The Ratman of Southend

“hey danny! I know u live in kent, but i don’t suppose uve been to southend lately? u said u wanted spooky stories and this one is pretty creepy. i first heard it last year when i found a note under my windscreen wiper. i think someone had been putting them on all the vehicles in trhe carpark.
But it was a load of writing, like a police notice. anbd it was basically telling people not to go under these tunnels at night. it said that some people had been hurt down there but didn’t specifiy what exactly had happened.
something u might find of interest?”

When I received this e-mail in 2002 I didn’t bother replying. It wasn’t that I was ignoring the friend who sent it, but I didn’t quite know what to make of it.
For one thing, I knew the kinds of things that got shoved under your windscreen wiper. Menus for kebab houses, parking tickets, religious literature. But not this.
In truth I thought it was all a wind-up. Even friends who I have not seen in the flesh for many years are fully aware with my interest with all things paranormal.
No doubt this friend was just kidding to see if my head would explode from the awesomeness of his lie.
But two months later I received yet another e-mail. My friend had apparently been captivated by the story. He had gone to the effort of asking people about it, about what the police notice may have meant. And this is what he told me...

Many years ago a tramp lived under the tunnel in question. He was a bitter, strange man with many terrible secrets. He was also lame and relied on handouts to get through the days.
“Spare a bob?” He’d ask passersby, his friendly smile dissolving when their backs were turned.
But one night it all ended. A group of teenagers, all absolutely pissed by the way, came across the tramp and loomed over him.
After slurring a few insults, they gave him a thorough kicking and took his blanket as some sort of trophy of the nights sport.
Bleeding and now freezing, the old geezer was a dead man.
It was not a quick end either, he spent hours in the darkness. Muttering about the unfairness of his life, screaming for help and eventually vowing that somehow he would revenge himself upon the town that had let him die so miserably.
He was still conscious when a horde of rats began to eat at his fingers.
Someone, or something, heard the old mans pleas for vengeance. And his spirit was brought back to those tunnels.
His ghostly image was no longer human, but instead appeared in the hideous shape of an overgrown and diseased rat. Appearing at night and forever waiting for those he hated to cross his path. The young and the rich who had all the things he was denied.

When he sent me the story, albeit with many more grammatical errors, I was taken aback. You see, the town in which this supposedly took place is not very interesting. Southend-on-Sea is a sunny but nondescript seaside town in Essex. It has only ever been noted for having the longest pleasure pier in the world. So this dark piece of local lore came as quite a shock.
What I did find intriguing were the similarities of it to the Bunnyman story in America. In that particular urban legend, the ghost of a deranged murderer appears under a bridge after he was chased onto the train tracks above.
We all know how stories grow, it’s an endless game of Chinese whispers. It grows and moulds and changes in the telling. What once started out as a guy in a bunny suit could rationally evolve into a guy who now appeared in a rodent-like form and haunted a similar location.

I just chalked it up to a case of one myth being relocated to a different country and timeframe. It was nothing special, nothing really impressive or unique about any of it.
But in 2005 another friend from around that area sent me a link to a now-defunct website entitled The Southend of Hell. It was poorly made, a site created using the free Webs programme. But there were a few people who used it to genuinely talk about ghost stories in their town. Things like spooky houses and disappearing men on the pier.
They also, rather foolishly, discussed breaking and entering into buildings they thought might be haunted. Which probably explains why these loons packed up and went somewhere else eventually.
But one member also mentioned the Ratman story.
But this was an entirely different version. He said he heard it at school.

“guys, shit, you won’t believe what i just heard??! i was at school but heard from a mate that the tunnels near the end of the high st. had something REALLY fucked up in them
a friend of my older brother said that the mayor had a son, a fugly son by another woman who was born looking like a rat
to protect his carer, the mayor had the baby put in the tunnel. it grew up all hairy and shit and is allowed to escape at night. go under there and itll try and eat you alive!
lets meet on Saturday and look under theer? GIOW?”
- Written by a poster called – imaginatively – Solid Snake

And this was the point at which I began to take this all a little more seriously. I began to think it over and try to make some sense of it all. What did it mean? What was the underlying message?
A lot of urban legends have a theme. They often warn about the dangers of leaving children alone or try and teach you that you shouldn’t trust strangers?
But what were these variants of the same story saying?
An old misanthrope beaten to death and reborn as a ghostly monster. An unwanted child being locked away and growing feral.
If there is a meaning, a meaning beyond someone starting a rumour about an already unpleasant place, then I have no doubt that it centres around the hierarchy of society and how we treat those who are seen as inferior to us.
Both the tramp and the baby were, in their way, maltreated. And because of this maltreatment, because of the poor hand they were dealt they became monsters. The lowest rungs of society becoming representations of the lowest beasts in the animal kingdom.
You’ve got to admire the symbolism.