October 10, 2020 • 21 mins
We're revisiting a 2010 episode from previous hosts. Most people are familiar with Jack the Ripper, but Victorian England was also plagued by an odd character named Spring-heeled Jack. Were reports of this bounding scoundrel a symptom of mass hysteria, or something factual?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We are continuing our October classics with
a bit of an unsolved mystery from previous hosts Katie
and Sarah. This is spring Heeled Jack, who was a
strange assailant who terrorized London and the surrounding communities in
the nineteenth century. It's a story I was not familiar
(00:22):
with until listening to this old episode of our show
to decide whether to put it as a Saturday Classic.
And this episode originally came out on October Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History class a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie
(00:49):
Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey, and it's getting closer to Halloween,
so we're getting a little bit spookier in our series.
Sarah had a really good pick for today well in
this a popular listeners suggestion too, so it's not exactly
my pick. But in the late eighteen thirties, London and
its outlying villages, places that are suburbs now were apparently
(01:11):
terrorized by this mystery assailant. And sometimes he was dressed
as a bear or a devil, or dressed in a
coat of armor, and he tormented his victims, who are
usually young women, by tearing at them with sharp talents,
sometimes shooting flames at them, and then he would escape
with great agility across the countryside. And that agility earned
(01:34):
him the name of spring healed Jack, which is something
people eventually began to take literally, like he was running
around in these shoes with giant springs on the bottom.
But he made such an impression on people across the
country that other mystery attacks ten years, forty years, even
seventy years later were chalked up to this springman, who
grew even more fantastic as the decades went by. Yeah,
(01:57):
and he started to appear in Penny dread Fools, which
were the best phrase, it makes me so happy. It's cheap,
lurid fiction, I guess, which makes me less happy, But
is the name of our next imaginary fun to read through?
And he took on this folklore persona to this wronged
aristocrat who was inflicting vigilante justice. And if you look
(02:19):
at pictures of Jack from the nineteenth century engravings, of
course he looks a lot like a proto batman. And
I'm kind of wondering what sort of inspiration, if any,
he had on the creators of Batman. I mean, he's
got the scalloped black cloak, he has black boots, He
flies and jumps, and you and I saw the batmobile
(02:40):
on Monday Cappy's uh car collection at Chick fil A headquarters.
So that's so. I like to think things are coming together.
But then spring Hill Jack mostly faded from memory. He
was replaced by these, you know, more generic ghosts and
boogeymen like we think of. But in nineteen sixty one,
and this story kind of gets a second wind when
(03:02):
it's used as an example of pre space age UFO
visitation in a magazine called The Flying Saucer Review seriously,
which you know, I mean, if you want to buy
us a subscription for Christmas, you totally could. But since
the nineteen eighties, the subject of spring Heeled Jack has
been seriously studied by one man in particular, who's named
(03:24):
Mike Dash. So the legend is obviously huge. But was
there ever a real spring Heeled Jack and what was he? So,
just to give you some bearings before we launched into
this very mysterious before we spring and ring into this
story of our subject today could have been an alien
(03:45):
at least according to Flying Saucer Review, a supernatural being,
a nobleman carrying out some sick terms of a bet,
a series of copycats feeding off of a rural rumor,
or just an urban legend. And Sarah was saying that
the cool thing about this story is that even if
(04:07):
you walk away from it believing that nothing happened at all,
it's still really interesting to take a look at the
urban terrors and hysteria in the nineteenth century. Like if
you if you think about ours, the Satanist cults at Daycares,
thing that was going was in the nineties. So yeah,
we had no spring heeled Jack. But if you were
(04:28):
back in England at this particularly weird stuff that happened
exactly this is what you would be worried about. But
first we're gonna tell you a little bit of a
ghost story. So our scene is set February eighteen thirty eight.
