Spring-Heeled Jack, a 19th century London cryptid story
(Image 1: The cover of a fiction magazine ‘Spring-Heeled Jack 2 by Robert Prowse, 1904)
In 1837 and 1838, northwest London was terrorized by a series of attacks from a mysterious figure. He would come out at night and mainly assault women, ripping their clothes with his cold iron fingernails and stealing valuables.
After every sighting, the creature would always escape by leaping unnaturally high, a trait that earned him the nickname ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’.
Supposedly, he was often seen jumping from one rooftop to another, laughing maniacally during his escape. He usually only scared people, but there are also stories of Jack tearing a child to shreds with his iron talons, and crashing a carriage by suddenly appearing in front of it and then disappearing. There are several accounts of the cryptid scaring people to death.
Many people claimed he was a supernatural creature. Sometimes he was said to wear a suit of armor or a black cape, and other times he supposedly took the form of a bear or a white bull. He was described as ‘devil-like’, smelled like brimstone, had glowing red eyes, and sometimes would spit blue fire (in some stories, the fire was produced from a magic bullseye lantern). Some sources equated him with the actual devil.
These attacks happened during a time when ghost stories were popular entertainment (newspapers would even publish dramatized reports of supposedly haunted locations), and as a consequence Jack got mixed with folklore ghosts in the public eye. He was regarded as a devil or a ghost, and parents even used him as a bogeyman to scare misbehaving children.
(Image source 2: illustration from an unknown penny dreadful, BBC Hulton Picture Library)
In fact, Spring-Heeled Jack was soon connected to an earlier ghost sighting of a figure in a white robe in the cholera burial ground (which contains a mass grave for the Sheffielders who died in the epidemic of 1832).
Some people, according to an 1873 article in the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, believed that Jack was actually the ghost of a cholera victim who came back to haunt the world of the living. Supposedly, he would regularly return to this graveyard. Also, in one account from a carpenter who claimed to have been attacked, Jack summoned two ghosts to aid him when the victim tried to fight back.
Interestingly, he was sometimes described as an athletic (but not supernatural!) human being wearing a devil mask and a suit. In these stories, the giant leaps were explained by way of spring-loaded shoes.
The newspapers named a suspect: Lord Henry de la Poer Beresford, marquis of Waterford, who was already notorious in the area for his love of pranks. He would pull practical jokes on passersby, which were often needlessly cruel and outright dangerous. In 1838, The Times published an anonymous letter to the mayor of London, claiming that the local prankster nobleman was indeed the culprit, though hard evidence was never found. Some people formed armed mobs to patrol the streets in an attempt to catch Spring-Heeled Jack in the act, but they never succeeded.
(Image source 3: Vladimir Lemajic)
The character seemed to stick, however, and became popular in the ‘penny dreadfuls’: cheap, weekly fiction stories that often featured crime and action plots. In these books, Jack usually had horns and bat wings. He was usually a vengeful anti-hero rather than a villain, despite being based on a cryptid who assaulted women. In fact, he was often written as a hero of the working class in these books, fighting aristocrats who abused their power and money.
Spring-Heeled Jack’s popularity resulted in the appearance of several copycats by the mid-19th century: some of these were harmless pranksters, dressing up as a winged devil to scare and confuse people, while others would rob or assault their victims.
It is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction: though I doubt he actually performed even half of the feats ascribed to him, I don’t find it unlikely that there really was a masked robber. The foggy streets of 19th century London were no safe places for women, after all.
Sources:
Clarke, D., 2006, Unmasking Spring-heeled Jack: A case study of a 19th century ghost panic, Contemporary Legend n.s. 9: p.28-52. Mackley, J. S., 2016, Spring-heeled Jack: the Terror of London, Aeternum: the Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, 3(2), p. 1-20. 2324-4895.