Reece Shearsmith talks ASSAP and David Farrant

Video: David Farrant – Revisiting the Highgate Vampire
ASSAP 2013 Conference
 

It is pleasing to see ASSAP’s long-standing work and one of its past conference speakers acknowledged in a mainstream memoir by one of Britain’s best-known writers and performers. Shearsmith’s book joins a growing list of cultural references that keep the Highgate story, and the careful investigation of anomalous phenomena, in the public eye.

Things I Took from the Dark: The Museum of Me is available now in hardback, ebook and audiobook.

Would recommend visiting https://davidfarrant.org/ 

For wider reading about David Farrant 

The Highgate Cemetery investigation (late 1960s–1970)

The 1970 arrest and court case

Farrant and a small BPOS group (including a medium) entered the cemetery at night for a séance/investigation near the back gate, carrying protective Celtic crosses, a camera, a portable tape recorder, charcoal (for the element of fire), and a stake attached to cord (used, he explained, to mark a protective circle with chalk, not for staking corpses; the stake also bore protective symbols).Police arrived with flashlights. Farrant tried to leave via a private garden he knew but was arrested. He refused to name the others (to protect their jobs and the society) or give his address (to safeguard society membership records). He spent a night in custody, gave a false name, and was reported as of “no fixed address.”He was charged in connection with the cemetery vandalism. Police (Detective Neville Brown) allegedly attributed to him an unsigned statement claiming he intended to hunt the “King Vampire,” open coffins, and stake it through the heart—something Farrant denied ever saying. In court they produced only the stake and cross (omitting the cord and other items), framing him as a vampire hunter. He argued he was being made a scapegoat for the film-inspired desecrations and for public statements by another individual who had appeared on television advising how to destroy vampires (stake through the heart, decapitate, burn remains). Farrant was ultimately acquitted. He stressed he has never been a vampire hunter and was a serious psychic investigator. (He noted with ironic humor that one of the magistrates was named Christopher Lee.)
 
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