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On the evening of September 23rd, 1954, hundreds of local children climbed the walls of a Glasgow cemetery carrying knives, sharpened sticks, and dogs.
Jack Mercer explores the Gorbals, Glasgow: the 1954 vampire hunt in the Southern Necropolis, the horror-comic panic, 1930s gangs, and the people who shaped the district's reputation.
Key Takeaways
- The 1954 vampire hunt was a product of deprivation, lack of play space, and a rapidly spreading rumor rather than a real threat.
- Moral panic over horror comics led to legislation despite lacking evidence that comics caused the behavior.
- The Gorbals' violent reputation was shaped as much by fiction and media coverage as by documented events.
- Urban clearance and failed housing policies compounded the district's social problems.
What the video covers
- On September 23, 1954, hundreds of Gorbals children entered the Southern Necropolis cemetery with knives, sticks, and dogs to hunt a supposed 7-foot iron-toothed vampire said to have eaten two boys.
- Police found no vampire and no missing children; the rumor rested on two victims who never existed.
- Children in the Gorbals had few green spaces and lived in severe overcrowding, so the cemetery functioned as a playground and the monster story spread quickly.
- Newspapers blamed American horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and a council motion pushed for legal controls on such comics.
- Researchers found no evidence comics caused the hunt; local folklore such as Jenny with the iron teeth and earlier child monster hunts in the 1930s suggest a longer tradition.
- The panic contributed to the Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act of 1955, which remains on the books though rarely used.
- In July 1939, a crowd attacked police after two arrests, with gangs like the Beehive Boys and Southside Stickers involved.
- The Gorbals' gang reputation was amplified by the 1935 novel No Mean City, though the most famous gangs (Billy Boys, Norman Conks) came from the East End.
- The Mercer video also covers crime cases including the Patrick Caraher murder trial and a prisoner-turned-artist's life, and the demolition of Gorbals housing blocks due to damp and maintenance failures.
Chapters
- 00:00The 1954 Vampire Hunt in the Southern Necropolis
- 05:00Why Children Were in the Cemetery: Overcrowding and Play
- 08:00Horror Comics Panic and the Press
- 12:00Folklore Roots and Legislation
- 16:30The 1939 Police Riot and Gang Culture
- 21:00No Mean City and the Myth of the Razor King
- 27:00Criminal Cases and Later Life Stories
- 36:00Housing Decline and Demolition
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Some were only 4 years old.
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They were hunting a 7-foot vampire with iron teeth that had supposedly eaten two boys.
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Police found no vampire.
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They also found no missing boys.
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That was the Gorbals, a district where children grew up so surrounded by hardship that a monster story felt believable.
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I'll walk you through the people and events that built its reputation.
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And the last man's own books tell one killing two different ways.
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The children of the Gorbals had come straight from school to the Southern Necropolis, a Victorian cemetery said to hold the remains of more than a quarter of a million people.
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According to a local newspaper, they scaled the walls.
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Reports from the time don't explain why they didn't just walk in through the gates.
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Then the shouting started, and it got loud enough that somebody called the police.
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The officers expected vandals.
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A constable named Alex Deeprose reportedly could hardly believe what he found, which was several hundred kids, from toddlers up through the teens, moving among the headstones.
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Some carried homemade tomahawks.
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Many had brought their dogs along.
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Here's what I can't get past.
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The rumor behind all of this was incredibly specific.
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A vampire, 7 feet tall with iron teeth, had killed two local boys and eaten them.
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Ask which boys, though, and nobody could say.
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The police checked.
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No children had been reported missing.
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The entire panic rested on two victims who never existed.
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The constable tried to move the crowd along, and it didn't work.
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How it finally ended depends on who you ask.
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One account says it started raining, and everyone went home.
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Others say a local headmaster was brought in to scold the children into leaving.
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Nobody disputes the next part.
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They came back the following night and the night after that.
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One boy who was there, Ronnie Sanderson, was 8 years old.
