Graham Bond - a promising and talented rock musician - was born in Romford, Essex, on 28 October 1937. John Pope (who would later change his surname by deed poll to “Pope de Locksley”) was born in north London on 11 July 1953. David Farrant was also born in north London on 23 January 1946. These three individuals came to be linked by one single factor - rivalry within the transparently satanic religion of Thelema concocted by Aleister Crowley before Bond, Pope and Farrant were born.

Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley in Warwickshire in 1875, was the self-proclaimed “Wickedest Man in the World” and the “Great Beast 666.” He also considered himself to be the “avatar of the Age of Horus” which was supposedly a 2000-year-old aeon, beginning in 1904, that would supplant Christianity with “Crowlianity” - the false religion of Thelema. Crowley had rebelled against a strict religious upbringing and was thus initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898, after leaving Cambridge University. He left the Order after a row with its founders and then travelled to Mexico, India and Ceylon, where he was introduced to yoga and Buddhism which replaced his interest in the occult until an experience in Cairo in April 1904. Crowley was asked by his wife, Rose, to perform an esoteric ritual as an experiment. During the ceremony, she entered a trance-like state and became the medium for the words of a communicator. “They are waiting for you,” she said to Crowley. “They,” she said, being Horus, the god of war and the son of Osiris, according to the beliefs of ancient Egypt. The communicator told Crowley to be at his desk in his hotel room between noon and one o’clock on three specific days. He agreed and in these periods he wrote, via automatic writing, a document called The Book of the Law. This tome spoke of a race of supermen and condemned traditional Christianity, pacifism, democracy, compassion and humanitarianism. The foundations for Crowley’s bizarre tenets of Thelema and much of modern Satanism were laid.

Aleister Crowley

Ordo Templi Orientis, once headed by Crowley, today boasts a membership of three thousand in forty countries, half residing in America, and there are many more rival organisations describing themselves as the OTO. All but forgotten at the time of his death as a poverty-stricken heroin addict in a run-down Hastings boarding house in 1947, Crowley was rediscovered two decades later by drug-crazed hippies of the 1960s counter-culture, and was also popularised by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin who bought Crowley’s home in Scotland. From 1973, Crowley was imitated by John Pope, whose belief in Crowlianity is absolute, and David Farrant who believed only in his desire to court publicity and the achievement of same at any price. Farrant and Pope supposedly attempted some of Crowley’s more notorious demon raising ceremonies, including the “raising of Pan,” which led to both being charged with and acquitted of arson. Pope has described himself as the “spiritual son” and “successor” to Aleister Crowley. Farrant’s self-description merely being that of “high priest of witchcraft.”

Farrant (centre) and Pope (right).

"What do witches really do?" was the question posed by Robert Kilroy-Silk on 21 June 2001 on BBC television’s Kilroy programme. Farrant sat in the studio audience. He had been invited as a self-styled “high priest of British witchcraft” along with Kevin Carlyon who coincidentally claimed an identical description. Neither are recognised by other witches or pagans outside their own virtually non-existent covens. Briefly interviewed, Farrant placed importance on being properly initiated into wicca. Carlyon felt that initiation by others was unnecessary. Questions nonetheless arise over Farrant’s own “initiation” and whether or not he is a witch even by his definition because headlines in national newspapers some three decades earlier described him as a “phoney witch.” Michael Fielder, for example, writing in in The Sun, 4 July 1974, titled his article about David Farrant: “Phoney Witch Sent Out Dolls of Death.”

Today Farrant claims the year 1964 for his initiation into witchcraft, but when asked about this matter in interviews given over the previous three decades he told newspaper reporters that he had been initiated by his spiritualist mother when a minor. The age of thirteen was sometimes given. This age wavered in the telling to different journalists, but any “initiation into witchcraft” was obliged to remain prior to 1959 (when he would have been thirteen) because this is the year his mother died. Farrant nowadays claims he was initiated by a someone called “Helen,” but fails to confirm the identity of “Helen.” Such conjecture becomes academic for those who are familiar with his story, as they would be more than aware that his “wicca” is a publicity ploy.

