The Cutprice Guignol

On the chilly Autumn evening of 23rd September, 1954, dozens of children descended on Glasgow’s imposing Victorian graveyard, the Southern Necropolis. The gloomy stone tombs were lit by flashes of fire from a steelwork factory at the far end of the street, the scent of smoke heavy in the air. Brandishing wooden stakes, knives, and crosses, the children were there for one reason: to hunt down and kill an iron-toothed vampire who had been kidnapping and killing their classmates.

The Gorbals Vampire, as it would later become known, first took shape on the playgrounds of various schools in the Gorbals and Hutcheson’s area of Glasgow, Scotland in the first few weeks of September, 1954. According to these rumours, the creature was a seven-foot-tall vampire with iron teeth who had snatched up two schoolboys in the area in the preceding weeks to feed his bloodlust, and lived in the local Victorian graveyard known as the Southern Necropolis.

The Necropolis, which had been created in 1839 in response to overcrowding in other local cemeteries, was the final resting place of around 100,000 bodies, most of them buried in layers in the graveyard on the Southern side of the city. With it’s imposing gatehouse and scattering of elaborate Victorian tombs, it’s easy to see why this was decided upon as the vampire’s resting place – if there was anywhere in Glasgow hiding out a creature of the undead, it had to be this place. It also represented one of the few green spaces available to children in the highly-industrialised Glasgow of the time, and was often used as a play area or meeting space for young people, that familiarity perhaps another reason it came to mind so quickly as a potential vampiric site.

Soon, the children of these schools had settled on a way to strike back – a horde would descend on the Southern Necropolis just as soon as classes had finished for the day, and take care of the vampire themselves. Children – from toddlers to teenagers – gathered everything they could by way of weapons (one carrying a homemade tomahawk), and scrambled over the walls to hunt down the vampire who had been picking off their classmates once and for all.

The exact number of children who attended this hunt isn’t clear, but local reports suggest it might have been up to several hundred. The hunt began in earnest, and, soon, the commotion had attracted enough attention (and caused enough noise) that a local policeman, Alex Deeprose, was sent out to see what was actually going on in there. He was informed that they were on the hunt for a killer vampire who had been targeting local schoolchildren, and, despite attempts to disperse the would-be vampire slayers, the children would not be moved. Well, at least until it started to rain, upon which most of them returned home.

But they were far from finished – the group (though in dwindling numbers) returned to the Necropolis for the next few days after school, determined to hunt down and destroy the vampire before he could attack again. Of course, they didn’t find anything or anyone hidden amongst the old gravestones over the course of that September week, and, soon enough, interest in the Gorbals Vampire began to fade amongst the children involved.

So, what exactly led to this particular rumour? It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s worth noting that there were no missing children reported around the time the vampire was set to have struck. Nor was it the first time in the preceding decades that a mob of children had formed in Glasgow to take on a mythological creature, with newspaper reports from the 1930s remarking on similar attempts at supernatural justice aimed at creatures such as banshees.

A poem by Scots poet Alexander Anderson, taught at local schools, may have formed the basis for some details of the Gorbals Vampire story – Jenny Wi’ The Airn Teeth (Jenny with the Iron Teeth) told the story of a creature who would steal away restless children with her iron teeth at night, meant to encourage children into an early night of rest: “Sleepin’ weans are no for you/Ye may turn about/An’ tak’ awa’ wee Tam next door/I hear him screichin’ oot.” Heavy industrialisation in the area may have helped sprout the vampire’s iron fangs, with a metalworks overlooking the Necropolis he was said to inhabit. Several of the children involved in the hunt later remarked that they didn’t even really know what a vampire was – Bob Campbell, speaking to the Citizen’s Theatre about the event in 2017, admitted that he “[didn’t] know what we’d have done if we’d met one, like.”

But some local adults who caught wind of the rumour came to a different conclusion about the origins of this bizarre Scottish vampire. As any mob of children stalking the streets with knives and stakes might engender, there was some concern about where this had come from, and, crucially, how it could be stopped from happening again.

Shortly before the hunt for the Gorbals Vampire began, in mid-1954, a long-running campaign in America to censor horror comics had finally come to fruition – the Comics Code Authority, a group that promised to keep the contents of comic books and other magazine publications strictly above-board, took on the job of ensuring a squeaky-clean comic book output; from lifting the low-cut blouses of Archie comics characters, to, crucially, limiting the scope of horror content in the medium. The authority condemned depictions of werewolves, zombies, and, of course, vampires.

A similar campaign had run congruently in the UK, but it had gained little traction. Comics imported from America were of particular interest to this campaign, such as Tales from the Crypt and Dark Mysteries. One particular 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries, in fact, had even featured a short story titled Vampire with the Iron Teeth (which you can read here), a seemingly obvious connection to the events in Glasgow. However, the extreme poverty in the area would have made it next to impossible for children in the Gorbals to access the publication, and none of the children involved in the hunt reported coming into contact with this comic or any like it in the lead-up to their attempt at vigilante vampiric justice.

Regardless, in the aftermath of the Gorbals Vampire panic, Alice Cullen, member of parliament for the Gorbals at the time, and John Rankin, MP for Tradeston in Glasgow, used the incident to rail against the dangers of horror comic books that could be read by children in a parliamentary reading of the Harmful Publications bill in February 1955, a matter of months after the children of the Gorbals rallied to destroy their vampiric nemesis. Rankin declared, of the Gorbals Vampire incident, that “just as we would refuse to put poison on the breakfast table or the dinner table to be put into the bodies of our children, so I hope that tonight we shall refuse to instil poison into their minds.”.

The bill, intended to ban the publication of any depictions of “the commission of crimes, acts of violence or cruelty, or incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature” in comics that could feasibly be accessed by children, was commenced in June 1955, less than a year after the Gorbals Vampire incident. It didn’t seem to have a particularly impressive impact on Scottish children’s desire to gather and hunt for supernatural beings, though, as incidents of large groups of kids pursuing paranormal creatures, such as ghosts, in Paisley and Kilmarnock in the following decades indicated.

The Gorbals Vampire remains a popular part of the history of the Southside of Glasgow, commemorated by a mural by art collective Art Pistols and Ella Bryson near the Necropolis. While no evidence regarding the veracity of the rumours are true, it formed the basis a long-lasting and iconic story that has been passed down through new generations of the city’s inhabitants, still surviving almost seventy years later.

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(header image via David Castleon)