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He later said he'd been telling his wife about the vampire for years, and she never believed him.
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Another, Tam Smith, remembered that the glow from the works behind the cemetery lit up the smoke red, so the gravestones seemed to jump, and figures walking at the back looked outlined in fire.
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One man who took part later said they didn't have Christopher Lee to explain the stake, so the plan was just to cut its head off.
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Think about that for a second.
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Hundreds of children, the youngest 4 years old, went into a graveyard in the evening to kill something because another kid said it existed.
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You can see how a child ends up believing something is out there, but I want you to understand why these particular children were in a cemetery at all.
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For them, it was a park.
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Green space was scarce in the Gorbals.
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At its peak in the 1930s, the wider district held an estimated 90,000 people, and by the 1950s, the overcrowding hadn't gone away.
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One newspaper account said a single bathroom might serve as many as 30 people.
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Families of six or eight shared one room.
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Children chased rats through the streets and clubbed them with sticks.
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So this wasn't a gang of bored vandals.
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It was a neighborhood's kids with almost nowhere else to play and a story that spread faster than any adult could stop it.
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The adults didn't see it that way.
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On September 24th, the vampire reached the front page of a Glasgow paper called The Bulletin, and other papers followed.
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Before long, the story had a villain, and it wasn't a vampire.
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Newspapers pointed at American horror comics, naming titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror.
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One headline asked whether this was the kind of comic your child was reading.
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An unlikely alliance of churches, communists, and the National Union of Teachers had been pushing the same idea.
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On September 30th, a Glasgow councillor, Bailey Main, put forward a motion asking the corporation to lobby the Secretary of State for Scotland for a law to control horror comics sold to children.
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Here's the problem.
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There's no evidence the comics caused anything.
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When researchers interviewed people who took part in the hunt, none remembered reading them.
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There was one 1953 comic story called The Vampire with the Iron Teeth, so that coincidence is real, but Glasgow children already had their own iron-toothed monster.
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A 19th-century poem by Alexander Anderson told of Jenny with the iron teeth, a figure used to scare kids who wouldn't sleep.
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One man even remembered his great-grandfather, who lived near the cemetery, telling stories about an iron man.
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And this wasn't the first time.
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A 1985 paper by researchers Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwall found that Glasgow children had gathered for monster hunts through the 1930s, chasing a banshee, a white lady, and Spring-heeled Jack.
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A week after the vampire night, several hundred Glasgow children surrounded a traveler caravan and tried to stone the family inside, nearly hitting a 5-month-old baby.
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Nobody knows how that one started, either.
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The comics historian Martin Barker suggested these kids were looking for any spark of excitement in a miserable place to live.
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Whatever lit the fuse, the politics went further than anyone expected.
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Alice Cullen, the Labour MP for the Gorbals, took the campaign to Parliament, and in 1955, Britain passed the Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act.
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The law never actually uses the words horror comics.
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It targets stories told in pictures that show crimes, violence, or repulsive incidents.
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It's still on the books today, though it's rarely used.
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So, a hunt for two boys who were never eaten ended with a law.
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That's the childhood version of the Gorbals.
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The adult version had already been earning its reputation for a generation, and in the summer of 1939, the police found out how far it went.
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Here's the scene.
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It's July 1939 in the Gorbals, and police are taking two prisoners to the station.
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Word gets around.
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The Beehive Boys and the Southside Stickers, two local gangs, reportedly join forces to confront the officers.
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Hundreds of local people gather on the main street corners.
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When police reinforcements arrive in squad cars and vans on Thistle Street, they get stoned.
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Shop windows are smashed, and officers end up standing guard just to stop looting.
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Think about that.
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This wasn't two gangs fighting each other.
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It was a crowd turning on the police over two arrests.
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The Beehive Boys took their name from a draper's shop on the corner of Thistle Street and Cumberland Street, right in the middle of it all.
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Now, I want to clear something up, because this is where the Gorbals gets credit it doesn't quite deserve.
