I want to bite your neck....

I thought I would post a little on the subject of vampires, not that I'm a little behind with Halloween or anything it was purely a weird bit of coincidence that happened. I happen to listen to a podcast (yes far too many I know...) from Nervous Teeth and the latest episode mentioned the Highgate vampire and one of the presenters (Gareth) happened to have devoted a fair amount of time looking into the story.

This sort of weirded me out as 'back in the day' I got quite immersed in the odd story and the strange characters that called themselves 'vampire hunters' involved in the investigation. Sean Manchester really was a freaky character, and from memory I think he proclaimed to be a self ordained priest or something. The Highgate 'vampire' episode occurred in the seventies from memory and I got drawn into the story as my mother happened to live in London a short hop from the very imposing old Gothic cemetery and on a day trip to London took me past it and told me all the spooky stories she remembered from her late teens/early twenties from living in the area. That was it, I was hooked, 'it must be true if my mum thinks it's true surely....' Unfortunately back then the cemetery was closed to the public and was very overgrown which just added to my curiosity.

From that point on I read Dracula and watched every 'Hammer horror' with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing hunting the notorious creature of the night. I also remember many interviews with the crazy Sean Manchester and his vampire hunting. For those interested it is a terribly compelling episode but in all likely hood complete rubbish but was headline news in the tabloids years ago.

Anyway I think this whole episode spurred me into looking into weirdness which continues to this day and I always harboured this idea of becoming some sort of 'weird stuff' investigator. I actually did correspond with Andrew Collins after his book 'The Black Alchemist' which although out of print for some time is about to be re-released. That then spurred the idea of 'magick', spiritualism and psychic connections all heavily influenced by paganism.

Anyway weird how similar things spur people on to 'seek the truth', a case of synchronicity.....

As a little update to this post I had to 'change' the photo of Mr Bishop Manchester. It seems he didn't like the use of his oil painting portrait like fuzzy pic I had used from his 'online' biography. Copyright infringement apparently but I suppose he can't complain about his book now can he?. Though I suppose he could censor anybody from reading it by removing all traces of it from existence....