their execution, eg headline of the Hornsey Journal, 7 September 1973: “I will sacrifice cat at Hallowe’en: F[——],” and the same newspaper, 16 November 1979: “Ritual sex act and cat sacrifice,” followed by a report opening with the words: “Self-styled ‘high priest’ David F[——] told a High Court jury this week of the night he performed a ritual sex act in an attempt to summon up a vampire in Highgate Cemetery. He admitted that he had taken part in the ‘sacrifice’ of a stray cat in Highgate Wood.” In another squalid report, where he is interviewed by Sue Kentish for the News of the World, 23 September 1973, he is quoted as saying: “I did not enjoy having to kill the cat, but for one particular part of the ritual it was necessary. The sacrifice of a living creature represents the ultimate act in invoking a deity. I do not see animal sacrifice as drastic as people have made it out to be. … And, at least, I anaesthetised the cat before I had to kill it.”

While serving a four years and eight months prison sentence, David wrote an article for New Witchcraft magazine (issue 4), in which he claimed: “In magic, blood is symbolic of the ‘life force’ or ‘spiritual energy’ which permeates the body and in this context is used in many advanced magical ceremonies. It would not be sacrilegious to compare this to the use of wine as symbolic of blood in the Catholic Communion. Accordingly, at approximately 11.45pm, I drew blood.” His lengthy description of summoning a “satanic force” is nothing short of an admission to his engagement in unabashed diabolism: “We then lay in the Pentagram and began love-making, all the time visualizing the Satanic Force so that it could — temporarily — take possession of our bodies.” Use of the word “temporarily” might have been inappropriate in the circumstances and somewhat premature with hindsight.

In my first unexpurgated account of the Highgate case, I tendered the following opinion: “I have found not a single shred of evidence to suggest that the least of these things are true.” [The Highgate Vampire, British Occult Society, 1985, page 80.]

I slowly became less confident in that view, as his associations with hardcore Satanists like Jean-Paul Bourre grew exponentially. Accordingly I expurgated it from the 1991 edition of The Highgate Vampire. The simple fact of the matter is that I did not know how far he was capable of going. After all, he had broken the law before I ever met him, using two British passports — the phoney one being in the name of “Allan Aden Ellson.” To own this passport meant that he had acquired Crown property through deception by falsifying information on the application form. Had it been known at the time by the authorities, he would have been arrested and charged with a serious offence. He was causing the BOS/VRS a lot of personal inconvenience, and was obviously a compulsive individual. But how sinister, or even satanic, was he really?

Two people who knew him longer than anyone else, Anthony and David’s first wife, Mary, are convinced that his witchcraft and occult stunts were utterly phoney. In that regard I concurred, but I could no longer opine with certainty just how far or not he was willing to go in the pursuit of publicity.

The Sun, 21 June 1974, recorded: “The wife of self-styled occult priest David F[——] told yesterday of giggles in the graveyard when the pubs had closed. ‘We would go in, frighten ourselves to death and come out again,’ she told an Old Bailey jury. Attractive Mary F[——] — she is separated from her husband and lives in Southampton — said they had often gone to London’s Highgate Cemetery with friends ‘for a bit of a laugh.’ But they never caused any damage. ‘It was just a silly sort of thing that you do after the pubs shut,’ she said. Mrs F[——] added that her husband’s friends who joined in the late night jaunts were not involved in witchcraft or the occult. She had been called as a defence witness by her 28-year-old husband.”

Shortly before and for a period following his imprisonment in 1974, I attempted to gain David’s confidence in order to discover the truth about his alleged “occult” activities. The conclusions I arrive at are published in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook, a work that covers this matter comprehensively: “My personal view is that he has become possessed by demonic influences. His behaviour, by any standard, is extremely obsessive.” His self-styled organisation, rarely consisting of more than one member, I deduce “did not have the same appeal [as other witchcraft groups], owing to the ‘high priest’s’ total lack of occult knowledge and contradictory statements.” [The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook, Gothic Press, 1997, pages 55 & 87.]

From the very beginning — when his acquaintances knew him only as “Allan” — to the last moment I spoke to him [a brief meeting, after a gap of five years, which took place in London’s Highgate Wood at dusk on 24 January 1987, as recorded in From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, pages 73-74], F[——], in the absence of any corroborating witness, would frequently ridicule witches, occultists and also members of any mainstream religious faith. For him witchcraft and the occult was only a means to an end. My impression was that he actually believed none of it. He saw those who took such things seriously as being only worthy of his contempt. His raison d’être was and remains an agenda where his manufactured publicity stunts masked deep-rooted insecurities that probably stem from childhood. By dabbling in these areas, however, David opened himself to the very thing he privately scorned behind closed doors. He rapidly became the Devil’s plaything.

“I don’t believe in the existence of the Devil,” [quoted from David’s appearance on the Michael Cole Show, UK Living, 20 December 1998] he would protest in later years when interviewed. But, of course, the Devil was more than aware of David — and, moreover, sought to manipulate him.

Barring journalists who will always take advantage of a free meal ticket when a compulsive publicity-seeker offers one on a plate, many of his acquaintances who provided David with succour turned out themselves to be apologists for the diabolist Aleister Crowley and others of that ilk.