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The most famous gang of the era, the Billy Boys, came from Bridgeton in the East End.
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Their Catholic rivals, the Norman Conks, took their name from Norman Street, also in the East End.
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The Gorbals had real gangs, but the legend stuck to it for another reason: a book.
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In 1935, a Gorbals bakery worker named McArthur and a journalist named H. Kingsley Long published a novel called No Mean City.
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Its hero was a slum hooligan named Johnny Stark, nicknamed the Razor King.
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It was fiction, and it sold the Gorbals to the world.
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Later writers say people even confused the made-up Stark with the real Billy Fullerton, who led the Billy Boys in Bridgeton.
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Fullerton, by the way, didn't end the way a razor king should.
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He died in 1962, aged 57, in a one-room tenement near Bridgeton Cross.
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About a thousand people marched at his funeral, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.
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So, what were these gangs, really?
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People still argue about it.
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A 1974 article in a socialist magazine called them hooligans fighting boredom.
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The historian Andrew Davies, who studied Glasgow's gangs, argued the opposite: that they were organized, that they extorted money from shopkeepers and publicans, and that they preyed on the neighborhoods they claimed to protect.
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I'd say both can be partly true.
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Here's one thi
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He remarried in 1955. In 1959, a future MP, Norman Buchan, wrote a ballad about him, and the actor Roddy McMillan wrote a play [music] called Romensky Must Go Free.
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One Scottish gazetteer says he escaped from Peterhead three times in 1958 alone, though other counts differ.
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Years later, he was caught on a shop roof in Ayr and sentenced to a year in Perth [music] Prison.
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There, he suffered a stroke, and he died on November 4th, 1972, aged 66. [music] That was the same calendar date as his first escape from Peterhead, [music] 38 years earlier.
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Now meet the other kind of Gorbals man. Patrick Carraher was born in 1906, the same year as Remensky, in the same district, and the newspapers called him the fiend of the Gorbals. [music] By every account, he came from a
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respectable working-class family. He just loved to fight. At 14, he was sent to Borstal, the first of many stretches in custody. He drank heavily, [music] and the accounts say the drink fed his anger. One account says prison suited
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[music] him. Most inmates were focused on stealing. For Carraher, the point was [music] always the fighting, and prison, with its knives, gave him plenty of it.
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Carraher killed two men. Sources disagree on the name of his first victim, and exactly when it happened, [music] so I'm going to skip those details.
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What's clear is the outcome. He was tried for murder, convicted of culpable homicide, which is [music] roughly what Scots law uses where other places say manslaughter, and sentenced to 3 years.
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His defense was that he was too drunk to [music] understand what he was doing.
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The verdict surprised a lot of people in the legal world, and it was read [music] as a sign that juries didn't want to send anyone to the gallows. Keep that in mind for now.
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After his release, he was back in court on razor slashing and assault charges. Then, in a street fight near the end of the war, he stabbed a man named John Gordon with a chisel, and Gordon bled to death.
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One account puts it in November 1945. Three men were arrested, but only Carraher was charged. According to one telling, it began when a friend of Carraher's, Daniel Bonner, had a dispute with one of the Gordons. When Carraher heard about it, he went looking for
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them, and he found John Gordon with his brother-in-law. At the trial, Bonner and his sister, who was Carraher's girlfriend at the time, gave evidence against him.
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[music] The jury took less than 20 minutes. This time, the verdict was murder. Patrick Caraher was hanged at Barlinnie Prison on April 6th, 1946.
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He was 39. Born the same year as Romensky, dead 26 years before him. A book about his case was later published with a title that says it all, Trials of Patrick Caraher, Twice Tried for Murder in Glasgow.
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Here's what I keep coming back [music] to. Romensky was known for never using violence and spent most of his life behind bars. Caraher killed two men and the first time the system gave him 3 years. I'm not telling you what that
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means. I'm telling [music] you it happened. Barlinnie is where Caraher died. Within 20 years, Britain would abolish the death penalty for murder and the next man in this story would [music] be sent to Barlinnie, too, but never to
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the gallows. Jimmy Boyle was 23 years old when a jury at the High Court in Glasgow took 45 minutes to find [music] him guilty of murder.
