HUNT FOR THE GORBALS VAMPIRE
Armed with wooden stakes and kitchen knives, the night Glasgow children stormed a graveyard to confront a monster – and how their mass hysteria changed the law
THE children converged on the graveyard armed with whatever weapons they could find. Some were well enough versed in vampire lore to bring wooden stakes, while others brought kitchen knives or stones. Schoolboy Tam Smith brought his Auntie Sadie – everybody in the neighbourhood was scared of her.
Then, as darkness fell, they began the hunt for the iron-toothed predator in the cemetery where a quarter of a million of Glasgow’s dead slept.
In some ways it was a remarkably brave act of defiance, taking on a monster they believed had already slain and eaten two of their own. In other ways it was one of the most bizarre instances of mass hysteria in Scotland, with hundreds of children (and some grownups) chasing a figment of their collective imagination.
The date was September 23, 1954 and, for reasons not understood even today, the children of Glasgow’s south side were on a mission to free their city from the terror of the Gorbals Vampire.
Certainly PC Alex Deeprose could get little sense out of the vampire hunters when he was called to the city’s Southern Necropolis to investigate reports of a disturbance.
They told him their quarry was 7ft tall, had iron teeth and had already struck twice in recent days. Now they were here to kill him.
Looking around in the gloom of the graveyard, the constable saw hundreds of children, some as young as five and many with their family dogs to help search among the tombstones.
Telling the pint-sized hunters that vampires did not exist made no difference. Nor did the fact that there had been no reports of missing children. What on earth had possessed them?
The explanation seems almost as elusive as the spectre the youngsters were chasing. Even those involved are now hazy about why they took part. Yet the incident so panicked the political classes that it was raised in the House of Commons and led to legislation still in place today.
Clearly, argued Labour’s John Rankin, MP for Glasgow Tradeston, the children’s minds had been ‘polluted’ by American horror comics. Within months, the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 was rushed through to keep youngsters safe from the monsters portrayed in these publications.
Yet it emerged that few of the children involved in the vampire hunt had ever heard of these comics, nor did the youngsters know much about horror movies. They would not have been allowed into a cinema to see one, and almost nobody in the neighbourhood in 1954 had a television.
But the supposed vampire threat ‘went viral’ with all the speed of today’s social media, only without the technology. As Mr Rankin told a bemused Commons: ‘By some system of bush telegraph, no one knows how, and as the children poured out of school, the word went round like wildfire that there was a vampire in a nearby cemetery – that this vampire had iron teeth and had eaten two young children.
WITH that prattle, there went talk of spaceships and men from Mars, and all the time there was talk about a monster. The “monster” had gripped the minds of the children and so they armed themselves with sticks and stones and anything they could obtain because they were on a great mission – to destroy evil, to destroy the monster.’
More than 60 years later the story of the Gorbals Vampire has inspired stage dramas and documentaries, featured in books on the paranormal and been the subject of academic debate, but still nobody quite knows how the legend took hold among the city’s five to 14-year-olds.
Ronnie Sanderson, eight years old at the time, first heard about it in the playground. Speaking in 2011, he recalled: ‘The word was there was a vampire and everyone was going to head out there after school.
‘At three o’clock the school emptied and everyone made a beeline for it. We sat there for ages on the wall, waiting and waiting. I wouldn’t go in because it was a bit scary for me. I think somebody saw someone wandering about and the cry went up: “There’s a vampire!”’
Tam Smith, a year younger than Ronnie, was in a cafe with his Aunt Sadie next to the Bridge Street Subway station when word came about the danger in their midst.
He remembered: ‘We were sitting there listening to the jukebox and a friend of hers ran in and told us there was a vampire in the graveyard.’
He and his aunt both went to investigate and, because she was with him, he felt no fear. All his friends were scared of his Auntie Sadie. Perhaps the vampire would be, too.
‘The walls were lined with people,’ he said. ‘We ventured through the gatehouse and there were loads of kids in there, some wandering around, some sitting on the walls. There were a lot of dogs, too, and mums and dads with kids.
‘We found a place to stand out of the way, because there were so many people there. I think the whole of the Gorbals was in that graveyard. I can’t remember how long we stayed but one thing I remember clearly is that there was a furnace blast from the ironworks at the Dixon Blazes when it started to get dark.
‘It turned the sky flaming red, right across the top end of the Gorbals, and when that went up, everyone jumped. They thought that was the vampire.’
In fact, the ironworks was just another spooky element in an already unnerving mix. Its bright flares cast shadows on the tombstones and illuminated the smoke left hanging in the air.
In the youngsters’ minds, had the iron teeth been smelted in the furnace before finding their way into the gums of a vampire lurking among the dead in the graveyard next door?
Or did the metal dentistry originally belong to ‘Jenny wi’ the iron teeth’, a character from local folklore reputed to haunt Glasgow Green in the early 19th century?
Certainly her methods were vampiresque. According to the story, told to make children behave, Jenny would creep up behind her victims, sink her teeth into them and drag them away to be devoured.
