The Effect
In the early decades of nineteenth century London, terrifying reports begin to circulate: ghoulish sightings of unknown entities, stalking women as they walk alone and unchaperoned through the maze of the gas-lit capital. Many people swear to have witnessed a glowing white ball, hovering in the air, waiting to terrorise its next victim. Some claim that what they have seen is a huge ghostly bear, others the hulking apparition of a bull. A number of witnesses allege that the horror actually takes the form of an enormous man, completely clad in armour, wearing metal gloves with claws long as butchers’ knives and, on his feet, large metal boots heeled with springs. But these strange stories remain just that until, towards the end of 1837, everything changes.
It is a chilly October night when a young woman, Mary Stevens, makes the walk home from Battersea in south London, where she has been visiting her parents. She heads towards Lavender Hill, where she works as a servant, fingers of mist hanging in the air above Clapham Common, which she crosses alone. Suddenly, a tall figure leaps out at her from the blackness. He grips her tightly, frantically kissing her face whilst tearing at her clothing with claws Mary later describes as ‘cold and clammy like those of a corpse’. Petrified, Mary screams at the top of her lungs, causing the attacker to turn and run. The noise summons a number of passers-by, who rush to Mary’s aid. They conduct a search of the immediate area, but the attacker cannot be found and, although she is described as ‘perfectly sensible’ and ‘not likely to suffer from hallucinations’, Mary is thought to have been mistaken or lying, and her story is completely disregarded.
However, the very next day, another attack occurs. This time, very near Mary Stevens’ home, a bizarre figure swathed in a voluminous black cloak abruptly jumps out before a carriage, causing its driver to lose control of the vehicle. The horses and carriage veer wildly, and the driver is seriously injured. But on this occasion, a small handful of witnesses do see the attacker, claiming to watch as he flees the scene by clearing a 9ft wall in one leap, while emitting a peal of high-pitched laughter.
A few months later, in January 1838, the unknown assailant - half-ghost, half-villain - strikes again. Polly Adams, a barmaid, walking one long, dark winter evening across Blackheath, is attacked by a cloaked, devil-like creature that furiously claws at her clothing. Soon, similar reports begin pouring in from other locations across London, telling of young women frightened into ‘dangerous fits’ and ‘severely wounded by claws’.
There are so many accounts of similar attacks, in fact, that newspapers begin to cover the alarming goings-on, and the perpetrator is christened ‘Spring Jack’ on account of his supposedly super-human ability to scale walls and buildings in a single bound. As panic spreads to the outer reaches of the city, the Lord Mayor of London, in a public session, finally addresses the attacks of the previous months. He says he has received copious amounts of letters, from the relatives of young women attacked by the mysterious ‘Spring Jack’, who have been: ‘severely wounded by a sort of claws the miscreant wore on his hands’. Some have been ‘frightened into fits’, others ‘deprived of their senses’ to such an extent they are ‘likely to become burdens on their families’.
Once the Lord Mayor - a respected upper-class man - addresses the reported attacks, the mysterious figure of ‘Spring Jack’ gathers credibility, and stories of his wicked deeds escalate ever further. People apparently die of fright after encountering the monster in both Brixton and Camberwell, as hysteria spreads. Children are warned that if they misbehave, ‘Spring Jack’ will jump through their windows, while one Northamptonshire victim claims her attacker was ‘the very image of the devil himself, with horns and eyes aflame'.
On 19th February 1838, a teenage girl, Jane Alsop, answers the door to her father’s house to a man claiming to be a policeman. ‘We have caught Spring-Heeled Jack, here in the lane’ the man declares exuberantly, and tells Jane to come outside, bringing a light with her. She does so, only noticing the man’s height and the great black cloak that swathes him once she has followed him into the darkness. Suddenly, the man throws back his cloak, presenting ‘a most hideous and frightful appearance’, vomiting blue and white flames from his mouth, while the places where his eyes should be burn like ‘red balls of fire’. He seizes hold of Jane and tears mercilessly at her gown. She screams and makes a break for the front door of the house, but the man captures her once more, ripping his claws across her arms and neck. Luckily for the girl, her noise summons one of her sisters, who causes the assailant to flee. Jane later reports that, in addition to his ghoulish appearance and intentions, the man seemed to be wearing a large helmet and, under his cloak, tight-fitting clothing that resembled white oilskin.
Only nine days later, on 28th February, 18-year-old Lucy Scales and her sister are making their way home through a respectable part of Limehouse, East London, when ‘Spring Jack’ strikes again. As the sisters pass along Green Alley, they observe a figure, shrouded by a long cloak, and silhouetted against the smog and the thick glow of the gaslamp at the end of the passageway. Just as Lucy approaches the figure, he opens his mouth, spurting a stream of ‘blue flame’ in her face. The girl is so shocked she instantly drops to the ground, and is seized by violent fits that continue for several hours. Lucy’s sister later describes the assailant as possessing a tall, thin, and gentlemanly appearance, covered in a large cloak, and carrying a small lamp or bull’s eye lantern, similar to those used by the police. The man, she says, did not speak or try to touch either of them, just violently spewed his luminous blue fire before melting into the night.
Following the attack on Lucy Scales, the police intensify their efforts to capture the criminal responsible, now referred to by the name ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’. They apprehend and question a number of men, but release them again when no evidence of their guilt presents itself.
As the years slip by, reports of attacks do not stop, instead spreading further afield to other parts of the country. The now-infamous Spring-Heeled Jack, it is claimed, has struck in the Midlands, where he has leapt onto the roof of the Cross Inn in Dudley. He appears, too, in East Anglia, interrupting mail coaches. At one point in the 1870s, he even apparently takes on the British army in Aldershot’s North Camp, where a sentry tells of a ‘man-like creature’ who slaps his face before cackling and jumping onto the roof of the sentry box. This professional soldier even opens fire on the creature, but hits nothing. The figure has, once again, vanished into the night.
With every seemingly credible eye-witness account outlining every incredible anecdote, ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’ becomes a legend. However, in the late 1880s, London finds itself firmly in the grip of a new terror. A new monster is lurking in the back alleys of the capital, mantled by the smog and the lamplight, setting his sights on some of society’s most vulnerable women. And this time, although he calls himself ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’, he is deadly.
The Method
By 1888, London is in the grip of a new terror. A mysterious killer is butchering women in the East End, terrorising the populus with a succession of serial killings of unforeseen brutality. During the course of their ultimately fruitless investigation, police receive a number of letters sent by people claiming to be this serial killer. One of these is signed ‘Spring-Heeled Jack - The Whitechapel Murderer’, the name scribbled in blood on the back of a postcard. But were Spring-Heeled Jack and Jack the Ripper really the same person - a man who had gone from laughing as he jumped over walls to savagely dismembering women?
As the attacks went on, the descriptions of Spring-Heeled Jack given by the people who claimed to have seen him, became increasingly contradictory. Many reported his terrifying and frightful appearance, the fact that he possessed a diabolical, Devil-like physiognomy, gigantic clawed hands, and eyes that “resembled red balls of fire”. He breathed fierce blue flames from his mouth, they claimed, and had an other-worldy, ringing, high-pitched laugh. But others, by contrast, said that he was tall and thin, even had the appearance of a respectable gentleman. At least two eye-witnesses stated he could speak comprehensible English. But why so many inconsistencies? Could it have been that rather than looking for one man as the culprit of the attacks, police should actually have been looking for several?
As early as 1840, only three years after Mary Stevens was accosted on Clapham Common, rumours started to circulate that a rather high-profile individual may have been behind the Spring-Heeled Jack attacks. The Marquis of Waterford, an Irish nobleman, frequently found himself in the news in the late 1830s for an array of disreputable activities, including: drunken brawling, slander and vandalism. He was said to go to any lengths to place a good bet, and his unconventional escapades, coupled with his general contempt for the opposite sex, earned him the title ‘the Mad Marquis’. He was known to be in London at the time the first incidents took place, and was also known to have enjoyed ‘springing upon travellers unawares to frighten them’ for his own amusement. And, furthermore, a contemporary commentator also stated that several of the Marquis’s equally-disreputable friends were known to follow his example. However, over the years of the investigation, no concrete evidence was ever found to unmask the Marquis of Waterford, or any of his associates, as the masterminds behind Spring-Heeled Jack.
Might the fact that no human perpetrator could be found mean that Spring-Heeled Jack was not part of the corporeal world, at all? Across the years following the attacks, a variety of wildly speculative paranormal explanations were put forward to explain the origin of Spring-Heeled Jack, and his multitude of extraordinary powers. Some have speculated that he was an extraterrestrial entity, which, they argue, would explain his reflective eyes and phosphorus breath, that his superhuman agility was born from life on a high-gravity world. Others are convinced he is a demon, accidentally or purposefully summoned as part of a ritual, and forced ever since to keep himself busy by creating turmoil for the people of England.
Despite the frequency of the Spring-Heeled Jack attacks, like reports of a demonic entity, no evidence extended beyond eye-witness accounts, and as such it has never been definitively verified that Spring-Heeled Jack ever existed. So was he instead conjured from some sort of unstable communal psyche - or social panic - during which ordinary members of the public unconsciously respond to a pressure cooker of societal factors? And might this be the most fascinating explanation for his existence of them all…
Queen Victoria’s accession to the British throne issued in a period of considerable industrial, cultural, scientific and military change. Indeed, the first reports of disturbing entities stalking women across London, occurred just three months after she first took to the throne. Social panics are characterised by reports of some form of community threat, followed by an account of the first interaction with that threat, or attack. As the media takes up and spreads this initial story, more eye-witnesses step forward claiming they have also been attacked and so it continues, each story feeding the next and perpetuating the legend. Many people in such cases are not even altogether aware of what they are doing, they are often simply responding to the stress of a changing era, an era at the hands of which they feel more and more powerless. As the victim or eyewitness in such a case, they are touched by something extraordinary, something which focuses the rest of their society on this new perceived threat, instead of the wider and very real issues bearing down on them.
Different people experiencing such incredible happenings - people who have never met or collaboratively shared accounts of their experiences - is also known as mass hysteria. This is a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether they be real or imaginary, through a population as a result of rumour and mutual fear. There have been a number of mass hysterias or social panics through the centuries, from dancing manias to witch trials, from collective faintings to ghost sightings to non-existent poisonings. It is a phenomenon that is arguably part of the human condition and just one of the strange ways in which we, as a group of social animals, respond to various shared pressures. A phenomenon that affects very ordinary people.
In the nineteenth century, rather like the term ‘Joe Bloggs’ today, the name Jack was commonly used to refer to an unknown, ordinary man. If the Spring-Heeled Jack attacks did not - if you’ll pardon the pun - spring from a social panic or mass hysteria, could these crimes instead have been carried out by an ordinary man in a not-so-ordinary profession? Might Jack have actually been a circus performer, an acrobat, a tumbler seasoned in dazzling his audience with unbelievable feats? Could the blue flames that spewed from his mouth provide the clue that he was actually a fire-breather? The long blades on his hands indicate a professional knife-thrower? The disturbing red eyes be the result of some kind of luminescent stage makeup?
Whatever the explanations for this extraordinary figure, the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack has outlasted his age. From his appearance in Penny Dreadfuls - the popular serial literature produced in the 19th century - to his being the inspiration for super-villains and anti-heroes worthy of Gotham City, this figure that seems both so human and so superhuman endures to this day.
And, indeed, a handful of sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack have even been reported in more recent times. In 1986, a Herefordshire salesman apparently reported seeing him ‘leaping high hedgerows in great bounds’. In 2012, a family on their way to Ewell in Surrey reported a man jumping away from them at impossible heights. So, if you find yourself in the heart of England and catch a glimpse of a tall, cloaked figure, metal glinting from his fingers, crimson glowing from his eyes, it may be that Jack still has some spring left in his step. It may be that he is waiting to pounce… on you.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