It's less than a year into Queen Victoria's reign, and
we're at bear Binder Cottage in old Ford, which is
(04:48):
just east of London. So Jane Alsop, who's a young
woman who lives with her parents, here's somebody ringing the
bell at her family's front gate, it's a little late
for visitors to be calling. It's about a quarter to nine.
So she goes out and sees the man and asks
him what's wrong, and could you please stop bringing the
bell so loudly, And he says, for God's sake, bring
(05:11):
me a light, for we have caught spring hailed jack
here in the lane. So she hurries in. She grabs
this candle and she hands it to the man, who
thinks she thinks is a policeman, but that's not what
she sees. At that point, he throws off his cloak,
holds the candle up to his chest, and it illuminates
this horrible face with red eyes and a helmet and
(05:33):
tight fitting white clothing. And then he shoots blue and
white flames from his mouth and grabs her starts to
tear it her clothes and her skin with his metal claws,
and somehow she escapes from him and she runs to
the door of her home. There he grabs her again,
keeps on ripping at her hair and tearing at her clothes.
(05:54):
Finally one of her sisters opens the door and saves her.
So that sounds completely terrify even today. And this is
the first firsthand account of spring Hill Jack, which was
published in the Times of London, and the story was
followed up by two investigations, one by the newly formed
Metropolitan Police and other by a for Higher detective James Leah,
(06:16):
who's considered one of the most famous early detectives. But
Jane's account was almost entirely backed up by her family
as well as other witnesses, so she was believed to
be an entirely credible witness, at least for most of
the story. YEA, someone I think was it her cousin
who said there was no neighbor. Yeah, So the one
(06:38):
sort of major contested point, a neighbor said, yeah, I
definitely didn't see any flames, even though you know, I
heard someone ringing at the bell. But the rest of
the creepiness everything seemed to add up pretty well. Um,
but that's not where our story is going to start
because months before Jane's attack, rumors of a mystery assailant
had already swept through the countryside, and they started in Barnes,
(07:01):
a village southwest of London in September eighty seven, where
a quote ghost imp or devil was believed to be
attacking mostly women and over the next two months, there
were reports from more than two dozen other villages of
a similar phantom. So the story spreads. Of course, it's exaggerated,
maybe it was all made up. Serious newspapermen and police
(07:23):
who looked into these tales couldn't find anyone who would
actually admit to having seen the assail. And it was
more like, oh my gosh, yes i've heard you know,
you should go ask Sarah. And then Sarah would come
to me. I'd say, oh, I haven't seen it myself,
but go see old Joe down the road. What about me, Sarah,
You could have asked me about the imp. You can't
(07:44):
send him right back to you, Katie. So it seemed
like everybody had heard of this ghost, but nobody had
actually seen him and the other thing. And they look
into some of these accounts and they'd find that sensational
(08:06):
stories had pretty normal sounding causes, you know, they were
seeing a mounted policeman or something. It wasn't spring heeled jack.
But still it seemed like something had been happening, because
by January the Lord Mayor himself of London made public
a letter he had received from quote, a resident of Peckham,
(08:26):
and this was published in the time, some individuals of
as the writer believes, the higher ranks of life, have
laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion name
as yet unknown, that he durst not take upon himself
the task of visiting many of the villages near London
in three disguises, a ghost, a bear, and a devil.
(08:46):
The wager has however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain
has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses. Okay,
so this is putting forth this wager idea and sketch
rumors start flying all over the countryside. But possibly something
really is going on here. I mean, if the Lord
(09:07):
Mayor thinks that it's worth publishing, you never know. The
Gentleman in disguise story seems half plausible. And then in
February we have our first firsthand attack, which is the
Jane Alstop story from earlier. Um. In that case, the
principal suspect is this carpenter named Millbank, who's a squat man.
