Spring-heeled Jack
Spring Heeled Jack is a creature said to have existed in England during the Victorian era. Sightings of Spring Heeled Jack are recorded all over England, from London and Sheffield up to Liverpool, but they were especially prevalent in suburban London and later in the Midlands, where they peaked between the 1850s and 1880s.
Description
Spring Heeled Jack was described by one of his victims as having a "most hideous and frightful" appearance, with clawed hands and eyes like "red balls of fire." The same victim also reported that beneath a black cloak he wore a helmet and a tight fitting white garment like an "oilskin." Other descriptions also mention a "Devil-like" appearance, wearing a helmet and a tight fitting oilskin outfit, as well as clawed fingers and pointed ears. All accounts indicate that Jack was capable of effecting great leaps, and several report that he was able to breathe blue and white fire from his mouth.
History
Early reports
Many sources claim that reports of a peculiar leaping man were in circulation as early as 1817, but the first confirmed sighting may have occurred in September 1837 in London, England. A businessman returning home late one night from work was suddenly shocked as a mysterious figure jumped with ease over the considerably high walls of a cemetery, landing right in his path. No attack from the creature was reported, but the submitted description was disturbing: a muscular human figure with devil-like features, which included large, pointed ears and nose, and protruding, glowing eyes.
The next recorded incident took place shortly after. The same figure was said to leap out of nowhere and attacked a group of three women. One of the girls had her coat ripped by him, but managed to get away, followed by one of her friends; but Polly Adams fell behind and was caught by the creature, who tore off the top of Polly’s blouse, grabbed her and scratched her belly with his claws. The police discovered her lying where she was attacked, unconscious, bloodied but alive.
In October 1837, Mary Stevens, after visiting her parents in Battersea, was walking to Lavender Hill, where she was working as a servant. On her way through Clapham Common, the same mysterious character leaped at her from an alley. Pinning her with a tight grip of his arms, he kissed her face, put his hand down her blouse, and laughed hysterically. Mary screamed, making the attacker quickly flee from the scene of the assault. The commotion atracted several residents who launched an immediate search for the creature, but he was nowhere to be found.
The next day, the strange creature chose a very different victim near Mary Stevens' home, starting a modus operandi that would become typical of his future deeds: he jumped in the way of a passing carriage, causing the coachman to loose control and crash, injuring him seriously. Witnesses at the scene claimed that he escaped by jumping over a nine-foot wall effortlessly.
A few days later, another women was attacked by the creature near the Clapham churchyard. For the first time, police investigators discovered evidence at the scene of the crime: two footprints about three inches deep, obviously made by someone who had landed from a great height. On a closer inspection, there were strange imprints within the impressions which suggested that the attacker had been wearing some kind of apparatus on his shoes. There were no forensic investigators in those days, and instead of making plaster casts of the intriguing impressions, the police allowed the weather to erode the evidence. Gradually, the news of the strange character spread, and soon the press and the public gave him a name: Spring Heeled Jack.
Official recognition
A few months later, on January 9th 1838 the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, revealed at a public session held in the Mansion House the contents of a letter he had received several days earlier. He had withheld it, he said, in the hope of obtaining further information. The correspondent, who signed the letter "a resident of Peckham", wrote that, as the result of a wager, a person of the highest rank had adopted several frightening guises and set out to scare thirty people to death. He had "already succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses", two of whom "were not likely to recover, but likely to become burdens to their families." The resident of Peckham continued:
"The affair has now been going on for some time, and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject. The writer has reason to believe that they have the whole history at their finger-ends but, through interested motives, are induced to remain silent."
Though the Lord Mayor seemed fairly skeptical, a member of the audience confirmed, "servant girls about Kensington, Hammersmith and Ealing tell dreadful stories of this ghost or devil". The matter was reported in The Times and other national papers next day, and the day after that (January 11th) the Lord Mayor showed a crowded gathering a pile of letters from various places in and around London complaining of similar "wicked pranks". The quantity of letters that poured into the Mansion House makes clear that the activities of Spring Heeled Jack were common knowledge in suburban London by that time. One writer said he had ascertained that several young women in Hammersmith had been frightened into "dangerous fits"; and some "severely wounded by a sort of claws the miscreant wore on his hands"; another, that in Stockwell, Brixton, Camberwell and Vauxhall several people had died of fright, and others had had fits; another, that the trickster had been repeatedly seen in Lewisham and Blackheath, but the police were too frightened of him to act.
