A rumour circulated in 1954 in Gorbals, Glasgow that a vampire haunted the old Southern Necropolis. It took a group of feisty kids and a newspaper story to defeat it. However, there are still whispers of its existence in the city…
In the 1950s and 1960s, comic books were seen as a medium only for children, no matter what the content. There were a fair few comics concerning horrific monsters including vampires, so perhaps this was where the idea behind the rumour originated.
The Gorbals Vampire was apparently seven feet tall with red eyes that glowed in the dark, pale skin, and it had sharpened, iron teeth. It also seemed to have an appetite for children. The rumour held that this vampire had abducted, killed, and feasted on two small boys by draining them of their blood.
In spite of the adults, police force, and teachers trying to calm the hysteria, the children collectively decided to deal with the vampire themselves.
After school on September the 23rd 1954, some two-to-four hundred kids, from 4 to 14 years old, armed themselves with crosses and kitchen knives, sticks, stones, stakes, and dogs, and rushed upon the Southern Necropolis (or “The Gravy” in colloquial terms) to do a spot of vampire-hunting. Even some adults joined in! They continued to search even as night fell, checking behind trees and Victorian headstones. They even carried on as a soupy fog rolled in, causing them to rush towards one silhouette after another, convinced it was the vampire.
The hunt would have been no mean feat. The Southern Necropolis, built in 1840, contained more than 250,000 resting inhabitants. The Dixon Blazes steelworks was at the rear of the cemetery, coughing out smoke, lighting the sky up orange, likely blocking out the moonlight, emitting a sulphuric stench. Flames from the works’ towers cast odd shadows over the graves, making the headstones seem to leap, making it so figures appeared to be walking along at the back, limned in red light…
On top of that, a bonfire was spotted close to the cemetery and the kids started screaming that the vampire was burning its victims.
Locals called the police, and Constable Alex Deeprose was dispatched to the Necropolis. He said, “When I appeared, I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. All shapes and sizes of children streamed after me, all talking at once, and telling me of the ‘vampire with iron teeth’. This I could handle, but when grown-ups approached me and asked earnestly ‘Is there anything in this vampire story?’ it made me think.”
One child begged a journalist at the scene, “Hiv ye come tae shoot him, Mister? Kill him sae we can sleep tonight!”.
More police arrived followed by Edward Cusick, the headteacher of St Bonaventure’s Primary School, who gathered the kids together to reassure them that the vampire wasn’t real.
It started to rain and the children returned home. Gravediggers, cemetery officials and police couldn’t keep them away. Some of them went back to hunting the vampire in the Necropolis the next night, scaling the walls after the gates were locked, and the night after that. By the third night, their interest was starting to wane. By that time, stories were being printed about it in the national press.
The intrigue about the vampire spread through the wider population, prompting a discussion about the effects of American horror comics on youngsters. The kids’ vigilantism was raised by Alice Cullen, the Labour MP, during a debate on the 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act. This Act banned the sale of “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature” to minors. The Act was likely influenced by the Teachers’ Union, a few Christian groups, and the Communist Party (who wanted to stop American influences reaching the United Kingdom).
There were no missing or murdered children reported around the time of the Gorbals Vampire hunt.
At the time of the rumours, there was a horror comic about a vampire with iron teeth in the December 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries. Other American horror comics at the time were Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror.
However, many of the children living in Gorbals were in poverty and didn’t even have access to comic books or a TV. Most of the kids didn’t even know what a vampire was!
There was a passage in the Book of Daniel in the Bible, which would likely have been taught in schools: “Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth.”
The children may also have been inspired by the folkloric figure “Jenny wi’ The Iron (or Airn) Teeth,” a variation of Jenny Greenteeth, a monster invented by adults to scare children into avoiding bodies of water where they would be likely to drown. Jenny wi’ The Iron Teeth supposedly haunted Glasgow Green in the early 1800s. This particular Jenny was interested in eating children who refused to go to sleep, according to the rhyme:
“Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth,
come an tak’ the bairn.