(09:28):
He doesn't really match the description that Jane gives of
her attacker, who's this imposing, enormous fire breather with a
helmet but Millbank admits to being so drunk at the
time that he can't remember what happened. And Jane and
her sister are both very adamant that the assailant was
(09:49):
not drunk, So when how would he be a fire
breather if he was well? And that's the other thing
if we're gonna, if we're gonna take the fire breathing seriously,
it's very dangerous to do fire breathing, period, unless it's
absolute calm, right, because got everything under control and you're
doing everything correctly, the wind blows the wrong way and
(10:09):
your face explodes, it's pretty dangerous. It would be especially
dangerous to do while you were drunk. But still now
it is spring healed jack fever, and not just in
the countryside but in London too. So we're gonna move
on to talk about a couple of attacks, and these
are the classic attacks from a short string of events
(10:30):
from eighteen thirty seven to eighty eight. So the second
one was five days after Jane's attack, and again it
was in the East end of London. The assailant knocked
on the door of a house and when a servant
boy came to the door to open it, Jack frightened
him so much that he started screaming his head off,
and Jack was forced to get out of there before
(10:51):
anybody heard. The third classic attack was when Lucy Scales
and her sister were walking home from their brother's butcher
shop down Green Dragon Alley, which sounds very Harry Potter.
They're ambushed and the assailant shoots blue flames and then fleas.
And this story doesn't gain as much attention as Jane's
for some reason, but I think it's a pretty good one,
(11:11):
possibly because Lucy was Jane was the daughter of a
pretty well off family, Lucy less so. So at this
point we enter the copycat stage, and you have angry
men calling themselves bring you know, just standing up in
the bar and so I'm spring heeled Jack and attacking
women and boys dressing up as Jack to play pranks
(11:34):
on each other. Some men are arrested, but people are
also so obsessed by the story by now and frightened
frightened of it, that nearly any mystery assault gets added
to Jack's rap sheet. So it doesn't matter if it
doesn't exactly follow the pattern for what we've what we've seen,
if it's mysterious, it must be spring heeled Jack when
(11:57):
it goes on for years and years. His name is
so shaded with later attacks in the Midlands and the
Home counties in Middlesex, in Peckham and Sheffield, and famously
an alder shot in eighteen seventy seven, which is where
a British Army campus station and that's where he would
lay his chill hand over an isolated sentries face and
(12:17):
then bound off on giant springs. So apparently he's gone
from fire breathing to chill hands again. This is nearly
forty years later. Yeah, so it's extremely I mean, I
think we can discount that there would be one person
carrying out all these attacks. That would be pretty ridiculous.
But the last major spring hill Jack appearance occurs in
(12:39):
nineteen o four in Liverpool, and he's more athletic than ever.
I mean, he's practically flying by these better springs. Springs
have improved considerably over the decades, and the account of
this appearance is really sketchy. I think there had been
rumors of a poultergeist in the neighborhood before, so everybody's
(13:00):
on edge, I guess. So the legend begins to fade
away after this. There's you know, if there's something scary
and fishy going on in your village, you're no longer
so inclined to blame it on spring Hill Jack. You
might just go with a plane, garden variety, polter ghost.
It's the boogeyman. Whoever? So what happened? We've got to
look at this from a few different angles. One, it
(13:22):
was Jack just a convenient boogeyman to blame for weird
events happening in the nineteenth century. Weird stuff happens. You
have this convenient scapegoat. Did opportunistic hoaxeres and genuine criminals
sees this m o of eighteen thirty seven Jack and
make this rumor real. So you have all this gossip
(13:50):
and then you take on the costume and the prepared crime.
You can go do whatever you want, or did An
original Jack tar arized the London area in eighteen thirty
seven and eight, before giving way to these lesser copycats
over the next few decades. So, according to the Oxford
Dictionary National Biography, Folklori's usually assumed that spring Hill Jack
(14:14):
was just a combination of two urban legends, and there
was one legend among the servants and the working classes,
and that was Jack was real. He was a supernatural monster,
so like he really was the devil or a ghost
or whatever appearing in disguises. Among the more educated people,
there was a legend that it was a gentleman's wager
(14:36):
and there was this gang of well off men with
access to costumes and transportation and money, and they had
made some sort of sick bet with each other to
go around and try to frighten people out of their senses.