The Lord Mayor himself was in two minds about the affair: he thought "the greatest exaggerations" had been made, and that it was quite impossible "that the ghost performs the feats of a devil upon earth", but on the other hand someone he trusted had told him of a servant girl at Forest Hill who had been scared into fits by a figure in a bear’s skin; he was confident the person or persons involved in this "pantomime display" would be caught and punished (as reported in The Times of 10th and 12th January 1838). A posse of men were formed to search for the individual responsible for the attacks, and rewards were offered. The Duke of Wellington himself (who was in his seventies at the time) and Admiral Edward Codrington decided to join the search. Some sources point that the Duke did actually encounter Spring Heeled Jack on a few occassions, but to no avail: he was never caught. Furthermore, he seemed to have grown bolder, and his attacks multiplied.
The Scales and Alsop incidents
Perhaps the best known incidents involving Spring Heeled Jack were his attacks on two teenage girls, Lucy Scales (sometimes mentioned as "Sales") and Jane Alsop. Both events were widely reported by the press, which fueled the mass hysteria surrounding the case. The dates when they took place differ from source to source; the ones pointed here are based on the articles published by The Times.
On February 18th, 1838, 18 year old Lucy Scales and her sister Margaret were returning home after visiting their brother, a butcher who lived in a respectable part of the district of Limehouse. Lucy slightly ahead of her sister, was passing the entrance to Green Dragon Alley when a figure leapt upon her from the shadows. The figure breathed fire into Lucy’s face and then bounded away as the girl fell to the ground, seized by violent spasms which lasted for several hours. The attacker, claimed no less than four witnesses, escaped by climbing from the ground to the roof of a nearby house on a single jump.
Two days later, on February 20th, 1838, Jane Alsop, also 18, opened the door of her father’s house in Bow to a man claming to be a police officer, who asked her to bring a light because he and other policemen had "caught Spring Heeled Jack in the lane", but this man then attacked her, tearing at her dress and hair until other members of her family ran to help her. She told the Lambeth police investigators that "he was wearing a kind of helmet, and a tight fitting white costume like an oilskin. His face was hideous, his eyes were like balls of fire. His hands had great claws and were as cold as ice, and he vomited blue and white flames."
A couple of days later, Jane's deposition was strengthened by the testimony of a butcher from Limehouse. He was the brother of Lucy and Margaret Scales, the victims of the Green Dragon Alley attack.
A week after the attack on Jane Alsop, once again a black cloaked figure knocked on the door of a house, this time in Turner Street, off Commercial Road. When a servant boy answered the call, the visitor asked to speak to the master of the house, a Mr. Ashworth. The boy turned to call his master when he noticed that the man standing at the doorway had glowing red eyes. In state of panic, he screamed, attracting the attention of the neighbours. With an angry and frustrated groan, Spring Heeled Jack waved his clawed fist at the boy's face and darted over the nearby rooftops. At the following interrogation by the authorities, the child claimed that he had noticed what became a significant piece of evidence: as Spring Heeled Jack was turning his back at him, he observed that he had a golden embroidered letter "W" on his shirt beneath the black cloak, much like a coat of arms.
The legend spreads
After these attacks, Spring Heeled Jack’s infamy grew. His exploits were reported in many newspapers and became the subject of several penny dreadfuls and melodramas performed in the cheap theatres that abounded at the time. But, perhaps as a result of the publicity, his appearances became less frequent and appeared over a large area. I was not until 1843 that terror of Spring Heeled Jack again swept the country. Then he appeared in Northamptonshire, in Hampshire (where he was described as "the very image of the Devil himself, with horns and eyes of flame) and in East Anglia, where he took particular delight in frightening the drivers of mail coaches.
In 1845 reports came from Ealing and Hanwell, in west London, of a weird figure, leaping over hedges and walls and shrieking and groaning as it went. Later that year he was seen at Jacob’s Island, Bermondsey, a low class slum of decaying wooden houses and full of pestilent ditches. This area had been immortalised by Charles Dickens as the lair of Fagin and his band in Oliver Twist. He cornered a 13 year old prostitute named Maria Davis on a bridge, breathed fire into her face and hurled her into the stinking ditch below. Witnesses reported the affair to the police, who dragged the ditch and recovered the girl’s body. The verdict at the subsequent inquest was one of death by misadventure, but the inhabitants of the area branded Spring Heeled Jack as a murderer.
