Sean Manchester

And within three weeks, the mystery had acquired a far more alarming explanation.

Sean Manchester was a young occult investigator who was president of the British Occult Society.

Like David Farrant, he had developed an interest in the cemetery's supernatural reputation.

But he had reached a very different conclusion to Farrant.

The theory represented a dramatic escalation.

David Farrant's original letter in the press had concerned a mysterious figure that appeared and disappeared.

Sean Manchester was now proposing that the figure might be an undead human being.

And now the link had been made, although, as I've attempted to briefly highlight here, quite detailed and substantial, I guess what we could loosely call ghost lore, was now being labelled and funnelled into the sole concept of vampirism.

And they were trying to figure out what the hell happened there.

And even online, between David Farrant and Sean Manchester, one-time friends, that divulged into a decades-long online argument between them that went up until their death in the 2000s.

This is how infamous it is in occult, ghost-hunting stories in the United Kingdom.

Crazy.

By the late 1960s, the paranormal community in London began hearing stories of something weird going on at the Highgate Cemetery.

25-year-old Sean Manchester, who was part of the British Occult Society, was told of a frightening tale.

Mm-hmm.

He said that two teenage schoolgirls were walking past the cemetery one night and that they had seen figures rising out of the graves.

So that's like the fancy way to spell vampire.

That's crazy.

Does a vampire walk in Highgate? Sean Manchester, that other guy from the Occult Society, he was interviewed, and he said that the apparition people have reported to have seen is not a ghost.

It's worse.

A man named David Ferent wrote to the local paper that on Christmas Eve in 1969, he saw a tall gray figure floating through the cemetery, and then he found foxes on the ground with their throats cut.

Another local man named Sean Manchester claimed the vampire had been resurrected by someone practicing dark magic.

Do you think that's just legend or rumor?

Probably.

So that, that one, I don't know.

Like, it kinda depends on how well you believe Sean Manchester.

But there was definitely something weird was going on in Highgate Cemetery around that time.

Huh.

Um, I don't know that, that, that Sean, that Sean Manchester, uh, or probably the Reverend Sean Manchester, with reverend in quotation marks.

But, uh, uh, you know, I, I don't know that he, that his accounts are accurate.

But there was definitely something in that cemetery that was, that was doing something strange.

There's just a lot of very famous people there.

You might think that two paranormal investigators who were both interested in the same case could work together, but that didn't happen at Highgate.

The relationship between David Ferrant and Sean Manchester deteriorated into a prolonged public feud.

Both men became closely associated with the vampire controversy, but they disagreed about the nature of the phenomenon, the interpretation of events, and even each other's involvement.

Ferrant later maintained that his original experience had involved an unexplained figure,

It's an old-ass thing.

So, then enters Sean Manchester.

And he's like, guys, it's not a ghost.

It's a vampire.

Okay.

Alright.

So, Ferrant, David, like I told you, and Sean Manchester, they start this competition, pretty much.

Basically... inciting a vampire hunt in the cemetery.

I'm your co-host, Kamini Gupta.

And today I'm super excited because we've got Sean Manchester from Triple Bar speaking today with us.

And I'm really excited to get into your background.

Sean, tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do at Triple Bar.