Magic Island Storytelling Theatre: Strange Tales From The Isle Of Arran: Ghost & fairy tales & more.

So our hapless young narrator has been trapped and abandoned by the bigger, rougher boys who accompanied him into the great rambling old graveyard of Glasgow's Southern Necropolis, tied down and bloodied across a line of broken tombstones. Just as well the urban legend of the graveyard being haunted by an iron toothed vampire is just an old story with no truth behind it. It isn't true... is it...?

This episode doesn't have the bloodshed or "bad" language of the previous installment, but it does feature plentiful vampiric horror - you have been warned!

Here's the second part of this dark tale inspired by the genuine Glaswegian urban legend of an iron-toothed vampire haunting the great graveyard of Glasgow's Southern Necropolis. Our hero has unfortunately, in telling the story to his schoolmates, talked his way into a nocturnal trip to the cemetery with the biggest, toughest, scariest kids in the school, all in search of the fabled vampire....

BE WARNED - this is an unrepentant horror story, and a Glasgow horror story at that, with disturbing scenes related in some very frank language. Rating "R" (or "X" as they used to say in the golden era of British horror films), in other words.

And so, as they say in the creepiest horror movies, it begins... with the first episode of my epic tale inspired by an urban legend of my native southside of Glasgow, an uncompromisingly Glaswegian vampire tale, told in an unapologetically Glaswegian voice (for my feelings on the importance of this, check out the separate introduction I posted yesterday). Yes, back in the 1950s, before I was born, there was a mass panic centred around the city's rambling Southern Necropolis graveyard: local kids in this most impoverished part of the great city had got the idea in their heads that a vampire with iron teeth was running loose in the graveyard, attacking children. Every night they went into the graveyard, armed with wooden stakes, to stalk the vampire - at least until the "polis" came along and chased them away. Spoiler alert: no actual iron-toothed vampire showed up. But my story responds to this anti-climax by imagining... what if there really was such a creature haunting the graveyard? And what if, a generation later, a local boy, intrigued by the legend, fell foul of just such a creature?

And so, as they say in the creepiest horror movies, it begins... with the first episode of my epic tale inspired by an urban legend of my native southside of Glasgow, an uncompromisingly Glaswegian vampire tale, told in an unapologetically Glaswegian voice (for my feelings on the importance of this, check out the separate introduction I posted yesterday). Yes, back in the 1950s, before I was born, there was a mass panic centred around the city's rambling Southern Necropolis graveyard: local kids in this most impoverished part of the great city had got the idea in their heads that a vampire with iron teeth was running loose in the graveyard, attacking children. Every night they went into the graveyard, armed with wooden stakes, to stalk the vampire - at least until the "polis" came along and chased them away. Spoiler alert: no actual iron-toothed vampire showed up. But my story responds to this anti-climax by imagining... what if there really was such a creature haunting the graveyard? And what if, a generation later, a local boy, intrigued by the legend, fell foul of just such a creature?

Here's something a wee bit different: me on video (if you're on Spotify, sound only elsewhere) introducing an epic piece of storytelling which I'll shortly be posting right here: my 10 part audio drama inspired by an urban legend of the very part of Glasgow I come from: the legend, which caused panic among local children back in the 1950s, of the mighty Southern Necropolis graveyard on the city's southside being haunted by a vampire with iron teeth.

I've taken that true story (true in the sense that there really was a panic about this among local kids - and police, and parents, and politicians!) as inspiration for my own piece of dramatic Gothic fiction built around the legend: a very Glasgow story told in a very Glasgow voice. That will make its premiere very shortly in this very spot. Meanwhile, here's the intro....