Hello all,
The 24th of October 2013 was a milestone in Highgate’s history. After years of research and months of hard working ‘getting lost in the code’ (and I mean HARD work – sleepless nights, dedicated research and cross referencing sources and learning the mysterious world of ‘php’ and ‘css’ files, not just copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia like some plagiarists I could mention) Della’s new website finally went live last Friday.
It was a mad dash to get it live incase the Ham and High wanted to run a piece on Thursday the 23rd, and a subsequent push to get it ready for the Friday night North London Paranormal Investigations Friday Night Show with Mickey Gocool and Kurt Logsdon, which you can listen to in the archives here. Della had been concentrating so hard that she was barely speaking, working all day, then working all night on the website, and at the weekends working on the website as well. But suddenly the Sunday before last she downed tools and rushed off to the cemetery shrieking ‘OH my God, I’ve got to meet Polly Hancock’.
I have met Polly myself several times over the years, ironically perhaps the first occasion was when she took a photograph of myself in 2003, to celebrate the launch of my own website. I think it was called in those days dfarrant.co.uk, and I remember long suffering Dave Milner plugging away at that site using a 56k dial up modem. We should also remember that in those early days hardly any functioning websites had videos to watch. But BPOS member (and alleged fugitive from justice) Dave Milner managed to secure about ten for me, all of which constituted interviews with and films about my career as a psychical investigator. For retro value, you can see fragments of the early site here , but Della ‘revamped’ it last year and I think you will agree that the progression of available technology has been a great help.
But back to the present day, and last week in fact. In the meantime Della had somehow managed to find time to record an excellent broadcast with Gareth Davies and Reeves Cooke of Mindset Central and The Para Talk, which you can listen to below.
My old acquaintance Gareth visited Highgate Cemetery himself in the year 2000, and has always been interested in genuine attempts to decipher exactly what if anything haunts the cemetery and its environs.
So, by the time Hallowe’en itself came around, we were enjoying a well deserved lie-in, unaware that just over the road in the newsagents the Ham and High was sitting there on the counter with Della gazing back from it. We didn’t even turn the computer on until the afternoon, and it took a good hour to wade through the responses to the article (and the response behind the scenes on the website!)
Well here is the article itself for you all to enjoy. I think that if you are reading this blog, you will agree that it makes a very refreshing change from endless circular debate about such nonsense as ‘bloodsucking vampires’. Here at last is a Highgate-focused website for grown-ups who are not fantasists, cranks or easily led mental patients (no detriment intended to the latter).
I am very proud of what my wife has achieved with her history and real-life paranormal orientated website, and so I present to you – https://hidden-highgate.org Enjoy!