Farrant married his pregnant wife, Mary, in a Roman Catholic Church in August 1967 where a nuptial Mass took place. She gave birth to a son three months later. Albeit a strange choice for a wiccan, when Mary appeared as a defence witness during his Old Bailey trials in June 1974, she affirmed that she had no knowledge of his interest in witchcraft and the occult. His Highgate Cemetery antics were described by his wife under oath as being nothing more than a bit of a laugh and a joke. In the early months of 1970, when he began his attention-seeking shenanigans, he was often photographed in attitudes of prayer before Christian crosses. He posed for photographs wearing crucifixes, rosaries and holding Holy Water. He was still doing so in August 1970, six years after he was supposed to have been initiated according to the latest date of 1964. A photograph taken in 1970 shows Farrant holding a wooden stake in one hand, a bottle of Holy Water in the other and wearing a cross around his neck. It can be found on page 54 of The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook. These are strange accoutrements indeed for a pagan witch. Yet there is no question from autumn of that year he turned to something diabolical to hold the media’s interest. Dr J Gordon Melton records: “In the summer of 1970, David Farrant, another amateur vampire hunter, entered the field. He claimed to have seen the vampire and went hunting for it with a stake and crucifix - but was arrested. He later became a convert to a form of Satanism.”[1]

Graham Bond was an orphan, adopted from the Dr Barnardo’s home, who came to prominence in 1962 at the Marquee Club in London as a featured musician with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. In 1963 Bond formed a trio, then a quartet, before founding in 1964 the Graham Bond Organisation. It was during the following period that he took an unusual interest in the occult and the works of Crowley. He was not alone in that respect. David Bowie and Mick Jagger each became fascinated with the diabolist’s writings, and the singer Sting apparently used to read Crowley’s books when touring. Yet Bond went much further and became a practicing Thelemite. From that moment his fate appears to have been sealed. He renamed his band the Graham Bond Initiation; its final appellation being Holy Magick (adopting Crowley’s perverse spelling of the word “magic”). In the early days, Bond was noted as being a silent, humble figure with a plastic alto saxophone; always on the outskirts of what was going on, never part of it. The thing about him was that he was not noticed. This would change. The versatile keyboard player and saxophonist, who also did some vocals, steadily developed an obsession with the occult, especially the brand of Satanism, devised by Crowley and known as Thelema, imitated by Pope and Farrant. Like his mentor, he also became seriously addicted to drugs and alcohol. According to the posthumous biography The Mighty Shadow, written by Harry Shapiro, Graham Bond sexually abused his stepdaughter. Pope would claim to be Crowley’s “spiritual successor” - employing the title “Son of the Beast” - but Graham Bond went one better. He claimed to be an illegitimate son of Aleister Crowley. In the Left-hand Path world of the dark occult nothing is too sacred or taboo for exponents of Thelema.

On 8 May 1974, Graham Bond fell, or perhaps jumped, in front of the wheels of a London Underground train at Finsbury Park station, and died. In the previous year, he had been called upon by another rock star, “Long” John Baldry of Muswell Hill, London, to help in an “exorcism,” as the media insisted on describing it. Baldry had been receiving threats and curses from Farrant, who confirmed this to be the case in repeated boasts published in his local newspapers at the time, eg the front page headline story of the Hornsey Journal, 28 September 1973. Baldry believed that his missing cat Stupzi had been sacrificed by Farrant in a witchcraft ritual. Whilst not denying the ritual sacrifice of cats during this period, Farrant maintained that the one he killed in Highgate Wood was not Stupzi, but a stray. On one occasion, Baldry and Bond arrived at Farrant's bed-sitting room to confront the sender of voodoo threats, but only found Pope whom Farrant had been using to deliver the clay effigies with accompanying menacing poems (as confirmed by Pope in later interviews). Farrant himself was out at the time, or possibly in hiding. When the rock star met with his unfortunate death, Pope immediately claimed that he had killed Graham Bond with a black magic curse; something he reiterated in a recorded interview with this author.

Mystery has always surrounded the untimely demise of Graham Bond and many commentators in the media have looked for simple answers, sometimes erroneously describing Bond as a “white magician.” There is nothing “white” about the magic that springs from Aleister Crowley. I spoke to Baldry in person, following a live television programme we both appeared on concerning the dangers of the occult, to assure him that Farrant was bogus and Pope was a joke. He nevertheless grew ever more terrified of the curses he had received and quit England for Canada, never to return. Farrant issued witchcraft threats to all manner of people throughout 1973 culminating in his investigation by Scotland Yard detectives. They discovered an altar with black candles beneath an image of the Devil in his bed-sitting room. He was arrested in early 1974 and held on remand until his trials in June, resulting in a four years and eight months prison sentence. Pope remained free to pursue his undisguised brand of evil. Bond died a month before Farrant faced his own fate in front of a judge and jury.