During the 1850s and 1860s Spring Heeled Jack was seen all over England, particularly in the Midlands. In February 1855 the inhabitants of five south Devon towns awoke to find that there were mysterious footprints that had appeared overnight in the deep snow. The footsteps ran along the tops of walls, over rooftops, and across the countryside for well over 100 miles. The hoof like prints were attributed by some to have been made by the Devil himself, while others thought it was the work of Spring Heeled Jack.
The last sightings
In the 1870s, the creature seemed to have chosen London again as his favorite playground. In November 1872, the News Of The World reported that London was "in a state of commotion owing to what is known as the Peckham Ghost... a mysterious figure, quite alarming in appearance" as Spring Heeled Jack, "who terrified a past generation."
In August 1877, Spring Heeled Jack made one of his most notable appearances before a group of soldiers in Aldershot's barracks. A sentry on duty at the North Camp peered into the darkness, his attention attracted by a peculiar figure bounding across the road towards him, making a metallic noise. The soldier issued a challenge, which went unheeded, and the figure disappeared from sight for a few moments. As the guard turned back to his post, it was beside him and delivered several slaps to his face with a hand as cold as that of a corpse, and spat blue flames from his mouth onto the soldier's eyes. Atracted by the ensuing noise, several men rushed to the place, but they claimed that the creature leapt several feet over them. A soldier shot at him, with no visible effect. Some sources denote the fact that the soldier may had fired blanks at him, merely used to make warning shots. After taunting them for a moment, he made an easy escape to the surrounding darkness. There were several more attacks of Spring Heeled Jack on guards at Aldershot. All these sightings concurred in the description: tall, muscular complexion, wearing a helmet and an oilskin suit.
After these incidents, a massive spree of Spring Heeled Jack's sightings hit all England. In Lincolnshire, he was seen leaping over several houses, wearing a sheep skin. The mob cornered him, and just like in Aldershot a while before, residents uselessly fired at him. Many witnesses claimed that the shots did hit him, sounding as they were hitting a hollow metallic object, like an "empty bucket". As usual, he made use of his leaping abilities to loose the crowd and disappear once again.
By the end of the 19th century, the geographical pattern of sightings of Spring Heeled Jack indicated that he was moving towards western England. In September 1904, at the south of Liverpool, Spring Heeled Jack appeared on the rooftop of a church. Witnesses reported that he suddenly jumped and fell to the ground, landing behind a nearby house. When they rushed to the point, they faced there a thin and muscular man, fully dressed in white and wearing an "egg shaped" helmet, standing there waiting. He laughed hysterically at the crowd, and ran towards them, making several women to gasp in dismay. Clearing them all with a gigantic leap, he disappeared behind the neighboring houses.
The Liverpool incident is usually considered the last time Spring Heeled Jack was ever seen. Reports of later sightings (some as recent as 1970) are too scarce and ambiguous to be confirmed.
Theories
The fact that Spring Heeled Jack was never caught, combined with the extraordinary abilities atributed to him and the very long period of time he was at large, have led to all sorts of speculations to ascertain both his nature and identity. It is worthy of note that, following his appearance and for the first years that followed, the press, the authorities and most part of the general public considered Spring Heeled Jack to be not a supernatural creature, but rather an individual (or perhaps more than one person) with a macabre sense of humor who delighted in scaring and molesting women. It has been thought that he was a certain irish nobleman, the Marquis of Waterford, branded the Mad Marquis for his sadistic taste, as well as his love to take part in wagers usually materialized in despicable practical jokes. Some authors suggest that the Marquis and some of his friends came up with the idea of the creating the character after a wager, while others believe that a humiliating experience with a woman and a police officer sparked his idea of "getting even" with police and women in general. Either way, they suggest that he could have designed (with the help of experts in mechanics) some sort of apparatus for special spring heeled boots, and that he could have practised fire-spitting techniques to increase the unnatural appearance of his character. Lastly, they point at the embroidered coat of arms with a "W" letter observed by the servant boy at the Ashworth incident. The Marquis, however, died after falling from his horse in 1859, while Spring Heeled Jack remained active for decades after. Said authors conclude that he may have had someone continue his macabre activities beyond that date.