Tak’ him to your den
where the bowgie bides,
but first put baith your big teeth
in his wee, plump sides.”
(Poem by Alexander Anderson)
Naughty children were also threatened with a visit from another folkloric figure, the Iron Man (not Tony Stark, but a being likely originating from the influence of the iron industry on the area).
In the cramped tenements of Gorbals, the Southern Necropolis was the only green space that children could meet up and play in. The atmosphere of the place lent itself to the swapping of ghost stories, which the kids did.
Gorbals, a place south of the river Clyde, began as a village in medieval times, but then Glasgow spread and surrounded it with the arrival of heavy industry. In 1340, there was a Leper’s House at St Ninian’s Croft hospital in Gorbals, and it’s said that when lepers crossed the bridge from there into Glasgow, they would ring handbells (or “gory-bells”) to warn the uninfected that they were coming.
By the end of the 1800s, Gorbals was suffering from overcrowding and poor sanitation. Many were drawn in by the promise of work with companies that provided worker housing. In 1900, there was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague.
As heavy industry declined and unemployment grew, there was an increase in crime and drunkeness. However, people still migrated into the area and filled up the tenements: people from the Scottish Highlands, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews. By the 1930s, around 90,000 people lived in Gorbals.
The infant mortality rate here was high, so it was little wonder that children would subconsciously conjure a being to explain child deaths which also had an association with metalworks. Iron had provided food – through jobs such as shipbuilding, the munitions factories in World War Two, and the iron foundry – but it had also taken away, leading to poverty, noise, light and chemical pollution, and dangerous jobs. In the children’s minds, iron was a thing with the power to destroy.
The Gorbals Vampire hunt was only one of several such hunts in history involving Glasgow children. In the 1870s, children hunted hobgoblins in Cowcaddens. In the 1900s, Glasgow children hunted banshees, ghosts, maniacs, and Spring-heeled Jack, the Victorian fire-breathing entity that apparently plagued London. In 1964, hundreds of children in Liverpool conducted a search for leprechauns.
In 2016, Johnny McKnight put on a play about the vampire in Gorbals, and residents of the area volunteered to act in it. At the same time, a competition was run in local schools for children to create a horror comic and design a mural paying homage to the vampire. Local teenage artist Ella Bryson and Art Pistol street artists Ejek painted the mural in an archway on St Luke’s Place near the Citizens’ Theatre.
Writing Update
I have recently had a few stories released. My dark humour flash fiction piece “You Are What You Eat” appeared in Slash magazine:
https://www.theslashmedia.com/you-are-what-you-eat/
My poem “Landscape One” won the Chai magazine’s Prithvi anthology contest (which may be available to read later in the year):
https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWkLQpCM87/?igsh=MTR4Yzhrb2hyaHQ3eQ==
I have a flash horror fiction, “Deathwalk,” in GossamerWight‘s Uncanny Regimes anthology, available to read for free online:
https://www.gossamerwight.com/store/p/uncanny-regimes-pdf
And my post-apocalyptic tale “Assuming the Mantle” is in ELA magazine:
https://nightwalks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/4eef7-ela-3-theendoftheworld.pdf
As for Once Upon A Crocodile e-zine, it is closed to submissions until the start of 2028 due to a backlog, but planned issues are still going ahead. You can read issue 19 here, and issue 20 is in the works. The edits are done, and I’m now doing the illustrations. It should be out by early August at the latest.
I’m also still rewriting parts of the second Nighthunter book. The beginning needed a do-over and some more scenes need adding in.
Sources
The Gorbals Vampire
Weird Britain (TV documentary series)
The Gorbals’ Vampire: The Iron-toothed, Child Eater who Terrorised Glasgow
The Gorbals Vampire – Did a 1950s Nosferatu Prowl Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis?
The Gorbals Vampire
Nightwalks 