John Pope intended to “form a new coven that will rule the world” and “abolish the system whereby children are forced to learn Christian worship,” according to an interview he gave Reveille magazine, 21 November 1975. When this failed to happen, he became increasingly unstable, declaring direct blood descent from Jesus Christ, Dracula, Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper. Farrant would frequently refer to Pope behind his back as a “silly little imbecile.” Today Pope provides “horror tours” to paying voyeurs who want to see the haunts Jack the Ripper in London’s East End where Pope now resides, and the house of the sexual pervert and serial murderer Dennis Nielson, which is located just around the corner from the Muswell Hill attic bed-sitting room occupied by Farrant since his release from prison on parole in 1976.

Farrant and a duped female stooge before his Devil's altar.

By no means did everyone end up dead, deranged, or demonically possessed. Anthony grew out of his admiration for Crowley, becoming sceptical in retrospect about his past experiences with séances and the like. He explained away his vision of the Devil as being nothing more than a face he saw in cigarette smoke while imbibing cannabis, a practice he later abandoned. Ironically, he became self-employed in the more mundane business of selling newspapers. His first marriage ended in divorce, and his next wife, a non-practicing Jewess of gypsy extraction, did not receive from him a hakenkreuz silver necklace. In the new millennium he quit England to live abroad.

Everything worth recording about the case of the Highgate Vampire has already been written, and I have no intention of trawling through everything yet again. For three and a half decades I recounted this thirteen year investigation, wrote books about it and made film documentaries. The number of interviews on this case alone runs into hundreds. That notwithstanding, the amount of false and misleading commentary in print over the last decade or so from those totally unconnected to the case merits some mention in passing - if only to provide a fitting epilogue to those nightmarish events.

A massive vampire hunt at Highgate Cemetery on the night of 13 March 1970, following reports in local and national newspapers, plus my television appearance at 6.00pm, led to a huge crowd of concerned people gathering outside the cemetery gates. I had made an appeal on the Today programme requesting the public not to get involved, lest they put in jeopardy the investigation already in progress. Not everyone heeded my words. Over the following months a variety of freelance vampire hunters descended on the graveyard only to be frightened off by its eerie atmosphere and what they believed might have been the vampire. Those seeking thrills served only to endanger all concerned and frustrate the investigation. Simon Wiles and John White armed themselves with a crucifix and a sharpened stake, and set off to see if they could locate the vampire’s tomb. Like others who followed their example, Wiles and White were soon arrested by police patrolling the cemetery who found a rucksack containing an eight inch long wooden stake sharpened to a fine point. White later explained at Clerkenwell Court: “Legend has it that if one meets a vampire, one drives a stake through its heart.” He was wearing a crucifix round his neck and Wiles had one in his pocket. They were eventually discharged. Thus began an unwelcome trend.

One man, fortuitously named, was a 25-year-old history teacher from Billericay called Alan Blood. He descended on Highgate after seeing the Today report, but at least had the good sense not to enter the now infamous graveyard. Though described by the Evening News, 14 March 1970, as a “vampire expert,” Blood, in a later interview given to the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 20 March 1970, stated that he was no such thing. “I have taken an interest in the black arts since boyhood, but I’m by no means an expert on vampires,” he said. Following a drink in the Prince of Wales, Blood joined the crowds outside the cemetery’s north gate. But he did not enter.

By 8.00pm on the night of 13 March 1970 scenes of utter pandemonium were taking place as people gathered in large numbers along the steep lane running alongside Highgate Cemetery. Police leave was cancelled to control those arriving, but it was an almost impossible task. By 10.00pm an assortment of independent amateur vampire hunters had joined the onlookers. Alan Blood was amongst the crowd. Matthew Bunson, as recorded in his The Vampire Encyclopedia (1993), felt Blood was a significant player in this publicised case. Bunson, an American who had no contact with Blood, or indeed anyone else contemporaneous to events at Highgate, relied on another American - Jeanne Keyes Youngson of the New York Count Dracula Fan Club aka Vampire Empire - who, in turn, was dependant on such as David Farrant.

