How a school-yard rumour became a full-blown panic…
When Pc Alex Deeprose was called to Glasgow’s sprawling Southern Necropolis on the evening of 23 September 1954, he expected to be dealing with a simple case of vandalism. But the bizarre sight that awaited him was to make headlines around the world and cause a moral panic that led to the introduction of strict new censorship laws in the UK.
Hundreds of children aged from four to 14, some of them armed with knives and sharpened sticks, were patrolling inside the historic graveyard.
Full story over at the BBC
This great tale from the crypt shows us how even the most unlikely rumours can escalate into something potentially more serious. Back in the 1930s, Halifax suffered a panic at the hands of a phantom assailant, the Halifax Slasher (detailed by Tim Chapman in SAJ2), while in the mid-1970s sheriffs had to persuade students at a Montana high-school that the cattle mutilators said to be plaguing the region weren’t about to turn their scalpels on humans – more on this in Mirage Men.
And then of course, there’s the alleged attack of the killer smurfs in Houston Texas…