There was also a forbidden element to the graveyard. The headmistress at the Gorbals Public School insisted that children must keep away from it – which, of course, only fuelled their curiosity and the sense of danger attached to it.
Having found no vampire on the first night, almost as many children returned on the second night to renew their search, only to draw a blank.
Yet still they did not give up. Only after three long nights’ hunting did they conclude they may have been chasing shadows.
‘Vampire with the iron teeth is dead,’ announced one newspaper headline at the time. ‘Lurid comics and a horror film are blamed with starting the scare,’ said the story.
It went on: ‘Last night all was quiet at the necropolis. Youngsters who swarmed the surrounding streets guiltily laughed at the idea of a vampire.’
The following day the backlash began in earnest. One tabloid ran an exposé on American comics, featuring ghouls, monsters and vampires, which were supposedly flooding the Glasgow market.
IT asked its readers: ‘Is this the kind of comic your child is reading?’ In full Mary Whitehouse mode, it railed: ‘This sort of rubbish must be stopped – for good.
‘Do not laugh off Glasgow’s vampire scare as a monstrous hoax. The youngsters round about Caledonia Road believed it all right. And, as the ghastly tale swept like a plague through the district, SOME ADULTS BELIEVED IT TOO.’
The tabloid warned that if the comics were not banned, they would ‘warp the Britain of the future’.
Soon it emerged that a comic book entitled The Vampire with the Iron Teeth had been published in the US
in 1953. Never mind that the vampire in the story was a woman.
Other chilling titles such as Tales From The Crypt, Vault Of Horror and The Haunt Of Fear were cited as possible triggers for the children’s behaviour, though none featured a character anything like the one they were chasing.
Nevertheless, the bizarre vampire hunt provided ammunition for campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic for a war on ‘horror’ in children’s comics.
Here a law was passed which prohibited the publication of periodicals portraying ‘incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature’. The legislation has rarely been used.
In the US, psychiatrist Charles Wertham, author of a notorious critique of comic books called Seduction Of The Innocent, leapt on the tale from the Gorbals as supposed proof that comics could turn youths into juvenile delinquents.
A national crackdown followed and several of the offending titles were pulled.
Back in Glasgow, the children carried on with their day-to-day lives, oblivious to all the fuss. Few of them had seen any comics beyond DC Thomson’s titles such as The Beano and The Dandy which featured nothing more monstrous than Dennis the Menace and Minnie the Minx.
Nowadays most of those who have studied the phenomenon dismiss the idea that it was comics which drove youngsters like brainwashed automatons to the local graveyard.
Some even mischievously suggest it could have been the Bible – part of the primary school curriculum at the time – which has a passage in Daniel 7:7 about a horrific beast with iron teeth.
Could the vampire have sprung from Holy Scripture? The relevant section reads: ‘After that, in my vision at night I looked, and there before me was a fourth beast – terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth; it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left.’
Or is the explanation a rather more prosaic one, rooted in the power of the imagination and children’s natural instinct for playing?
Geoff Holder, author of the book Paranormal Glasgow, dismisses any notion that the children were inspired by outside forces.
He said: ‘What I have discovered is that this vampire hunt is one of a great many monster hunts children in Glasgow have been doing over the years.
‘The necropolis was a place where children hung out. Because of overcrowding and lack of facilities, boys would nip over the wall and just play.
‘It was also a place of fear because there was this notion that a figure called The Fiddler would come to the graveyard at night.
‘It was supposedly a man whose wife had died and he came to her grave to play the fiddle. But the way he is described, he is clearly a dangerous figure, certainly from a child point of view.’
Perhaps a fleeting interest in vampires among a very small group of children piggy-backed on this story and produced the vampire hunt. After all, as Ronnie Sanderson readily admits: ‘I didn’t really know what a vampire was.’ Few eight-year-olds did, as he remembered.
FOR Mr Holder, the hunt for the ‘vampire’ was just another hunt for a monster – only this time with the word vampire attached to it. He has uncovered documented reports that in 1878 the children of Glasgow’s Cowcaddens were hunting hobgoblins.
In 1930, Govan children were searching for a banshee – and, four years later, talk of a ‘white lady’ galvanised children from nearby Linthouse into action.
Earlier in the 1950s, Gorbals children were on the lookout for a disembodied hand that was supposedly haunting one of the area’s buildings.
Mr Holder said: ‘Like all the others, the vampire hunt was a childhood fad, but it had a better public relations campaign. All these hunts lasted two or three nights and then they passed.’
Talk of the vampire with the iron teeth persisted for several weeks at school. Tam Smith remembers fellow pupils arriving in the classroom with reports of sightings. Some even invented a girlfriend for the vampire – Tin Lizzie.
But, by and by, other diversions competed for youngsters’ attention. One of them, another American import, arrived in 1955, the very year British politicians passed a law to stop a handful of US comic strip producers corrupting the youth.
It was called rock ’n’ roll.