Youngson’s influence on Bunson initiated the error in his and thereby subsequent accounts. The primary source, however, is the London Evening News, 14 March 1970, front page report “Mr Blood Hunts Cemetery Vampire.” The brief quotes attributed to Blood in this sensationalist report are rebutted by Blood himself in the Hampstead & Highgate Express that was published later. An authentic account of Alan Blood’s part in the affair is given in The Highgate Vampire (pages 77-79) from which the following is revealed: “By 10.00pm the hundreds of onlookers were to include several freelance vampire hunters, including a history teacher, Alan Blood, who had journeyed from Billericay to seek out the undead being.” He had seen the report on television some hours earlier and immediately set off for Highgate. On his arrival in Highgate Village, he entered the Prince of Wales pub on the High Street for a drink, whereupon he recognised an unkempt individual who had been one of several alleged witnesses interviewed by Sandra Harris. By this time I was already inside the cemetery with my research team. Blood thereby was obliged to settle for Farrant quaffing pints of ale in the Prince of Wales pub. He listened to claims of “a seven foot tall vampire that hovered by the cemetery gate,” and wanted to be shown exactly where this occurred. Oddly enough, Farrant declined and continued to drink his ale.

Blood left the pub to join the steadily growing crowd of several hundred people in Swains Lane. When the pub eventually closed, Farrant also joined the throng outside the cemetery’s north gate, and, like Blood, made no attempt to enter. It was while in Swains Lane, wearing a Russian-style hat, that Blood was noticed by an Evening News photographer and a reporter. They spoke to him, and also to 27-year-old Hampstead resident Anthony Robinson who had ventured to the north gate “after hearing of the torchlight hunt.” Robinson is alleged to have told the reporter: “I walked past the place and heard a high-pitched noise, then I saw something grey moving slowly across the road. It terrified me. First time I couldn’t make it out, it looked eerie. I’ve never believed in anything like this, but now I’m sure there is something evil lurking in Highgate.” Yet it was Blood, who saw and did nothing, whose photograph was to appear on the front page of next day’s Evening News. He is described at the head of the report as “a vampire expert named Mr Blood who journeyed forty miles to investigate the legend of an ‘undead Satan-like being’ said to lurk in the area.” Alan Blood, of course, claimed nothing of the sort, and would confirm in a more soberly conducted interview that he was “by no means an expert.”

None of which prevented American Matthew Bunson publishing some twenty-three years later: “The focus of the media attention turned to David Farrant and Allan [sic] Blood, vampire experts who led the search. Both were convinced that a vampire was sleeping in one of the vaults and were determined to find it and kill it. While blamed for the desecration of tombs and arrested for trespass, Farrant was acquitted on the grounds that the cemetery was open to the public. As is typical of such incidents, stories based on rumour and on unconfirmed sightings soon spread, and the tabloids and newspapers ran exploitative reports. No vampire was ever publicly discovered.”[2] 

Apart from the reference to press exploitation, not a single statement in Bunson’s entry for “The Highgate Vampire” is accurate. The focus of the media did not turn to David Farrant and Alan Blood. The latter, after the night of 13 March 1970, completely disappeared off the scene. Farrant was certainly to become infamous for publicity-seeking by the end of the vampire panics, by which time he had repudiated the “vampire theory,” as he would come to describe it. Yet, save for his letter to a newspaper editor in February 1970, he was not a “focus” with regard to the investigation, which promptly dismissed his allegations of sightings as unsafe and his behaviour unwise. Blood never stated that he was “determined to find and kill” the vampire. Farrant, of course, did, but later revoked this ambition. Nor was Farrant arrested for “trespass” - he was, in fact, arrested for being in an enclosed area for an unlawful purpose. And he was not merely “blamed for the desecration of tombs” in Highgate Cemetery. Four years later he was charged and found guilty of malicious damage to tombs following the longest so-called “witchcraft” trial in two hundred years at the Old Bailey. He was to receive a prison sentence of almost five years. Sightings of the alleged vampire were, indeed, confirmed, documented, and recorded.

I would add in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook (pages 66-67): “Interestingly, Jeanne Youngson’s name crops up in Bunson’s acknowledgements as having assisted with this book [The Vampire Encyclopedia]. Why does that come as no surprise? Peter Hough follows in Bunson’s errant footsteps in Supernatural Britain (1995) and repeats the misinformation that David Farrant ‘teamed up’ with Alan Blood (something neither ever claimed) whilst ignoring the actual investigation. When contacted through their respective publishers, neither deigned to reply. Their publishers also refused to answer any correspondence on the matter.” This refusal to address factual inaccuracy in their books is peculiar to many publishers in the USA.

