Well, if it’s 23 September… yes, of course: the 69th anniversary of the hunt for the Gorbals Vampire, in which hundreds of children aged 4–14, armed with dogs, knives and sharpened sticks went looking for an urban myth.
This is not to be confused with the invasion of Highgate Cemetery in 1970, involving grown adults in London believing that there was a bloodsucker on the loose who needed staking…
No, this was quite different. This was some children who had heard the Established Fact that “a 7ft tall vampire with iron teeth … had … kidnapped and eaten two local boys”. And where would such a fiend be found? Well, in Glasgow’s largest cemetery, of course.
Ronnie Sanderson, 8 at the time, told the BBC in 2010: “It all started in the playground — the word was there was a vampire and everyone was going to head out there after school” — ‘there’ being the magnificently named Southern Necropolis.
No one knows how the story started, or why, although The Scotsman had some theories when it revisited the story in 2016:
Two academics, though, who presented a paper about the event at a conference in 1985, looked into the idea of the comics, and said — in academic terms, at least — it was complete balls.
One version of the story suggests that it might have been December 1953’s issue of Dark Mysteries, and, certainly, only one copy needed to have found its way to that part of Glasgow for it to have sparked an urban myth.
…and that certainly seems more plausible than a lot of schoolchildren, even in the 1950s, having a familiarity with Daniel 7:7 (although, again, it only takes one to start a rumour, and if that rumour is appealing enough…)
The most likely explanation, surely,is that some half-heard, or half-remembered folk tale (or movie, or TV show) popped into some kid’s head one day, that kid told another, and… soon the graveyard was heaving with children — some, apparently, brandishing “homemade tomahawks”.
Depending on which source you believe, police tried to disperse the mob without success — and “a local school headmaster was summoned to the cemetery to scold the children into submission” — but, apparently, they only went home when it started to rain.
…and then came back for the next two nights, ultimately sparking a moral panic about the American comics they might not even have seen, bringing together a distinctly unholy alliance of teachers, communists and fundamentalist Christians who all had their own reasons for their frankly rather silly campaign.
Perhaps you don’t think it was silly, but I put it to you that deputy head George Pumphrey’s 1954 pamphlet Comics and Your Children is bilge of the highest order.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing in all this is that the campaign was successful, and what started as a bizarre playground rumour ended in 1955’s Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act — still in force, if hardly ever used.
It is, as Neil Gaiman points out “said to be the only piece of legislation the UK Communist Party ever managed to get on the books”.
