Highgate Cemetery opened in 1839 as one of the “Magnificent Seven” — a ring of new private cemeteries built around London’s edge to relieve the capital’s chronically overcrowded inner-city churchyards. Its centrepiece, the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon (built c.1838–39, likely by architect J.B. Bunning, around an existing cedar tree), is Grade I listed and gives the West Cemetery its distinctive avenue-of-tombs, catacomb-lined atmosphere. The cemetery now holds an estimated 170,000 burials across both its West and East sides, including Karl Marx, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti and Douglas Adams.

By the mid-20th century the original cemetery company had run out of money and space; the grounds closed in 1960 and were left to decay for over a decade, with ivy and self-seeded trees swallowing paths and toppling monuments — the overgrown, half-collapsed look that gave Highgate its gothic reputation, and that the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust has managed and partially restored since taking over in 1975.

That derelict decade produced the cemetery’s defining paranormal episode. On 6 February 1970, local resident David Farrant wrote to the Hampstead and Highgate Express describing a “grey figure” he’d glimpsed passing the cemetery on Christmas Eve 1969, and asked whether anyone else had seen something similar — readers wrote back describing a tall man in a hat, a spectral cyclist, a woman in white, a face glaring through the cemetery gate’s bars, a figure wading into a nearby pond, a pale gliding form, phantom bells and disembodied voices calling out. Separately, self-styled vampire hunter Seán Manchester — who founded his own Vampire Research Society on 2 February 1970 — began publicly framing the phenomena as the work of an undead Eastern European nobleman, supposedly brought to England in a coffin in the 18th century by occultist followers who bought him a house nearby.

The story became a full media sensation. On Friday 13 March 1970, Thames/ITV broadcast interviews with local witnesses the night before a planned mass “vampire hunt”; within hours a mob of self-appointed hunters armed with homemade stakes stormed the gates and walls, overwhelming a hastily assembled police cordon. That August, Farrant and fellow British Occult Society members were arrested performing a candlelit séance inside the cemetery. In 1974 Farrant was jailed for four years and eight months for damaging memorials and interfering with human remains at Highgate — vandalism he always insisted was the work of Satanists, not him. Manchester, for his part, later claimed to have located and staked/burned the vampire’s remains at a derelict Gothic mansion nearby. The two men’s public rivalry continued in one form or another until Farrant’s death in 2019.

Beyond the vampire saga, Highgate’s ghost lore has kept accumulating: visitors and staff report the ghostly figure of an elderly woman with long, knotted grey hair wandering among the graves, a floating nun near the chapel, and a pair of glowing red eyes reported staring out from between the railings after dark. None of it is independently documented — it’s a story built almost entirely out of a few overlapping 1970s newspaper letters, two feuding self-styled investigators, and fifty-plus years of retellings. Readers curious how that kind of evidence gets weighed may want our guide to the scientific methods used in ghost hunting.

Vampire or not, Highgate remains one of Britain’s most atmospheric Victorian cemeteries in its own right — and the one place in the country where a newspaper letter about a “grey figure” genuinely triggered a mob armed with wooden stakes.