Bunson and Hough were followed by Liverpool disc jockey and freelance journalist Tom Slemen whose paperback Strange But True (1998) erroneously claimed that “Alan Blood organized a mass vampire hunt that would take place on Friday 13 March, 1970. Mr Blood was interviewed on television. … The schoolteacher’s plan was to wait until dawn, when the first rays of the rising sun would force the vampire to return to his subterranean den in the catacombs, then he would kill the Satanic creature in the time-honoured tradition; by driving a wooden stake through its heart. … In an orgy of desecration [the crowd] had exhumed the remains of a woman from a tomb, stolen lead from coffins, and defaced sepulchres with mindless graffiti.”[3]

None of which is true. Blood did not “organize a mass vampire hunt.” Blood organised nothing at all. He was just an interested onlooker. It was not the “schoolteacher’s plan to wait until dawn.” This was the supposed plan of Farrant. There was no “orgy of desecration” etc. No damage whatsoever occurred on the night of 13 March 1970. What Slemen is almost certainly alluding to is an entirely different incident that took place five months later, as recorded on the front page of the Hampstead and Highgate Express, 7 August 1970, where the discovery of the headless body of a female and signs of a satanic ceremony were made by two fifteen-year-old schoolgirls, as they walked through the graveyard on a sunny August afternoon. Police viewed this desecration to be the work of diabolists and investigated it as such. Weeks later, Farrant was arrested prowling around the graveyard at night.

These misleading reports by Bunson, Hough and Slemen contaminated some other accounts, needless to say, but few would be as inaccurate as Leonard R N Ashley’s in The Complete Book of Vampires (1998). This occultist and colleague of Jeanne Youngson stated: “A typical, if overblown, time was around 1970, when David Farrant got in trouble charged with disturbing the neighbours if not the corpses and trespassing.” Referring to me as “the now late Seán Manchester,” Ashley falsely describes my presence in the cemetery as being “attended by as many press and television reporters as he could muster for the event.” He added: “I never met Seán Manchester.”[4] For the record, neither did Bunson, Hough, Youngson, or Slemen. None of these people communicated with me in any form, not even through a medium, which, if Leonard R N Ashley is to be believed, is the only way available. No newspaper or television reporter attended anything I conducted in Highgate Cemetery on that or any other night. Moreover, my reluctance to deal with the media is precisely what led to the more unscrupulous among them resorting to using Farrant and his publicity stunts. On the same page, Ashley sings the praises of Youngson.

The tomb of the vampire was located in August 1970, as revealed in the 24 Hours programme - a  BBC television film documentary transmitted on 15 October 1970 - and later confirmed in Peter Underwood's anthology The Vampire's Bedside Companion (1975) and Exorcism! (1990), plus J Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book: Encyclopedia of the Undead (1994), and my own The Highgate Vampire (1975, 1976, 1985, 1991). Three years and three months following the BBC documentary, the primary source was effectively exorcised with the help of my research team. Several 35mm photographs, some of which are reproduced in The Highgate Vampire book, were taken of the corporeal form in its final moments of dissolution. These images have been transmitted and discussed on various television programmes in the UK.

“Among the many people who contacted me,” I recounted in the first complete account of the case, “was the sister of a beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman, whom I shall call Lusia.”[5] She is someone who has never been identified - a photographic model, later an actress, would portray Lusia in representations of her part in the case. This was due to the tragic outcome, and a need to preserve her identity in perpetuity.

There is no denying that Lusia was very special to me, and there has been a great deal of speculation about her because, in the aftermath of the Highgate exorcism, her story evolved into one of the more extreme metaphysical outcomes that will not surprise the trained and seasoned demonolatrist, but is certainly a difficult area for most others.

My initial discovery of her was one of sheer delight tinged with a terrible sadness that grew stronger until it finally eclipsed her. The sombre tones of an apt piece of music enshroud her in my account. I wrote: “Her cascading flaxen tresses caught the dull illumination of the moonlight in their pale reflection. Somewhere, in the background, I could hear the dying pulses of Strauss’ solemn orchestral work, Metamorphosen. It haunts me to this day.”[6] Lusia entered my life as an attractive young female virgin of Nordic extraction, living in north London, who, being touched by what lies beyond earthly confines, became part of an unfolding array of nightmarish visions and visitations associated with Highgate at that time. I glimpsed an indistinct figure toward the end, a figure swathed in a white cerement, her face the colour of marble save for her mouth, which seemed full and wanton. This was not the Lusia I had first known. It was something else. A shade of something that had been sucked dry of life.