With an evocative name like the Glasgow Necropolis, you'd expect this massive graveyard in Scotland to have a history rich in paranormal lore.  But you'll be surprised by all the events here, including the well-documented hunt in 1954 for the Vampire with Iron Teeth.  Here’s the unusual, spooky history of the Necropolis.

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Several years ago, after a long week in Glasgow for a conference and with my work responsibilities complete, I had an evening to myself.  I'd had my eye on the incredible Surgeon's Hall museum in Edinburgh.  Still, the trip to explore the history of surgical innovation had to wait for the coming weekend and the hour train ride from my current location.  But this evening, with just a few hours of free time, I had been looking for something I could do to experience the city.

My search came from an unexpected source as I walked back to my hotel – an advertisement for a Ghost Tour posted on a billboard.  And, unlike most other tourist attractions that closed after business hours, this ghost tour was perfectly timed.  It would start well after dark. 

Back in my room, I googled it and learned we'd tour through the dark alleys and silent spaces of the old parts of this storied city.  But, as much as I'd want to have a real paranormal experience, it seemed to be an unrealistic expectation.  And at this point, I still hadn't had my experience at the Haunted Taipei Hyatt that I covered in season 1. 

I’ve covered a number of ghostly stories on My Dark Path…and I have many, many more to come.  I love these accounts of spirits and hauntings.  While I want to believe, but I certainly don’t want to invite evil into my life or anyone else’s.  I hypothesize that paranormal experiences are real but rare and that they are manifestations of the unseen world leaking into our mortal existence.  And that some of the stories I’ll tell you about this unique cemetery may be examples of this.  Welcome to the story of the Unusual History of the Glasgow Necropolis.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast.  In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal.  So, if you geek out over these subjects, you're among friends here at My Dark Path.  See our videos on YouTube, visit mydarkpath.com or find us on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok.

But no matter how you choose to connect with me and My Dark Path, thank you, so much for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me.  Let's get started with Episode 48,  The Unusual History of the Glasgow Necropolis.

Part I

So, as the sun set, I found my way to the starting point of the Ghost Tour.  There were, perhaps, 15 participants.  The guide was lively and well informed – not only about the legends of the places we were visiting, but about the history of the city of Glasgow.  If I recall correctly, we walked the spooky streets and saw a few of sights thought to be haunted, including the Tron Theater.  The theater was built on the site of the St. Mary’s church which burned down in 1793 but left the iconic tower intact.  St. Mary’s church had sat on the property since 1525, but the location had also served as a gathering hall, execution site, and a police station. In modern times, the theater’s staff frequently report unusual events.  Some claim that they feel watched, despite being alone in the space.  Others have claimed to feel an icy touch.  Perhaps the most ominous story is that of a threatening figure appearing in the basement boiler room.

All these rumors and stories seem at home in a location that was burned to the ground, but perhaps the oddest claim about why the building might be haunted comes from the purported cause of the fire in 1793 – the meeting of Glasgow’s Hellfire Club.

It’s certainly an unusual name – and one that evokes thoughts of devil worship or other occult practices.  But in reality, the club was a bit more mundane.  It was the name given to a secret society of upper-class men in British and Irish society in the 1800s…for purposes of drinking, debauchery and other immoral acts.

Reportedly, Tron Church was one of the stations for the night watchmen who looked after the city after dark.  On the night of February 15, 1793, the night watchman stepped out from his station to do his rounds.  While he was away, drunk members of the local Hellfire club came upon the roaring fire.  The party warmed themselves by the fire, and the relative comfort of the location enabled them to restart their drinking.  And, amid the partying, the fire too got out of control and destroyed the building.  Why these events might make the Tron Theater an unusually haunted location, aren’t entirely clear, but it hasn’t made the location any less intriguing to ghost hunters.  So, like most ghost tours, the participants definitely learn more about the history of the city than they ever do experiencing the paranormal.

But of all the ghostly stories we heard that night, the one that still sits vividly in my memory is that of Glasgow’s body snatchers.  And this wasn’t even a paranormal event of suspect origins.  Glasgow’s, and Scotland’s, body snatching problem is very well documented.

The education of medical students has driven demand for human corpses for centuries.  Scotland, where the study of anatomy and surgery goes back to 1505 when the Barber Surgeons of Edinburgh was formally incorporated as a draft guild of the city.  It’s likely that this may be the oldest surgical society in the world.

The society’s charter included the following statement…a bylaw that essentially required the procurement of human bodies.  Member of this surgical society “must know anatomy, nature and complexion of the human body…that he know the nature and substance of everything that he works with, or else he is negligent.”