There was even a suspect for this theory, the very
rakish Henry de la Poor Beresford, who is the Marquess
of Waterford, and he's still regarded by some people as
(14:58):
the chief suspect for the original eighteen thirty seven eighteen
thirty eight string of attacks, because he certainly would have
had the resources. And again it's possible that the lack
of concrete information in rural areas from late eighteen thirty
seven comes from some sort of cover up, cover up
the nobleman. Maybe the first string of attacks ended because
(15:19):
there was pressure put on the police not to investigate
any further, or nor he was just getting it was
getting too risky to keep on doing this. The police
couldn't be expected to cover it up anymore, or he
fulfilled his his his bet that thing's all done after
those classic attacks exactly, and the magazine Folklore unsurprisingly takes
(15:41):
up this same position. I mean, it's called folklore after all. Um,
that Jack was just a rumor and part of this
hysterical panic. He shouldn't be associated with any one person
because he was a product. He wasn't a real flesh
and blood man. But the research of the his orian
Mike Dash, forces to look at Jack a little more
(16:04):
closely and consider a few different angles. He spent most
of his working life researching the Jack mystery, and his
research has exposed some of the most notable secondary sources
on Jack as being nearly complete fiction. So too famous
Jack stories that of the eighteen thirty seven attack on
the servant Polly Hill by a man she recognized as
(16:27):
the popeyed gentleman who propositioned her earlier in the day
seems made up, and Sarah was saying that was notable
because Henry Waterford was known for being popeyed. And another
the attack and murder of prostitute Maria Davis in eighteen
forty five, also seems entirely fictional and has no contemporary
evidence to back it up. So instead of relying on
(16:50):
these obviously questionable secondary sources of literature, Dash has poured
through records and newspaper entries from around the country, from
not just the Times but all over the English countryside,
even from the US because there are other similar events
happening here at the same period in time. So instead
(17:11):
of relying completely on some of this obviously sketchy secondary literature,
Dash has instead tried to go to the primary sources
as much as possible, which in this case there's some records,
but it's mostly newspapers, just trying to figure out what
the reporting suggests actually happened, and from his research, Dash
(17:32):
has concluded that there were elements of reality and fiction
in the case of spring heeled Jack, which I think
it's an interesting way to look at it. So he's
figured that there may have been a few Jacks in
the first string of attacks from eighteen thirty seven through
eighteen thirty eight, but the attacks on Lucy Scales and
Jane Alsop were probably done by the same person, and
(17:54):
that person was probably also the same one who was
responsible for those mysterious eight teen thirty seven attacks in
the countryside, and after Spring eighteen thirty eight, it was
probably copycat Jack's who were using this ruse to play
hoaxes or occasionally to sexually assault women. So there's rumor
and panic around this whole thing, but there's also a
(18:16):
kernel of truth. So where there's smoke, there's fire. Yeah,
we think. But he also discounts to surprisingly popular theories
going back to that UFO idea. Yeah, so he's pretty
sure Jack was not a UFO and he was not
a supernatural ghost or devil, and educated people at the
time never really thought he was a ghost or a devil. Um.
(18:38):
But over the years people have claimed that Jack couldn't
have been human because his talents, his fire breathing, his
jumps would have been out of range for Victorian science,
which sounds so funny to actually say to someone, no talents,
those are beyond Victorian type. It does sound ridiculous, or
(18:58):
fire breathing even um. So Dash has been his research
looking through all the papers, he's figured that jumping doesn't
really have enough concrete evidence to back it up. It
does seem, as you mentioned in the beginning of the podcast,
that people started to take the name Spring heeled jack,
which was applied to Yeah, they started to take it literally,
(19:22):
like he has actual springs hidden in the heels of
his shoes, or he has India rubber sold shoes. She
would think would make it pretty difficult to get around
the countryside. Actually, if you were actually wearing springs on
your feet, I think it would be very difficult to
not just wind up with a broken ankle and caught
by the detectives. So if we take the springs out
(19:42):
of the equation, you can say that the fire breathing
and the talents could easily have been produced in the
eighteen thirties. So if he did exist, we should assume
that he was at least as a man. Yeah, So
I think it leaves it open to you guys to
think about it a little. You know, do you think
he's a combination of an urban legend and some kernel
(20:03):
of truth or is it just an outright folk tale. Um.
