The Gorbals Vampire of Scotland
Unexplained : True Tales of Unexplained Mysteries with Bestselling Author Steph Young
Steph Young
4.3 • 613 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2021
⏱️ 13 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Children turned to monster hunters, said the Glasgow South and Eastwood Extra. |
| 0:18.5 | Rumors of missing children, of a vampire with iron teeth, |
| 0:22.3 | and the local children determined to rid the creature that haunted their dreams. |
| 0:26.9 | There was 1954 in a decaying, industrial, heavily populated part of Glasgow called Gorbals, |
| 0:34.2 | but a time long before the internet, when kids played out all day, but no one could have imagined that their games of cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, would turn instantaneously into vampire hunting at night. |
| 0:46.3 | Goebles is on the south bank of the River Clyde, and tenement buildings were built there in the mid-1800s to provide housing for the growing |
| 0:54.6 | number of people who worked there in the factories and docks. |
| 0:58.4 | The accommodation became quickly overcrowded, with poor residents, and estimated 85,000 of |
| 1:04.2 | them living in an area only the size of about 250 acres. |
| 1:09.0 | Conditions became unsafe and filthy. It was not until the 60s that the tenements |
| 1:13.5 | were torn down and replaced with tower blocks. The Scotsman says, but the Gorbals was also |
| 1:18.4 | famed for its community spirit which could not be crushed, despite the often adverse |
| 1:23.3 | circumstances the residents faced. And perhaps this is why they came together in their hundreds |
| 1:28.5 | to take down a vampire. |
| 1:30.6 | Gourbles is also the setting for the 1935 novel No Mean City, in which the lead character |
| 1:36.3 | of Razor slashes his way through the underworld gangs, wielding Razorblades as weapons, |
| 1:41.3 | to become crowned the Razor King. |
| 1:43.9 | But in the 50s, the local kids were more concerned with a different kind of villain, a seven-feet-tall vampire, with teeth made of iron. It lived, they believed, in the southern necropolis. The necropolis was a cemetery close by, established to enable the poor of the city to have a decent |
| 2:01.6 | burial. This was now the lair of the creature of the undead. No one really knows how word |
| 2:07.7 | first spread, but the vampire, the kids said, was responsible for the recent disappearance of |
| 2:13.6 | several children. The news spread like wildfire through the boys and girls, |
| 2:18.6 | and perhaps the most surprising thing in all of this |
... |
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