Many moons ago, my (now) wife and I took a road trip from Budapest to Transylvania
We ended up in a town called Sighișoara. In German, it was known as Schässburg, and by the Hungarians, Segesvár, reflecting some of the many changes in its fascinating history.
It is a remarkably enchanting town that also happens to be the birthplace of Vlad Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler, if you prefer. He was born in 1431 and ruled the Wallachia region of (now) Romania at various times between 1456 and 1462. Vlad’s father (also called Vlad) was prince of Wallachia from 1436 to 1442, a member of the Dragon Order, or ‘Dracul’ order in the local dialect. That’s where the name comes from. We all know what Bram Stoker did with that name and the origin myth.
The town circles a hill, on the summit of which stands a citadel with a ring of walls, nine extant towers, and a number of medieval churches (one of which is at the top of the hill). After midnight, full of red wine and bonhomie, we decided to ‘find a vampire’.
We ascended the Covered Stairs (a wooden walkway) that connects the Citadel Square with the church on the hill, and behind the church is an old cemetery, a resting place of Sighisoara’s early German settlers. It was the eeriest place. There ensued our own little drama of imagination coupled with an atmosphere literally charged with another place and another time. In the daylight, we laughed at how spooked we had been, and how excited also…
Now press the rewind button to the grim post-war inner city landscape of the Gorbals in a Glasgow of the 1950s.
On September 23rd, 1954, police were called to the Southern Necropolis, (a huge graveyard in the Gorbals said to be home to a quarter of a million dead). Constables made their way to the graveyard, expecting to find vandals—not an uncommon occurrence in the Necropolis. PC Alex Deeprose was the first to arrive on the scene and he was in for quite a shock. There were hundreds of children running all around the graveyard. Alarmingly, those children (aged from toddlers through to teenagers) were weaponised – they had crosses, crucifixes, axes, and even knives.
Constable Deeprose, in no uncertain terms, asked them what was going on.
The excited responses all led to the same clear conclusion. The children were hunting what they called The Gorbals Vampire, a 7-foot tall creature with iron teeth. They believed that this creature was behind the murders of two other children that had recently been consumed in the Necropolis.
Copyright Bradley Michael and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence
Tam Smith was a seven-year-old schoolboy at the time. He recalled the scene in a local newspaper interview:
“The walls were lined with people. 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. It’s hard to put an estimate on the number of people.”
Being Glasgow, it wasn’t long before the rain came and called a halt to the evening hunt. However, the children returned again the next night…and the night after that. By this time, the police had been called multiple times and the legend of the Gorbals Vampire was beginning to take root…
Parents began to worry about the creature that was stalking and killing children in the dead of night and discussions were frequent on the subject of ‘what to do’. Not surprisingly, rumours were rife in the schoolyard. An excitement laced with an element of fear was palpable. It became, in effect, a form of mass hysteria.
And then it all just stopped. It ran its course and that was it. While the children vampire hunting in the graveyard at night, illuminated by the fire of the nearby steelworks, was very real…the tale of the vampire seemed to be just a story. According to investigations by the police and reporters at the time, no children were missing or had been found dead or injured in the area during the time.
So, what had caused so many people to believe there was a vampire in their midst? Did it all start and end in the playground fueled by childhood fantasies? That was the conclusion of the Press and of many parents.
Maybe they were half right. There was a story of an iron-tooth vampire published in an American comic the year before (December 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries #15). Could this have been the spark? The result was that scary comic books were blamed, and the MP for the Gorbals introduced the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act the following year.
However, according to a report in the Scotsman newspaper, the children may have updated a local boogeyman into something more easily hunted,
“Myths of iron-toothed monsters have haunted Glasgow for some time. According to Tam Smith, parents sometimes warned their badly behaved offspring that the ‘Iron Man’ – a local ogre – would get them.”
The Southern Necropolis cemetery was indeed located near an ironworks called Dixon Blazes, and there had been tales through the generations that a monster resided there…
So, Glasgow kids didn’t need to turn to American comics for a story about a flesh-eating, iron-toothed monster. Such creatures were already firmly embedded in other local legends such as Jenny Wi’ the Airn [iron] Teeth, a figure immortalised in a 19th-century poem by Scottish railway worker-turned-poet Alexander Anderson. The poem, used to frighten children who refused to go to sleep, told of a creature that would carry away restless kids, but not before she sank her iron teeth into “his wee plump sides.”
‘Jenny’ is a far more illusive character than the Gorbals Vampire and is often mentioned as part of the cultural mix that led to her more famous offspring but she deserves attention on her own. It was believed a monster haunted Glasgow Green and lived in a shed owned by two elderly women – one of whom had substandard dental work carried out leaving iron fillings in her teeth clearly visible.
Interestingly, many local legends such as ‘Jenny’ were works of fiction designed to make children wary of something. There are similar stories told all over the United Kingdom – no matter what name you use – Ginny Greenteeth, Nelly Longarms, Ginny Burntarse, Peg Powler, Jenny Wi’ the Airn Teeth, or Screeching Ginny.
There is another report from Liverpool where locals still remember the St James’s cemetery lodge being pelted with eggs in the 1950s by local schoolchildren believing it to be the home of Ginny Greenteeth.
And then there were the notorious living conditions in the Gorbals, which had to rival some of the worst in Europe. This might have made local children welcome a vampire hunt by way of an exciting diversion from the grind of everyday life.
As a matter of fact, the Gorbals legends and folk tales may even have had some roots in Central and Eastern Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romania during the century before, peasants and other village folks would use the vampire as scapegoats for everything from plague to bad weather. Many immigrants from those regions had settled in Glasgow during the 19th Century expansion of inner-city industries.
Whatever the main cause or catalyst, what we have seems to be a striking example of children’s world-building in action, and by extension the power of imagination combined with social networks and local (and wider) cultures. Maybe it is not so surprising that we now live in a world rife with adults claiming ‘this and that’ incredulous conspiracy – social media and mass information systems have made it much easier for local to become international…
French Phillips Historical Consultancy 