Spring-heeled Jack

the United Kingdom
London and its suburbs (Peckham, Bow, Old Ford, Limehouse), 1838; then Aldershot 1877 and Liverpool 1904

Spring-heeled Jack — the night assailant of the London suburbs who in 1838 leaps walls and hedges, spits blue flames and vanishes, born of a letter to the Lord Mayor and grown in the newspapers.

Variants and names

Spring-heeled Jack, Springheel Jack, Spring-heel’d Jack

What is told

A night assailant who leaps walls and hedges as if he had springs in his heels. On 8 January 1838 a letter signed «a resident of Peckham» reaches the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan; it is read in public session at the Mansion House the following day and reported by «The Times»: persons «of the highest ranks of life» had allegedly wagered with a «mischievous and foolhardy» companion that he dared not visit the villages around London «in three different disguises — a ghost, a bear, and a devil». On 20 February, in Bear-bind Lane between Bow and Old Ford, eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop opens the gate to a man claiming to be a policeman: the figure «vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flames from his mouth» and seized her with claws «of some metallic substance» («The Times», 22 February 1838). On 28 February at Limehouse it is Lucy Scales’s turn («Morning Post», 7 March 1838). Then the sentries at Aldershot in 1877 and William Henry Street in Liverpool in 1904.

What it was forthe author’s reading

An urban panic that feeds on the press: the Lord Mayor’s letter makes a rumour public, and from that moment every night assault in the suburbs has a name. The only explanation that stands in a primary source is the costumed prank; for recent scholars it is rather a panic moving from place to place, with imitators. The blue fire and the metal claws, which make the character a creature, appear at Bow in February 1838 and not in the January complaint.

Where it is attested

«The Times», 9 January 1838 (the Mansion House session), 22 February 1838 (Jane Alsop’s deposition at Lambeth Street), 2 March 1838 (arrest and discharge of Thomas Millbank); «The Morning Post», 7 March 1838; «Sheldrake’s Aldershot and Sandhurst Military Gazette», 17 March 1877; «News of the World», 25 September 1904. Spring-Heel’d Jack: The Terror of London, Newsagents Publishing Company, 1863 (reprinted 1867); «Boys’ Standard» serial, April 1878. Studies: Mike Dash, «Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost», Fortean Studies, 3 (1996), pp. 7-125; Karl Bell, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2012; J. S. Mackley, «Spring-heeled Jack: The Terror of London», Aeternum, 3.2 (2016), pp. 1-20.

Caution

Much of what one reads comes from Peter Haining, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack (1977), which has no traceable sources: the attack on «Polly Adams» of October 1837, the gold-filigree «W» on the cloak, the death of «Maria Davis» in 1845 are in no newspaper, and Dash verified that in the coroner’s records the Davis episode does not exist; Haining said he had lent his papers to a scriptwriter who never returned them. The identification with the Marquess of Waterford does not appear in 1838: the first printed attribution found is in Brewer’s Reader’s Handbook, 1880, and the 1884 source that repeats it admits that «not a shadow of proof could ever be adduced»; Waterford died in 1859 and the reports went on. «Seen for sixty years all over England» is true as a span of dates (1837-1904) and false as continuity: they are distinct local scares, press revivals and serial fiction.

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