The dreams and optimism which sprang out of the Sixties were long buried under the emerging cynicism and consumerism of the Eighties. I remained committed to music and the arts, but life's tempo had changed and everyone suddenly seemed to be in such a rush with nowhere especially interesting to go. More than ever, I was a fish out of water, but nonetheless met people who, like myself, felt out of step with the modern age. In-between those two decades, of course, came the Seventies at the commencement of which was a tumult which catapulted me into the limelight.
I should, I suppose, begin by offering some explanation as to what we are talking about. At its centre the matter quintessentially concerns an account I wrote; not one, but three; or, if you prefer, three in one. It began with an anthology to which I was invited to make a contribution before the matter was anywhere near completion, followed, ten years later, by the first complete account in the form of my own book, which, in turn, was followed by a larger edition, revised to include intimate reflections.
It was the celebrated paranormalist and author Peter Underwood who first invited me to tell the story. He had known Montague Summers and was indeed preparing an anthology of predominantly non-fiction about vampires and vampirism. A mutual colleague, Professor Varma, also contributed, as did others. My own contribution accounted for twenty percent of the published anthology that was titled The Vampire's Bedside Companion (Leslie Frewin Books, 1975). The following year a paperback edition appeared, published by Coronet, on which cover was one of my case file photographs.
Fifteen years later, Peter Underwood published Exorcism! (Robert Hale, 1990) where my first person singular account in The Vampire's Bedside Companion is rendered in the third person for a chapter titled "Vampires and Exorcism" in which a full page photograph of me holding a silver crucifix appears. By this time the case had long since been resolved, but Exorcism! stuck to the 1975 agreed formula.
My contribution to the highly successful The Vampire's Bedside Companion covered what happened up until the summer of 1970. A line had to be drawn because incidents had been unfolding thick and fast, and it was always my intention to tell the full story once the case closed. That would not be until 1982 when the final exorcism occurred. More than enough material for the anthology prior to dramas which culminated in August 1970, mentioned on BBC television in late 1970, existed. To say more would still leave loose ends at that time, and I was not clear which approach I would take when I came to write my own book. As it turned out, the first edition of The Highgate Vampire was quite journalistic in its coverage, while the second (larger) edition was from a more personal perspective.
I was always grateful to Peter Underwood for providing a literary springboard from which I was able to bounce and plunge into the murky waters of recounting the Highgate Vampire story in print. Some publishers would either balk at the prospect of handling my full and unexpurgated account, or, if strong interest was shown, demand the excising and editing of what I considered to be essential material, which I found untenable and unacceptable. This led to the British Occult Society of Pond Square, Highgate, being the first to publish my account unedited. It contained a whopping seventy-two illustrations, most of which were original case file photographs. A deluxe edition was published in hardback by Gothic Press six years later where text and illustrative material was revised and updated.
A curious irony arose out of a minor detail which grew into a major migraine. I had no desire to mention or refer to a tiresome interloper by the name of Farrow or Farrant; indeed, he is totally absent from my own account in The Vampire's Bedside Companion, and the subsequent reiteration in Exorcism! However, Peter Underwood did make mention of him in the 1975 anthology due to this character's arrest in Highgate Cemetery accompanied by court appearances and newspaper reports.
"Publicity of a dubious kind has surrounded the activities of a person or persons named Farrant and his - or there -association with Highgate Cemetery, in search of vampires," Peter began in the chapter preceding my own in The Vampire's Bedside Companion. Peter noted that Farrant was sometines called "Allan" and at other times "Robert" in the press. When arrested he gave the surname "Farrow."
I sighed with dismay when I saw mention of this incorrigible publicity-seeker in the anthology. Having met him in an Archway Road coal bunker (part of a communal cellar beneath a block of flats in a Victorian house), I already had the cut of his jib, and was consequently obliged to warn against his pending threat to enter the graveyard at night when I spoke on Thames Televsion in March 1970.
This was the first and last occasion that I would mention this man's name on television, or indeed on radio, throughout the following decades where I made literally hundreds of broadcast transmissions.
That notwithstanding, Peter's anthology had been a best-seller, which obliged me to briefly chronicle my meeting with this person, and his subsequent court case, which, of course, would not have happened had he heeded to my public call for him to desist with his plan to invade the cemetery.
Some publishers who clearly liked my manuscript The Highgate Vampire made it a condition of their handling of the book that all reference to the interloping charlatan be expurgated in its entirety. I refused to censor what I had written. If I was writing the same book today I would not mention him.
As often I have heard said, the devil is in the detail. It was certainly in this Farrow or Farrant character.