Skeptical investigators have tried to refute the legend of Spring Heeled Jack, usually by pointing at mass hysteria as the final explanation. Some authors sustain that it is nothing but an exaggeration of the story of a certain mentally ill zealot, who danced and leaped over rooftops claiming that the Devil was chasing him. Others believe that some individual(s) may have been behind its origins (perhaps the Marquis of Waterford himself), being followed by imitators later on. Rumors of his "powers", his alledged "devilish features", and his skill in avoiding all attempts of aprehension captured the mind of the public, and so his figure was given a supernatural aura. This became specially true with the passing of time, which gave the impression that Spring Heeled Jack had suffered no effects from aging. As a result, a whole urban legend had been built around Spring Heeled Jack, being immediately reflected by sensational contemporary publications, which in turn fueled this popular perception in a vicious circle.
Lastly, a whole variety of explanations have been proposed by those who support the supernatural nature of Spring Heeled Jack. The following are just a few:
- A minor devil, accidentally summoned into this world by practitioners of the occult (a theory that has been incorporated into the RPG Feng Shui).
- An alien, somehow stranded on Earth. Supporters of this theory believe this would explain his alien appearance and features (like reflective red eyes, or phosphorous breath), his jumping ability (by saying he could be from a planet with greater gravitational pull, just like astronauts experienced on the Moon), strange behaviour (through Solipsism Syndrome or perhaps as a result of breathing the gases present at the Earth atmosphere), and his longevity.
- A visitor from another dimension.
The supporters of the paranormal explanations usually refer as proof of their claims that no human could have ever used any sort of gadget to leap the way Spring Heeled Jack was said to, by pointing that during World War II, the german Wehrmacht experimented on the subject with disastrous effects. Alledgedly, such experiments gave an estimated 85% failure, with broken legs and ankles on the testers. They conclude that there was no way that a particular individual could have succeeded where an entire government failed, and more than a century before.
Spring Heeled Jack in popular culture
Due to his allegedly extraordinary nature, almost from his appearance the figure of Spring Heeled Jack entered the field of fictional entertainment characters. He was the protagonist of at least seven penny dreadfuls from 1840 to 1904. Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London, was the common names of many of these publications, where he was usually presented as a villain. Several plays were also staged, including The Curse of the Wraydons, where Jack is a traitor who spies for Napoleon, and stages murderous stunts as a cover. A century later, in 1946, this play served as base for a movie that bears the same name. (See IMDB entry)
Remarkably, The Curse of the Wraydons influenced later penny dreadfuls that completely changed his role, from arch-villain to superhero. Most notably, a 1860s edition and a late 19th century one (which lasted until 1904), which take place in 1805, after Napoleon has conquered Europe. In these stories, Spring Heeled Jack is Bertram Wraydon, a young and handsome lieutenant of the British Army, heir to £10,000 a year, who is unfairly framed for treason by his evil half brother Hubert Sedgefield. After escaping from his prison, Wraydon returns seeking revenge on the villains, assuming a secret identity and an odd looking costume with mane and talons, fighting against evil and helping the innocent. He has a secret lair, where he has hidden what he managed to save of his inheritance, selflessly using it to fund his heroic activities. These include the design of a spring mechanism that allows him to leap over thirty feet, and a device to breathe flames at evil-doers. He even has a trademark that leaves at the scene of his actions, a letter "S" that he carves with his rapier after his mission is accomplished.
Although lacking of any literary value, the influence of these Spring Heeled Jack series as a predecesor of modern day comic superheroes is evident, taking into consideration thay they were written twenty years before the first Zorro adventure and more than half a century before other fictional characters like Batman or the Lone Ranger were created. Such lasting influence and its consequent cultural importance is today practically forgotten.
Even to present date, the legend of Spring Heeled Jack continues to attract the imagination of writers, like Philip Pullman (author of the bestselling trilogy His Dark Materials), who published his fictional book Spring Heeled Jack - A Story of Bravery and Evil in 1989 (ISBN 0440862299). He retakes there the concept of a good Spring Heeled Jack, who dresses up as the Devil to scare villains, much in the tradition of the victorian penny dreadfuls.
References
- Jacqueline Simpson. Spring-Heeled Jack (leaflet). International Society for Contemporary Legend Research
- . ISBN 1578590701.
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External links
- Justin Gilbert's Penny Dreadful Page—Includes a magnificent example of a Spring Heeled Jack-based penny dreadful.
- Anomalies Article—Spring Heeled Jack
- Mystery Mag article—Spring Heeled Jack reappears in 1970s Sheffield?
- BBC - Legacies - Myths and Legends - England - Black Country— Spring Heeled Jack
- Paranormal Phenomena— The Top Ten Most Mysterious Creatures of Modern Times
- Culture UK— What makes Britain so... British! Spring Heeled Jack
- Haunted Britain— Spring Heeled Jack