To satisfy this educational need, their charter allowed Scottish surgeons to dissect a single corpse every year – that of an executed criminal.  But as the number of people studying anatomy and medicine increased, that single body was wildly insufficient.  That is, until 1694, when Alexander Monteith negotiated with the Edinburgh Town Council to get access to more bodies.  In this case, these corpses would be those of people who died while in prison.  In exchange for expanding the number of corpses, Alexander would open an anatomy theater, something that would be called a Surgeon’s Hall.

The supply of corpses would expand further in 1752 when Scotland passed the Murder Act – legislation that claimed to be “for better preventing the horrid crime of murder.”

The act required that anyone convicted of murder should not only be hanged but then be given “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment.”  Apparently, this could be accomplished either by hanging the murderer in chains or providing their body for public dissection later.  But, in either case, the body would “in no case whatsoever…be suffered to be buried.”

It was government acts like this that caused the work of anatomists to be closely associated with criminality.  So, while the supply of corpses for medical education expanded, demand continued to expand faster, especially in the 18th and 19th century as scientific knowledge exploded.

Medical students too, wanted more opportunities to learn outside of the anatomy halls,  centuries before they had access to Anki and other flashcard applications.  It was in this moment where the so called resurrection men and bodysnatchers stepped into to resolve the imbalance between supply and demand for corpses. 

Part 2

Noted American author, Ambrose Bierce, once defined a body snatcher as “one who supplies the young physicians with that which the old physicians have supplied the undertaker.”

The term resurrection man, or bodysnatcher, is someone who would sneak into a graveyard under the cover of darkness, to resurrect a recently buried body.  Some of the most famous body snatchers like Burke & Hare in Edinburgh, were even a little, shall we say, excessively proactive.  They would murder 16 people to provide the corpses they needed.

The average corpse was worth about 10 pounds, or about $1,400 in today's value.  As you might imagine, the growth of grave robbing also caused an explosion of innovations designed to protect the corpse of a loved one from being stolen.  On one side, you had the outraged local populace trying to protect the remains of their loved ones and on the other side - the body-snatchers doing everything they could to acquire the corpse. Perhaps it's a bit impolite to say so, but this tension is reminiscent of the battle between car owners and the thieves attempting to steal catalytic converters.

There were simple approaches to foiling the resurrection men.  Graves would be filled with layers of branches to make digging more difficult.  Others placed massive stones over the grave, called mort-stones.  For example, n 1816, the Aberdeen Harbor works gave a mort-stone to the St. Fittick church graveyard.   Since that time, the stone has disappeared but others can be seen at a graveyard in Inverurie.

Amid this tension between the bereaved and body snatchers, it’s important to remember one thing.  The protections over a grave didn’t have to last permanently.  Instead, if the corpse could be kept interred for about 6 weeks, the decay would make it unusable. 

Mort-stones were also abandoned as grave protection devices.  The grave robbers simply angled their tunnel, dragging the corpse from one end of the coffin instead of digging straight down.  Another solution to the problem emerged as some bodies were fixed to the coffin, more or less permanently with a coffin collar.  This was a thick iron necklace that was bolted to the coffin.  That made it impossible to remove the body alone.  There are still examples at several graveyards around Scotland, including at St Andrew's Cathedral.

Further escalation was the creation of the mortsafe, or an iron cage that would enclose the coffin, secured with iron straps that prevented anyone from opening and retrieving the body.  While expensive, this was often reused after a body had sufficiently decomposed.  Of course, the wealthy would build crypts, protecting the body with stone walls.

These latter options were expensive, complex and unwieldy.  And so others began to build watchhouses where paid guards would spend the night to prevent graveyard thievery.  The simplest designs were mere shacks, but others became fully furnished rooms with windows and fireplaces.  A more ornate one may be at the Banchory Ternan graveyard near Abderdeen, Scotland.  It's a two story tower, complete with loopholes at the windows, allowing guards to steady their rifles.  The tower included a large bell at the top to be used to alert others to the threat of the resurrection men.  

Perhaps the most sophisticated morthouse is one at Udny Green in Aberdeenshire.  This one was built of granite, but in this case, it included a vault where coffins would be placed on a circular platform.  When the next coffin was added, the previous one was advanced into the vault.  Eventually, as coffins were added to the circular platform, the first one placed would return to the opening, but now at a stage of decomposition that it was of no use to the grave robbers and could be safely buried.

Ironically the Udny Green vault, the most innovative and secure of the mort-houses, became obsolete the very year it was built in 1832.  That was the year that the Anatomy Act was passed by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, becoming law on August 1st.

