Kevin Nosferatu: Skulferatu #95 - Southern Necropolis, Caledonia Road, Glasgow

I journeyed through to Glasgow on a day with clouds so low, stiff, and grey, that it looked almost as if the world had been wrapped in a pauper’s shroud of old. An oppressive shroud of gloom that seemed to deaden all the colours of everything in the city. As I left the train station, people rushed on by, heads down, and the snarled traffic beeped and belched along the road. Heading down the busy streets I made my way across the Clyde and into the Gorbals area of the city, where the streets seemed almost empty. Walking past block after block of newly built flats and houses, I ended up in an area of run down and tired looking flats and tower blocks. There, I found the place I was looking for, a place I’d been meaning to have a wander around for a long time, the Southern Necropolis.

A photo of a castle like old stone building with towers - the gate house to the Southern Necropolis. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

The Necropolis Gatehouse

A view down a pathway with trees on one side and gravestones on the other. In the background is the gate house to the Southern Necropolis and then two blocks of 60s high rise blocks. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

A view down towards the entrance to the Southern Necropolis

A black and white photograph showing some gravestones standing in front of a bare tree that looks almost skeletal. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

Gravestones and skeleton like trees

The Southern Necropolis, like its more famous counterpart the Glasgow Necropolis, is a graveyard best described as a ‘city of the dead’. It was opened in 1840 and over 250,000 people are buried there. It is the resting place of many of the richest of Glasgow’s inhabitants as well as many of its poorest. Though most of those interred there are now long forgotten, there is one name that will be familiar to many due to the product that carries his name. That being Thomas Lipton, the man who brought the world Lipton Tea.

Thomas Lipton was a Scottish entrepreneur who was born in the Gorbals in 1848 and spent his early life in Glasgow. After a few years of travelling and working in the USA, he returned to Glasgow and set up a chain of grocery stores there. By the turn of the century, he had built up a chain of over three hundred stores throughout the UK and was a very rich man. He then got into the tea trade and conquered the American market, making himself a multi-millionaire in the process.

Thomas was a great self-publicist who made friends in the highest echelons of society, including both King Edward VII and King George V. However, he led a life of contradictions, as despite being quite a hard-nosed businessman who was known for his flamboyant lifestyle, he was also deeply committed to philanthropy and was a vocal advocate for the welfare of working-class people. He also had a reputation as being a bit of a ladies' man, something he tended to promote himself as, but it appears likely that he was gay. He lived for nearly thirty years with a long-term male companion, William Love, who had been one of his early shop assistants, and when that relationship ended, his preference was for the company of young men.

Thomas was a tireless innovator who was always looking for ways to improve his products and business practices. He was also an important figure in the development of the modern grocery store. On his death in 1931, he left most of his fortune to the city of Glasgow.

A photo of a fallen gravestone. The inscription has faded away and there is a crumbling carved head of Christ at the top of it. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

Fallen gravestone with face of Christ

A photo of the crumbling carved head of Christ on the fallen gravestone. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

A weather worn and crumbling Jesus

A photo of a large, curved gravestone with trees in the background and in the distance a high-rise block of flats. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

Gravestone and trees

A photo of a large gravestone covered in ivy and looking almost like some cuddly toy. In front of it lies a fallen gravestone covered in green moss. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

Ivy and moss

A photo of gravestones stretching off into the distance. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

A field of gravestones

A photo of several gravestones in a grassy area with bushes and trees. In the distance are two high-rise blocks. Photograph by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

Gravestones with a background view of the high-rise flats at Caledonia Road

In 1954 the graveyard was the scene of a rather bizarre event. In late September of that year a rumour spread through the local schools that a seven-foot-tall vampire had strangled two little boys in the cemetery and then eaten them. Now, you may laugh at their gullibility in believing this, but hark back to your own childhood and the wild rumours that would run through the school. I remember as a child back in the early Seventies, I was at Primary School and the rumour went round that there was a tiger in the boys' toilet. Being five or six we all believed it, so much so, that one of my classmates ended up pissing his pants rather than risking going to the toilet. When the teacher demanded to know why he hadn’t asked to go to the loo he told her he didn’t want to be eaten by the tiger. Who told you there was a tiger in the toilet? She demanded to know. John - my classmate blubbered out the culprit's name. John come here; how dare you tell lies. Whack, whack, whack. That’s pretty much how schooling went back in Scotland in the Seventies. A few weeks later there was a rumour that our teacher had killed one of the boys in our class for some minor misdemeanour. There’s a knife covered in blood on her desk one of my little chums told me and showed me a knife on her desk with red smears on it. When one of the girls burst into tears and asked the teacher not to kill her, it was pointed out by the teacher that her knife was in fact covered in strawberry jam, as she’d been having her breakfast of toast and jam earlier that morning in the classroom. She then whacked some other unfortunate who she suspected to have spread the story round.

Anyway, getting back to 1954 and the rumours about the child eating vampire in the graveyard, the kids in the Gorbals didn’t run away crying, no, they decided to do something about it. So, hundreds of them armed themselves with penknives, sticks and stones and descended on the graveyard to hunt down the monster. They searched around the gravestones, behind the trees and bushes and rushed shouting at any shadow they saw. As the crowds of children grew in number, concerned members of the public began to phone the police. One of the first officers to arrive on the scene was Constable Alex Deeprose. He arrived expecting to find some youths causing a bit of trouble and was shocked instead to find hundreds of terrified children who clung to him and told him about the ‘vampire with iron teeth who just had to be killed.’ He soon felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin there were that many children following close to him and crowding around him. Concerned parents then started coming up to him and asking if there were any truth to the rumours. He tried to reassure everyone that there was no vampire and with the help of other officers cleared the cemetery. However, bands of kids carried on patrolling the streets, only heading home when it began to rain. For the next two nights, gangs of children found their way into the graveyard to carry on the hunt for the vampire. Eventually though they tired of this and found something else to do instead.

A black and white photograph of a tall and monstrous looking man with sharp teeth who is standing in a graveyard with his mouth open in a menacing way. Created by Kevin Nosferatu for the Skulferatu Project.

An artist’s impression of the Gorbals Vampire

The vampire was not forgotten so quickly though by those seeking an explanation to how a tale like this could have so quickly gripped the imagination of so many children. Some academics and politicians quickly latched on to the American ‘horror comics’ that were popular at that time, blamed them for ‘polluting’ the minds of the young and demanded that they be banned. However, other academics and social commentators pointed out that no monster matching the vampire could be found in these comics, but rather a similar one was mentioned in the Bible, in Daniel 7:7, a ‘dreadful and terrible’ beast that ‘had great iron teeth’, and another was mentioned in a poem taught in local schools – ‘Jenny Wi’ the Airn Teeth’ (Jenny with the iron teeth). But, at the height of a moral panic no-one tends to listen to the voices of reason and the call for the ban on the comics was taken up by the local MP for the Gorbals, Alice Cullen. In 1955 legislation was passed, banning the so called ‘horror comics’, the video nasties of their day.

On my visit to the graveyard today I saw no signs of anyone approaching seven foot tall and certainly no one with iron teeth. Apart from one dog walker the place was empty, just me, the birds singing in the trees, and the buried remains of a quarter of a million people.