In court Mary Farrant, subpoenaed by her husband, recoiled in horror and almost fainted when shown images of open coffins - later to become Black Museum exhibits - and, along with her husband, implied that Anthony had something to do with it, according to a court report in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 21 June 1974. It is true that Anthony had taken some of the photographs showing Farrant wielding a stake and holding a cross in Highgate Cemetery, plus the picture of him peering at a damaged coffin (wearing Anthony’s jacket, as he did not possess a decent one of his own), but there is no evidence to support the claim that photographs, like the Black Museum exhibits, originated with Anthony.

The public relations damage inflicted on the British Occult Society by Farrant’s phoney association was due to his obsessive manufacturing of news stories and claims of “occult powers” and “witchcraft ceremonies.” In countless published interviews given by him 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 front page headline story in the Hornsey Journal, 28 September 1973, revealed: “Farrant, 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 innumerable quotes where Farrant threatens and describes his animal sacrifices, eg headline of the Hornsey Journal, 7 September 1973: “I will sacrifice cat at Hallowe’en: Farrant,” 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 Farrant 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 also admitted that he had taken part in the ‘sacrifice’ of a stray cat in Highgate Wood.” In a squalid and revealing report, where Sue Kentish interviewed him 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 eight months prison sentence, Farrant wrote an article for New Witchcraft magazine (issue 4), in which he states: “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 open 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.” The insertion “temporarily” unconvincingly manifested years after the event.

In my first complete 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.”[1] I became less confident in that view, and accordingly expurgated it from the 1991 edition of The Highgate Vampire. The simple fact of the matter is that I do not know how far he is capable of going, or has gone. 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 a lot of personal inconvenience and was clearly a sick and depraved individual. But how really sinister or satanic was Farrant?

Two people who have known him longer than anyone else, Anthony and Farrant’s first wife, Mary, are convinced that his witchcraft and occult stunts were utterly bogus, and that he is a complete fraud. I would concur with that sentiment, but I can no longer opine exactly how far or not he is willing to go in the pursuit of publicity.

The Sun, 21 June 1974, recorded: “The wife of self-styled occult priest David Farrant 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 Farrant - 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 Farrant 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 following his imprisonment in 1974, I attempted to gain Farrant’s confidence in order to discover the truth about his alleged “occult” activities. The conclusions I arrived at are published in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook, a work that covers this area 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 or two members, 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.”[2]

From the very beginning - when most of his acquaintances knew him as “Allan” - to the final moment I spoke to him,[3] Farrant, in the absence of any corroborating witness, would ridicule witches, occultists and also members of any mainstream religious faith. For him witchcraft and the occult was only a means to an end. The impression I gained was that he actually believes none of it. He saw those who took the occult and certainly the paranormal seriously as being worthy of his contempt. His raison d’être was and remains an agenda where his manufactured publicity masks insecurities that probably stem from childhood. Yet, in dabbling in these dangerous areas, he opened himself to the very thing he scorns. Thus he is the Devil’s Fool.

“I don’t believe in the existence of the Devil,”[4] he would protest in later years when interviewed. But the Devil, of course, was more than aware of Farrant’s existence.

Farrant seated in a television studio audience.

Barring those journalists who will always take advantage of a free meal ticket when a compulsive publicity-seeker offers one on a plate, some who were to provide Farrant with succour turned out to be apologists for the infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley.