Creature Feature Friday: Spring-heeled Jack, the Terror of London
On a recent member episode, Episode 380: Gateway Into a Paranormal Life (Members), guest Sean described seeing an entity wearing cloak that “folded in” on itself and disappeared before his eyes. He described the strange being as similar to Spring-heeled Jack, a figure straight out of folklore but nonetheless real to the people he is known to have terrorized. Who, or what, is Spring-heeled Jack?
1) Spring-heeled Jack is folkloric figure out of the Victorian era in Great Britain, an early urban legend allegedly first sighted in London in 1837. Sightings of “the Terror of London” grew to cover much of Great Britain, with many of the accounts originating in London, Scotland, and the Midlands.
2) According to legend, Spring-heeled Jack first made his appearance before a girl named Mary Stevens as she was walking through Clapham Common on her way to Lavender Hill. To her shock, a dark figure reportedly leapt from an alley, grabbed her, and began to kiss her face and paw her with claws that she described as cold and clammy like a corpse. When she screamed, her attacker fled the scene and could not be found. The next day, the same figure was witnessed leaping in front of a carriage and causing a crash, before jumping away over a nine-foot-tall wall, laughing maniacally all the while. Following those initial encounters in 1837, sightings of and attacks by the light-footed leaper officially continued until 1904, but no assailant was ever caught.
3) As is the case with many reports of urban legends and legendary figures, Spring-heeled Jack’s appearance often varied greatly from encounter to encounter. Some claimed he had clawed hands and glowing red eyes, with a “Devil-like" aspect. Other reports described him as a tall, thin, gentlemanly-looking person with a long black cloak; sometimes he was said to wear a helmet and an oilskin garment beneath the cloak. Branching farther out into the realm of high strangeness, there were still other claims that Spring-heeled Jack, in addition to leaping to superhuman heights, could also breathe out blue and white flames! Whatever visage he truly had, the one common factor amongst Spring-heeled Jack reports is that he looked “terrifying and frightful.”
4) The conjecture about the true nature of Spring-heeled Jack also reaches far and wide, ranging from real person, to paranormal phantom, to mass hysteria. Skeptics over the years have asserted Spring-heeled Jack was a case of mass hysteria, with stories of true events becoming exaggerated and sensationalized as they passed through word of mouth. Other investigators of the old urban legend think a real human perpetrator may have been responsible for the very first tales of Spring-heeled Jack, followed by later imitators who kept the reports going for over six decades. On the other side of reality, paranormal speculations also abound. Spring-heeled Jack has been suspected of being an extraterrestrial entity with superhuman abilities, a demon, or a phantom attacker - a being that appears human but possesses phenomenal abilities and whose existence can never be proven in the flesh.
5) The tales of Spring-heeled Jack are strange indeed. Along with Mary Stevens, a girl named Lucy Scales was also assaulted outside by the jumping fiend, while a Jane Alsop was strangled by him in her home until her family beat him and sent him soaring away into the night. Complaints were directed to the Lord Mayor of London about a demonic red-eyed creature bounding across the rooftops of the city, on more than one occasion. In 1870, after decades of terror, the Army even set traps to catch Spring-heeled Jack, after some of their sentries were terrified by a man (or demon) who leaped onto the roof of their sentry box! Armed men rode out horseback, Londoners fired at the strange jumping figure in the street, newspaper articles circulated, and public sessions about the encounters were held, but no one ever apprehended the mysterious Spring-heeled Jack, and he remains elusive to this day.
What do you think Spring-heeled Jack really was? Share your own speculations with us in the comments!