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It was November 1967. The victim was William Babbs Rooney, a small-time Glasgow criminal who had been slashed from head to stomach with a knife.
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Boyle was given life with a minimum of 15 years before he could apply for release. He was one of the first high-profile figures convicted of murder after the death penalty was abolished in 1965.
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His son James had been born in 1966. His daughter Patricia would be born that December with her father already in prison. And here's the part that stopped me. It was the third time Boyle had stood trial for murder and the first
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time he was convicted. The first time he was found not guilty. The second time the charges were dropped. In both cases, the houses of witnesses had been firebombed to scare them off.
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Boyle was born in 1944 in the Gorbals. His father, a known robber, died in his 30s. His mother cleaned houses to support four boys. By 13, Boyle was in custody for the first time, and he had joined the Cumbie gang. He was jailed
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for 2 years for a bottle attack in which his [music] victim lost an eye. The press called him Baby Face.
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By 20, he was working for money lenders, collecting from poor customers who were charged interest of up to 1,000%.
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A former Strathclyde Chief Constable later described what that could look like. In one case, [music] he recalled, two tallymen held a debtor down in his own home and scarred his face. The man never complained to police, so police
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couldn't act. He just vanished. Boyle had been at it for roughly 3 years when William Rooney ended up in his path. Rooney owed £7 and had missed two payments, and his money lender was not happy. In early July 1967, Boyle was
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drinking in a government pub when he was asked to go collect. [music] He went to Rooney's home on Cornwall Street in Kinning Park. Rooney's girlfriend opened the door. Rooney came out bare-chested, getting ready for bed.
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Boyle said he'd come for the money, and Rooney asked for more time. At that point, Boyle was alleged to have pulled out a knife.
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Rooney was killed. Boyle fled to London, where, according to the account, he was put under the protection of the Kray's.
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The Kray's couldn't keep him hidden for long. In September 1967, according to the Evening Times, Boyle was drinking in the British Lion pub on Hackney Road in London when plainclothes police pulled up in a lorry, overpowered him, and took him back to Scotland.
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Picture that. A man who was supposedly under the protection of the most feared brothers in London grabbed in an ordinary pub by officers who didn't bother with [music] a patrol car. A detective named Brian McLaughlin later guarded him in his Glasgow cell.
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By November, he was standing trial at the High Court. Two men were charged over Rooney's death, Boyle and a man named William Wilson. You already know what the jury did with Boyle. Wilson was acquitted. So, Rooney's killing had
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produced one conviction, one acquittal, and a witness protection problem. Now, remember the firebombed witnesses from the first two trials? This time, after the verdict, witnesses needed police protection and three men, including a lawyer named James Latter, were convicted of intimidating them. A
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lawyer. I'd like you to sit with that for a second, because that detail tells you what kind of case this [music] was.
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The judge, Lord Cameron, called Boyle a dangerous menace to society. 15 years before parole could even be considered meant 1982 at the earliest. That was the sentence. Over the next several years, Boyle made it a lot longer. The numbers
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come from the same account, so take them as the Evening Times reports them. At Barlinnie, he assaulted an assistant governor and broke a bone in the man's face. That added 18 months. In October 1968, he attacked two officers at
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Peterhead, the very prison Johnny Ramensky had escaped from more than 30 years earlier, and that added four years.
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In June 1970, there was a riot at Porterfield Prison in Inverness and he got another six months. Then, in May 1973, he was named as a ringleader in more rioting at Porterfield and was convicted of the attempted murder of six
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officers. Six more years. Add those up and you get 12 extra years on top of a life sentence. I can't tell you how many ran at the same time as the others, and the account doesn't say, so treat that
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total as arithmetic on paper rather than time actually served. What I can tell you is what the prison did in response.
