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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Mar 23, 2010 22:55:34 GMT
The Gorbals Vampire Back in 1954, two policemen were called to a disturbance at a Glasgow cemetery. They discovered hundreds of children searching for a vampire with iron teeth. I'll give the programme a listen, and find out how that happened. How do you organise hundreds of kids to hunt vampires in the first place?
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Post by JohnK on Mar 24, 2010 14:25:01 GMT
Hullo, Craig, The Gorbals Vampire Back in 1954, two policemen were called to a disturbance at a Glasgow cemetery. They discovered hundreds of children searching for a vampire with iron teeth. I'll give the programme a listen, and find out how that happened. How do you organise hundreds of kids to hunt vampires in the first place? This sounds really interesting, to be honest, and might make for a good seed for a DW: AiTaS game. Any chance of you writing something up after watching the tv programme?
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Post by Craig Oxbrow on Apr 2, 2010 17:20:18 GMT
Glasgow's Southern Necropolis is an eerie place at the best of times but when two local policemen answered a call there in September 1954 they encountered a bizarre sight. Hundreds of local children, ranging in ages from 4 to 14, were crammed inside, roaming between the crypts. They were armed with sharpened sticks, knives stolen from home and stakes. They said they were hunting down "A Vampire with Iron Teeth" that had kidnapped and eaten two local boys. The policemen dispersed the crowd, but they came back at sundown the next night and the next. The local press got hold of the story and it soon went national. There were no missing boys in Glasgow at that time, and press and politicians cast around for an explanation. They soon found one in the wave of American Horror comics with names like "Astounding Stories" and "Tales from the Crypt" which had recently flooded into the West of Scotland. Academics pointed out that none of the comics featured a vampire with iron teeth, though there was a monster with iron teeth in the bible (Daniel 7.7) and in a poem taught in local schools. Their voices were drowned out in a full-blown moral panic about the effect that terrifying comics were having on children. Soon the case of the "Gorbals Vampire" was international news. The British Press raged against the "terrifying, corrupt," comics and after a heated debate in the House of Commons where the case of Gorbals Vampire was cited, Britain passed the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which, for the first time, specifically banned the sale of magazines and comics portraying "incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature" to minors. The Gorbals Vampire-- The programme was more about the fallout from the scare, and tracing the idea of a vampire with iron teeth to American horror comics and fuelling the campaing that lead to the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955. They actually managed to find a reference to such a vampire in Dark Mysteries 15 (published 1953) so maybe someone did read or hear about it. But while a few people from the time were interviewed, it didn't really address how the story moved from the page to hundreds of kids searching for the Vampire, which is what really interests me about the story. Oh well.
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Post by Null and Void on Apr 8, 2010 12:27:18 GMT
Why haven't I heard of this until now!?
oooooohhh.... my supernatural-fu is WEAK these days...
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