The tension around body snatching contributed to the passage of the Anatomy Act.  The intent was to create a greater legal supply of bodies and, thereby, eliminating the need for the corpse black market.  The Act gave anatomists access to any unclaimed bodies, mainly those who died in prison and poorhouses.  Additionally, the Act required that anatomists become licensed and created four positions who would be the Inspectors of Anatomy.  

The year of 1832 was clearly a pivotal year in the market for afterlife services.  It was the year the Glasgow Necropolis was established.

Part 3

Almost two centuries earlier, in 1650 the Glasgow Merchants’ House, a guild representing local businesse, purchased 37 acres of land from the estate of Wester Craigs.  This land would eventually become the Glasgow Necropolis.  The western end of the property is rocky and wasn’t easily developed, so workers planted fir trees there, garnering the name of Fir Park.  However, in 1804, the firs started to die and were replaced with willow and elms trees which started the conversion of the park into the Victorian style. 

Glasgow had exploded in size in the early 1800s, tripling in size by 1830.  But the rapid growth also brought disease.  In November of 1832 alone, 3000 people died of colera.   AT this time, another piece of legislation passed parliament - The Cemeteries Act.  This law authorized the creation of private cemeteries to help alleviate overcrowded city cemeteries.  So, 1832 was indeed a busy year for the dead.

With higher death rates and a shortage of burial options, residents of Glasgow felt that Fir Park would be an ideal cemetery.  The wealthy residents of the city also wanted to elevate the profile of the city.  And so, in 1831, John Strang the leader of the Merchants’ House, wrote that Fir Park would be an ideal cemetery, as “it would harmonize beautifully with the adjacent scenery…[and]…would at the same time convert an unproductive property into a general and lucrative source of profit, to a charitable institution.” Strang also wrote that it was to be “respectful to the dead, safe and sanitary to the living, dedicated to the Genius of Memory and to extend religious and moral feeling.”

To move forward with the conversion of the Fir Park into a cemetery, the Merchants’ House started a design competition with 5 prizes of £10, about $1,800 in today’s money.  The contest was advertised in local newspapers.  The Merchants’ House received sixteen proposals and each was put in an exhibition.

While David Bryce of Edinburgh won first prize and his brother John Bryce of Glasgow won second, the work was ultimately awarded to a landscape architect and gardener, George Mylne.  The work commenced and the first burial occurred in 1832, reflecting the interdenominational approach to the Necropolis as the first person interred was Joseph Levi, a Jew. 

Burials and construction continued in parallel.  Ornamental entrance gates and bridge were completed in 1836, and were named The Bridge of Sighs.  The Necropolis expanded in 1860 with extensions to the east and south.  The Necropolis' original design included a series of catacombs under the main hill, a design intended to thwart the work of the resurrection men.  But the Anatomy Act had eliminated the need for illegally procedure corpses, and so the original catacomb designs were never built.  Still, the cemetery expanded again in 1877 and then again in 1893, doubling the Necropolis’ size, reaching its current size.

The Glasgow City Council took over management of the Necropolis in 1966 from the Merchants House.  Today, 50,000 burials have taken place and the Necropolis was one of the first few to keep files about the dead, including profession, age, sex and cause of death.

With that number of burials, it’s perhaps not surprising that the Glasgow Necropolis is rife with ghostly sightings.  There are actually four necropolises in Glasgow.  Just across the River Clyde to the south is the Southern Necropolis that features one gravestone as the epicenter of many of the ghostly stories.  The gravestone is more than just a marker, a full statue in white stone, of a woman, cloaked, her head bent toward the ground.  While her features are eroded - whether by time and the elements or vandals, the figure still evokes a feeling of sorrow.  No doubt, this was the intent of the man who placed it there.  The statue stands over two graves - that of Magdalane Smith and her housekeeper, Mary McNaughton.  Magdalane’s husband, John Smith, erected it to memorialize the two women who died after being struck by a tram as they were headed home from church.

Stories claim that the statue's face will follow visitors to the Necropolis as they wander the grounds.  Some even claim that the statue will turn you to stone.  The former is hard to determine, given the state of the face that I described.  The latter claim, however, seems without substantiation as I didn't see any statues of ghost hunters scattered about the grounds.  The other reason why there aren't more people turned to stone is that everyone who comes across the statue follows a set of instructions.  Although, I think the instructions that seem to be for the benefit of allowing Glasgow locals to see who the tourists are.  You see, to prevent being turned to stone, you're supposed to run around the statue, loudly calling out the words "White Lady" three times.