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Boyle was held for long stretches in solitary confinement, in punishment cells, and what the account calls special cages. Another record, the history of Inverness prison, says he was often in the cages, whose only facility was a concrete block to sleep on, and
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describes him as severely disruptive. Read that again. A concrete block. Peterhead, Inverness, solitary. This was the answer to a man who kept hitting people, and it produced a man who hit people harder. Neither side was winning.
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The book he later wrote describes brutality in Scottish jails, and according to one account of it, he eventually resorted to what's known as a dirty protest to avoid being beaten.
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Then, something strange happened. In 1973, the same year as that second Porterfield riot, Barlinnie opened something called the special unit. Eight years after Britain abolished hanging for murder, the prison system was still working out what to do with men it could
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no longer execute. The unit ran until 1994, and placed its emphasis on rehabilitation. One prison officer, Ken Murray, is credited with the belief that rehabilitation depended on trust between staff and prisoners. In a Scottish prison of that era, trust between staff
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and prisoners was close to a revolutionary idea. Barlinnie, remember, is the same prison where Patrick Carraher was hanged. It was now going to be the place that tried to talk violent men out of violence. According to the Evening Times, Boyle was among the first
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men moved into the unit. Inside, with the help of an art therapist named Joyce Lang, he discovered something nobody had predicted. He could sculpt. And he kept at it. In 1976, still [music] a prisoner, he made a concrete sculpture
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called Gulliver for the Craigmillar Festival Society. A man serving life for murder was being commissioned to make public art. In 1979, he was commissioned to produce a memorial statue of the poet William McGonagall, though that project was never completed. And in 1977, he
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published an autobiography, A Sense of Freedom. It became a best-seller. The same year, he wrote a play with Tom McGrath called The Hardman. Another man who served time in the unit, Hugh Collins, has described Boyle correcting him calmly rather than snapping at him.
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When Boyle eventually left, Collins says, he left behind his sculpting tools and his place in the yard.
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I honestly did not expect that detail. Later, a film version of A Sense of Freedom starring David Hayman was nominated for a BAFTA. Just stop and think about the distance here. Born in the Gorbals in May 1944, he had been through approved schools and
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borstal. A boy in a gang at 13, a debt collector at 20, a man in a concrete cage in his 20s, and now a best-selling author.
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A psychiatrist named Sarah Trevelyan read the book and went to visit him, and they would later marry.
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The press and a lot of the public saw the headline they wanted, the Gorbals gangster who had been saved by art.
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Some people looked at the unit and saw proof that rehabilitation could work. Others saw a killer being rewarded.
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I can see both arguments, and I'm not going to pretend the question is simple.
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But there's a catch, and it concerns one night in Cornwall Street. The man who wrote the best-selling story of his own redemption would, decades later, publish a revised edition of his autobiography in 2016. [music] And on the question of who killed
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William Rooney, according to the Evening Times, it doesn't tell the story the way the first one did.
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Set with the two versions side by side. So, here are the two versions, and I want you to hear them side-by-side.
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Neither one is a confession, and neither one [music] is a clean denial. In the 1977 book, as the Evening Times describes it, Boyle wrote that he argued with Rooney and slashed him across the chest [music] but that he never killed him. He added
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that in law he was technically guilty because he had slashed him. The same account notes that he was not as forthcoming about Rooney's death as he was about earlier incidents in the book.
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Now, the 2016 edition. There, Boyle wrote that Rooney was killed by his co-accused, William Wilson. He also described [music] an agreement between them that whichever of the two got off would then say it was me that did it.
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And remember who got off. Wilson was cleared at trial, and by 2016 he was dead, so he can't answer.
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I'll be straight with you about where that leaves us. A jury convicted Boyle of murder in 1967, and that verdict stands.
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Boyle has said for years that he did not kill Rooney. The two accounts agree that he slashed him, and disagree about who finished it, and both of them come from Boyle.
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Remember what I promised you at the start, that the last man's own books tell one killing two different ways.
