In the final installment from our spooky October 100 Wonders, we bring you the Highgate Cemetery, and the Great Vampire Panic of 1970.
Highgate is one of the great Victorian cemeteries, crammed with examples of incredible funerary architecture. It is home to the remains of everyone from philosopher Karl Marx to science fiction author Douglas Adams.
However in the late 1960s it also became the home of a "King Vampire of the Undead", at least in the pages of the British Press and the minds of English teenagers. Through the perfect storm of teenage high jinks, yellow journalism, and local dueling occultists, the cemetery became home to a vampire panic that would result in corpses being disinterred, staked through the heart, beheaded, and set on fire.