On a separate trip to Glasgow, I was particularly interested in bumping into the white lady ghost.  She's been spotted quite a few times floating through the gravestones.  Who is she and what happened to her that made her turn into a ghost, we don't know.  But what we know is fascinating.  Ghost ladies in white dresses have been spotted in different cultures, different continents and different races.  Invariably, they're tall, have black hair that covers their faces, wear white wedding dress, and are thin.  White lady ghosts across different parts of the world have uncanny resemblance with each other, and they've become a phenomenon.  They're also called Woman in White, or a Weeping Woman.

A Woman in White is a female ghost who was betrayed by her husband, or lover, in her life.  In some myths, she killed her children before taking her life.  In recorded history, one of the earliest appearances of a White Lady was in the Czech Republic in the 15th century.  Legend has it that a nobleman was in a bad marriage, and when he was dying, he asked forgiveness from her wife, but she refused.  The nobleman cursed her, and to this day, she haunts the holdings of the nobleman, which include Český Krumlov Castle.

A lot of white lady sightings have been reported in mountainous areas, where she tries to hitch a ride from an unfaithful driver.  The White Lady of Whoopsy haunts Wopsononock Mountain and Buckhorn Mountain in the western part of Altoona, PA.  The source of this story is that the ghost's husband had an ill-fated crash, and she's been looking for him ever since.  When picked up as a hitchhiker, drivers reported her reflection wasn't seen.

In the Philippines, she operates differently.  She can appear anywhere.  She would hail cab drivers only to disappear.  The Filipino white lady has caused many accidents due to drivers panicking at her sight.

While I might have been disappointed to not be confronted with the lady in white directly, I did learn of another, unusual event that took place in the Necropolis in 1954.  It was an event, involving a vampire, and an angry mob of hundreds hunting for an elusive prince of the night.  If you imagine an angry mob and think of an irrational crowd, brandishing weapons and torches…you're not far off.  This vampire hunt was, as I said, even more unusual.  In this case, the mob was composed entirely of children who were seeking a vampire they were certain was real.

Part IV – Vampire Hunt

In September 1954, decades before the Twilight series made vampires popular with young adults, rumors had spread among the school children in the Gorbals neighborhood of Glasgow.  The children, it seemed, were convinced that a 7-foot-tall vampire with iron teeth had killed two of their classmates and was hunting for more victims.  And thus began, the story of the 'Gorbals Vampire'.

What happened next was truly remarkable.  After school that day, hundreds of children of all ages armed themselves with blades, crosses and stakes and accompanied by dogs.  They descended upon the city's Southern Necropolis to hunt the Gorbals Vampire, urgently seeking the vampire with Iron teeth.  The children still prowled the graveyard as night fell, checking behind trees and headstones for the awful creature that might be lurking. 

Reportedly, smoke and flames generated by the nearby steel plant only enhanced the otherworldly atmosphere.  One of the boys on the hunt, Tam Smith, told the BBC later "The red light and the smoke would flare up and make all the gravestones leap.  You could see figures walking about…all lined in red light." A thick fog rolled in, and in it many shadowy figures were caught by firelight.  The children would rush to this silhouette, and then another, as they thought they saw the vampire lurking in the mist.

Adults who lived nearby took note that afternoon when the kids first began to flood the graveyard but didn't pay much attention to begin with.   There were few public parks, and the Necropolis was great playgrounds for the children. 

When the Glasgow police were alerted to the disturbance at the Southern Necropolis and were dispatched, they arrived expecting to find vandals.  The sight of hundreds of children baffled the responding police.  They started trying to talk with the roving bands of kids…and learned that a singular rumor had drawn all the youngsters to the graveyard.  Every child reported that the vampire with iron teeth had killed and eaten two of their classmates.  Every child was certain of this.

According to one man who participated in the hunt as a child, “We didn’t have Christopher Lee to explain you had to put a stake through the heart to kill him.  We were just going to cut the head off, end of story."

 There are conflicting accounts, but news reports of that period were certain the the police struggled to figure out what was really happening.  Some new reports say that the children went home when it started raining.  Others claim that a school master send the kids home.  The most common belief is that the kids only when home when darkness made their hunt impossible.  But that didn't last... as the kids again on the two subsequent days, again hunting for the Gorbals Vampire.

  Their hunt was, of course, in vain, but the events added fuel to censorship controversy that was burning in Parliament.

Was the Gorbals Vampire simply a creature born of mass hysteria and children’s imaginations, or was it something more?