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That's what you just heard. I can't tell you which one is true. I can tell you that a book can sell a man's redemption, and then a second edition can quietly move the knife.
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Boyle was set free in 1982, which fits the 15 years the judge had set. Sources give the year slightly differently, but the Evening Times and the book's own publisher both say 1982.
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In 1983, he and Sarah Trevelyan founded the Gateway Project in Edinburgh, offering art therapy, and it later became Solas, supporting people with HIV and AIDS.
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A man a judge had called a dangerous menace to society was now running an art therapy project.
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That is the clean ending. It isn't the whole one. His son James, born in 1966, was 27 in 1994 [music] when he was stabbed to death in Oatlands on the south side of Glasgow.
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James had served 3 years for robbery and was a heroin addict. A man named Gary Moore was later convicted of culpable homicide and sentenced to 8 years.
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He and Sarah Trevelyan had two children of their own, now grown. Boyle had once written about learning he was a father.
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I was really [music] very happy. It was something I could never have imagined myself being.
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His daughter Patricia, in a 1999 interview, said something plainer. I didn't get a chance to know my dad, apart from prison visits.
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Two children, one born the year before the trial and one born after it. And one of them gone before he turned 30.
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I think about that when people call the special unit a happy ending. That brings us back to the place itself, because the Gorbals Boyle came from was already disappearing while he sat in his cell.
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In 1957, only 3 years after hundreds of children climbed a cemetery wall hunting a vampire, Hutchesontown was declared a comprehensive development area after the Bruce Report. The Gorbals of the vampire hunt was already on the list to be
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cleared. The idea was to clear the overcrowded, unsanitary tenements and [music] replace them with high-rise blocks.
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The area was split into five zones, each given to different architects to try a different scheme. Area B, by Robert Matthew, is still standing today and is seen as the most successful of the Gorbals high-rises.
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The most infamous was Area C, designed by Sir Basil Spence. The usual Scottish Office ceiling was £2,800 a home. Spence was allowed to exceed it [music] and some flats were narrowed to bring costs below 3,000 each. Two 20-story slab blocks, 400 homes. And on
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June 30th, 1961, the Queen unveiled a plaque. It was meant to be the future of the area. Instead, the flats suffered persistent damp, fungus, and infestations, including water beetles.
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Maintenance had been underestimated, and the wind at ground level was a problem, too. Tenants held a rent strike for about a year. A renovation in 1987 and 1988 didn't fix the damp. By 1993, the council estimated it would take between
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15 and 20 million pounds to make the flats habitable, and the remaining tenants were moved out.
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On September 12th, 1993, the towers were brought down in a public blowdown, which means they were blown up with an audience watching. The viewing area was too close. Debris killed a 61-year-old woman, Helen Tinney, and injured four others. And an inquiry found that the
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contractor had used twice the explosive that was necessary. I want to say her name because the story of the Gorbals usually leaves out the people who are neither gangsters nor architects.
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Think about the order. Patrick Carraher was hanged in 1946. Johnny Ramensky died in a Perth hospital in 1972.
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Jimmy Boyle walked out in 1982. And the streets they came from were cleared, rebuilt, and cleared again.
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The tenements of the razor gangs were gone, and so were the towers that replaced them.
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Other zones followed. Area E's low-rise flats came down in 1987, and its two towers in 2013.
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Saint Francis Church became a community center, and the old Hutcheson Town Library is now a training center.
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The Caledonia Road flats, the Cali flats, were demolished on June 29th, 2025. What's left of that old Gorbals lives mostly in books, a ballad, a play, and a novel that sold it to the world in 1935.
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Spence's site is now low-rise housing, no taller than eight stories, built in the 2010s.
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One block is called Queen Elizabeth Gardens, and its end balconies were designed to echo the towers that stood there before.
Topics:GorbalsGlasgowvampire huntSouthern Necropolishorror comicsgangsNo Mean CityChildren and Young Persons Harmful Publications Acturban historyScottish history
