I expect most of you will have heard by now (especially those who have been following the Highgate ‘vampire’ saga over years) that the current video from the Highgate Vampire Symposium 2015, “The Vampire Theory” Part 2, was suspended by You Tube recently following a complaint made by one Patrick Sean Manchester again myself for ‘copyright infringement’.
Mr Manchester insisted that he had undertaken Court action and demanded the permanent removal of this session while Court proceedings were pending. This would have a perfectly reasonable request . . . if true. The only problem was – it wasn’t! While it is true that Mr Manchester made the complaint cited above, it is NOT true that Mr Manchester had instigated any legal action to substantiate his complaint against myself and he was therefore unable to supply any evidence to YouTube to the effect he had done so.
Accordingly, the video was restored on December 10th and people are now able to view it below should they wish to do so (it is approximately 58 mins in length).
The Symposium was compered by publisher Paul Adams of Limbury Press, and the Speakers in this session included: author and paranormal researcher Jon Kaneko-James; Patricia Langley, whose book The Highgate Vampire Casebook caused quite a furore among esoteric circles upon its publication in 2007 and Dr. Jacqueline Simpson the former Secretary of the Folklore Society whose book Lore of the Land [2005] contained a detailed chapter on the so called Highgate ‘vampire’ case. I was also invited to give my humble opinion on some of the evidence presented to the Speakers during this session.
Some of this related ‘evidence’ was screened for the audience to see and was directly relevant to what the panels of expert witnesses had volunteered to discuss. Invariably this basically involved the published affirmations of some other people to the Media – including authors such as the late Peter Underwood – that the long-sighted apparition or ‘ghost’ witnessed at Highgate Cemetery was in reality a ‘blood-sucking ‘vampire’!
This latter point, of course, was one of the main objectives for holding the Symposium; to finally allow a team of experts to sift through the available evidence and decide how much of this was reliable in suggesting some ‘vampiric entity’ (or similar) could have been a possible causation for many of the ghostly sightings.
The Symposium proper lasted for approximately 7 hours, and by the end of this time, most people present – including the audience – concluded that while something had undoubtedly been witnessed in and around Highgate Cemetery (indeed, was still being witnessed) there was no real evidence to point to ‘vampires’ apart from earlier years in the cemetery’s history when in the late 1960s and early 1970s Hammer Horror Films had used the cemetery to film some of their most famous ‘Dracula films’. The rest was really just history – and fictional history at that!
David Farrant, President, British Psychic and Occult Society.
