Mmmm. Stake.

I perhaps jumped the gun a bit in asking the Bishop, "How many vampires have you dispatched in the "ancient and approved manner"?"

That is, staking them through the heart and cutting off their heads.

Rita Miller, a cultural anthropologist, already expressed interest in this facet of the Bishop's career, and queried him thusly:

In the “So Weird” interview with the BBC, you state you have exorcised scores of vampires. Can you elaborate a little – just how many and where were these beings were located? Can you give the year you exorcised the vampires?

The "So Weird" interview in question, can be read here.

A bloke by the name of Mr Papachumba asked him, "So how many vampires have you caught?"

To which the Bishop replied, "Scores. I have personally exorcised quite a number. Precise number I couldn't tell you. But after 33 years of vampire hunting, quite a few."

A similar line of questioning can be found in the VRS website's "FAQ" page.

The question responded to is, "How many vampires has the Vampire Research Society encountered?"

The response claims that, "The Vampire Research Society has probably now lost count of the number of vampires its members, and those who bring to it their knowledge and experiences, have encountered."

Let's get back to Rita's questions.

Regarding the "So Weird" interview, the Bishop makes the following claims in his blog post, "Exorcism":

Throughout the BBC internet interview, which followed a vampire programme on BBC2 television, much of what I said became altered and sometimes lost in translation. As I am sure you will appreciate, the questions came thick and fast. Moreover, as I replied with what I felt to be minimum yet essential detail, some poor soul was attempting to type an abbreviated form of my responses into a BBC computer. So when looking through the dialogue one must take into account its transliterated summary of my actual answers. That notwithstanding, the bare bones of what I was attempting to communicate managed to surface, albeit the worse due to an unavoidably hasty exhumation.

There's still the question over just how many vampires the Bishop has dispatched. Note that even the years of these alleged encounters (as per Rita's request), has also been side-stepped.

The closest we get to a direct answer is this:

There are obvious reasons why I would not want to get involved in just how many have been encountered by me and my colleagues. It is, of course, more than the two recorded encounters and exorcisms in the published account of the Highgate investigation.

The only other case even given a modicum of such publicity, by Manchester, is the 1990 vampire-hunting vigil that took place in the woods near Kirklees Hall Estate. He originally wrote about it in "The Kirklees Vampire", which appeared in The Unexplained 38 (1992). It is also given some coverage on the VRS website.

The VRS's "FAQ" page also mentions an investigation at Abney Park Cemetery.

Apart from those, we are told very, very little else about the allegedly numerous cases in the VRS's archives.

Why is this?

Why have these cases been aired for the public and the multitude of other cases they claim to have investigated, hidden from the light of day?

What is it about Highgate, Kirklees and Abney Park that take precedent over the rest?