This is the Pippins blog so they appear everywhere. The whole thing that connects these photos is a massively complicated story which would take several hours to do it proper justice, so this is a brief piece of it all.
I had never heard of the musician Graham Bond until I was contacted in 2015 by the author of the pamphlet in the main picture. The pamphlet is actually very rare and the author did write another one a decade and some later with a similar title. The person who contacted me in 2015 said they knew Graham Bond when they were a music journalist working for a well known music paper in London back in the 60's. It was a case of 'Graham who?' at the time where I was concerned, but I was curious. The man who contacted me expressed that it was odd the way Mr Bond died - which was under a Finsbury Park tube train on 8th May 1974, aged 36.
Whilst experiencing a bad bout of flu recently I noticed Graham Bond mentioned in another book I have and started looking him up in more detail. I found out he was an occultist - this was mentioned to me in 2015 by the author of the pamphlet, who I shall call GBS, above, who was head of the O.T.O. in Europe at one time. I didn't believe him when he told me in the email in 2015, but it is apparently true as shown on the cover of the pamphlet.
Anyway, it seems there was lots of goings on in Highgate Cemetery, London over a period of the late 60's until the cemetery was closed to the public in 1975. There is an East and West cemetery. The West graveyard is open for paid guided tours and the East has an entrance fee. Lots of the notables are the the old part - the West - but there are some others in the East one. Highgate is a village in North London which is thought to be a desirable place to live.
A rash of novels have now appeared for sale, all including a Highgate vampire or ghost. It has become an authors paradise in itself.
There are many complications about exactly what was going on and many different stories. There was also rivalry between too occultists connected to Highgate rituals - Bishop Sean Manchester (as he is now) and David Farrant, a local Wiccan. I will not go in to detail about goings on here, but a follower of David Farrant supposedly sent 60's musician Long John Baldry,then of Muswell Hill, a curse in the post after he had reported to the police that Farrant had killed his cat in a ritual. This was not true as the cat turned up fine some weeks later.
Graham Bond dealt with the curse - this was 1973, as he was an experienced occultist who had taken on some of Aleister Crowley's magickal names and called himself Lashtal. However he apparently felt some of it had stuck to him and met a strange demise under the subway train the following year. There were also dark rumours about some kind of feud with one of the cemetery magicians.
On to Highgate Cemetery - I first read about 'The Highgate Vampire' years ago in a second hand book called The Vampire's Bedside companion' by Peter Underwood. It has a photo of a tomb belonging to a William Fisher-Wace who allegedly became some kind of revenant. This is of course shown in the aforementioned book. However, the tomb associated with other goings on in Highgate belonged to Sir Francis Cory-Wright, a London notable of Victorian and Edwardian times who ran a coal company. He lived at Caen Wood Towers in Highgate, later known as Athlone House, as shown in the picture above. Cory-Wright had been called up in a necromancy ritual to do the bidding of the caller.This is what caused a lot of the other bother associated with Highgate Cemetery and some of the people previously mentioned.
Graham Bond's ashes were scattered at Rocky Valley in Cornwall, on the trail that leads from the waterfall at St Nectan's Glen, over the rocky outcrops to the sea.
There is also a reported vampire at a cemetery in Shipley, West Yorkshire. The details shown below appeared in the Bradford Telegraph And Argus on 27th October 2009 - written by reporter David Barnett. This is his piece below not mine.
Windhill Cemetery
Cemeteries would seem to be a good place to find ghosts, but if we venture to Windhill Cemetery we might find more than we bargained for. As recently as the 1980s there were reports of a strange figure which came to be known as the Owlet Vampire. It had a classic vampire appearance – a tall, dark man with a pale face and bright red lips, and even the fangs to match. He would appear in front of passers-by from seemingly nowhere, terrifying them and causing them to flee.