A paper published in 1985 noted that the Gorbal Vampire incident wasn't unusual.  The researchers, Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, found that the children of Glasgow had formed several hunts through the 1930s through the 1940s.  Every hunt had a different target - a ghostly lady in white, a banshee, and a creature called Springheeled Jack.  And, surprisingly, the child mob hadn't been the only one that fall.  A Scottish newspaper had reported that one week after the Gorbels Vampire Hunt, another mob of children had surrounded and stoned a caravan of gypies.  The attack was miles from the Gorbals event and was, therefore, composed of different children.  But the mob mentality was strikingly similar to the events of the Necropolis.

The Gorbals hunt was widely reported because it aligned with a moral panic that had ripped through the United States only a few months earlier.  At this time, an effort to ban crime and horror comics had reached a new milestone in the US.  In the spring of 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings on comic books, resulting in the writing of a restrictive Comics Code that effectively censored horror comics from existence.  After the passage of the code, no comic book could be sold if it contained any scene or horror.

There was a group that also wanted to eliminate horror comics in the UK.  In the 1999 book Pulp Demons, Martin Barker writes that in the early 1950s, a group of teachers, clergy and parents had tried to get horror comics banned.  While their case was even taken up by Parliament, but their efforts were frustrated when some of their more sensational claims were debunked by the UK's Home Secretary.  The fact that many of the leaders were exposed as Communist Party members.  The group tried again in 1953 with the creation of the Comics Campaign Council which was led by a respected pediatrician and communist party member.  

One leader of the Comics Campaign Council was quoted as saying: "sadism and violence are basic themes throughout the American type comics." The CCC began to make some headway as other organizations, including the British Medical Association, took up the cause of vilifying horror comics.  In September 1954, they were handed a gift as the account of the mass hysteria and frightened Scottish children of the Gorbals Vampire hunt was published across the country.

  Newspapers linked the Gorbals Vampire event to horror comics, writing headlines like "Is This the Kind of Comic Your Child Is Reading?"  Also, the vampire hunt was also included in the February 1955 debate in Parliament where a MP stated that the anti-comics legislation was necessary to protect UK children by "freeing their minds from evil influences."

All of this political pressure was successful and the Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act was made law in the spring of 1955.  While comics were not explicitly described in the law, the act did regulate publications that told stories in picture form, showing crime, acts of violence or incidents of a repulsive nature. The law criminalized their publication, sale or importation.  Police were also given stronger powers to search and seize these publications.  This is ironic as many credit a 1825 publication "The Glasgow Looking Glass" as the first comic book.

Apparently, the law is still on the books but never enforced.

So, did American comics incite the hunt for the Gorbals Vampire?

Likely not.  But there were plenty of local legends that inspired fear of the supernatural.  A witch-like figure, Jenny with the Iron Teeth, was a popular poem written by Scotsman Alexander Anderson.  His poem was intended to scare children into complying with bedtime as Jenny would only steal awake children after, of course, using her iron teeth on their plump bodies.  Hmmmmm....while I appreciate the parental desire to enforce bedtime routines.... perhaps this was not the ideal bedtime story if you didn't want children with nightmares.  Other children who participated in the Gorbals Vampire hunt recall stories perhaps inspired by the Necropolis' proximity to the Dixon Blazes ironworks.  One man recalls a story, told by his great-grandfather, of an Iron Man.  Others remember stories of a man with iron teeth.

The children's pursuit of a diversion, even for something as morbid as a vampire hunt, might be connected to living conditions in Glasgow.  After World War II, the UK paper the Daily Mail observed that residents of Gorbals faced some of the "worst conditions in post-war Europe."  Families lived in overcrowded tenements with poor sanitation.  Children chased rates through the streets with pickaxes and sticks.  Martin Baker, the author identified earlier, hypothesized that children of the area welcomed any flight of imagination to distract them from life in Gorbals.  In an 2016 interview with the BBC he said: "It's a miserable place to live, and you're looking for something to give you a spark of excitement in your lives.  What you've got here is a lovely example of children's cultures in action.  Sometimes they're complicated, sometimes they get out of control, but there's a lot to be learnt about the way children talk with each other, share rumors, tell each other stories, and so on."

Today, centuries after the need for resurrection men and the cemetery act, more than 100 years since the creation of the Glasgow Necropolis and the White Lady, and decades after the Gorbals Vampire hunt, what are we left with?

Sometimes…when we hunt for ghosts…we find other creepy stories that, despite our best efforts, are as ephemeral as the specters we seek.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path.  I'm MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our creative director is Dom Purdie.  I wrote this episode with research help from Nicky Abraham.  Big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

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