“A rumor flashed through the city’s schools that a ‘vampire with iron teeth’ had strangled and eaten two small boys.”

The boogeyman in the Queens neighborhood I grew up in was “Charlie Chop-Chop” (or “Chop-Chop Charlie“), a supposed shadowy slayer of small children whose coup de grâce involved the business end of an axe. It seemed an urban legend concocted to scare kids from being lured away by strangers, but when I was an adult I learned it was at least partly fact: A Manhattan serial murderer called “Charlie Chop-off” really did kill five African-American children in the 1970s. (He may have been Erno Soto, a mentally ill man who confessed to one of the murders but was deemed unfit for trial and institutionalized.)

I can only guess that in the aftermath of these crimes, a few facts traveled to the outer boroughs, probably melded with details of some actual local lawlessness and became larger and larger in the minds of schoolchildren, who needed no vampire comic book nor slasher film to draw the face of evil in their fertile minds. Such a thing seemed innate and viral.

Of course, that’s not to say that children won’t dip into the culture to help them create their stories. At the same time that comic books were considered a 10-cent plague in America, they were apparently causing “vampire riots” in Scottish graveyards. An article in the September 26, 1954 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls just such a mad scene. The story:

“Glasgow–Outraged education authorities today blamed horror comics for the action of hundreds of children who swarmed through a cemetery looking for a ‘bloodthirsty vampire with iron teeth.’

The shouting mobs of children rampaged through the cemetery in suburban Hutchesontown in what police called a ‘vampire riot.’

H.K. MacKintosh, city education officer, charged that ‘horror’ comics were responsible and said they ‘have now gone beyond the bounds of license. I hope the government will take active steps in this very real problem facing us.’

Police Constable Alex Deeprose gave the account of the ‘riots’:

‘When school finished, hundreds of children massed in Hutchesontown and prepared to march on the cemetery after a rumor flashed through the city’s schools that a ‘vampire with iron teeth’ had strangled and eaten two small boys there.

‘Shouting and waving pocket knives, carrying sticks and stones, the children swarmed over the cemetery wall and began a hunt among the gravestones.’

Witnesses said they appeared to be ‘deadly serious.’

Police called by the local residents managed to disperse the shouting throng but bands of children continued to roam the streets until dusk.”