I do like this story because even if you are
in the camp that assumes nothing happened, there's nothing real
about it, you're forced to still examine the hysteria that's
for real, that really did happen. Well, and it's it's
just cool because ideas of ghosts and things. I remember
(20:25):
watching Poultergeist in middle school and being completely terrified. Stories
of the supernatural just I mean they go back forever. Well, yeah,
ghosts like Jack have appeared long before seven and eighteen
thirty eight. I mean they just weren't attributed to spring
heeled Jack, and weird stuff happened that we don't have
an explanation for. Sometimes even now, sometimes it has a
(20:49):
basis in actual weird people. Sometimes it's just folks getting
hysterical and worked up about something. Fay so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
(21:09):
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart
(21:29):
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You Missed in History Class is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit
the iHeart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. We are continuing our October classics with
a bit of an unsolved mystery from previous hosts Katie
and Sarah. This is spring Heeled Jack, who was a
strange assailant who terrorized London and the surrounding communities in
the nineteenth century. It's a story I was not familiar
(00:22):
with until listening to this old episode of our show
to decide whether to put it as a Saturday Classic.
And this episode originally came out on October Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History class a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie
(00:49):
Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey, and it's getting closer to Halloween,
so we're getting a little bit spookier in our series.
Sarah had a really good pick for today well in
this a popular listeners suggestion too, so it's not exactly
my pick. But in the late eighteen thirties, London and
its outlying villages, places that are suburbs now were apparently
(01:11):
terrorized by this mystery assailant. And sometimes he was dressed
as a bear or a devil, or dressed in a
coat of armor, and he tormented his victims, who are
usually young women, by tearing at them with sharp talents,
sometimes shooting flames at them, and then he would escape
with great agility across the countryside. And that agility earned
(01:34):
him the name of spring healed Jack, which is something
people eventually began to take literally, like he was running
around in these shoes with giant springs on the bottom.
But he made such an impression on people across the
country that other mystery attacks ten years, forty years, even
seventy years later were chalked up to this springman, who
grew even more fantastic as the decades went by. Yeah,
(01:57):
and he started to appear in Penny dread Fools, which
were the best phrase, it makes me so happy. It's cheap,
lurid fiction, I guess, which makes me less happy, But
is the name of our next imaginary fun to read through?
And he took on this folklore persona to this wronged
aristocrat who was inflicting vigilante justice. And if you look
(02:19):
at pictures of Jack from the nineteenth century engravings, of
course he looks a lot like a proto batman. And
I'm kind of wondering what sort of inspiration, if any,
he had on the creators of Batman. I mean, he's
got the scalloped black cloak, he has black boots, He
flies and jumps, and you and I saw the batmobile
(02:40):
on Monday Cappy's uh car collection at Chick fil A headquarters.
So that's so. I like to think things are coming together.
But then spring Hill Jack mostly faded from memory. He
was replaced by these, you know, more generic ghosts and
boogeymen like we think of. But in nineteen sixty one,
and this story kind of gets a second wind when
(03:02):
it's used as an example of pre space age UFO
visitation in a magazine called The Flying Saucer Review seriously,
which you know, I mean, if you want to buy
us a subscription for Christmas, you totally could. But since
the nineteen eighties, the subject of spring Heeled Jack has
been seriously studied by one man in particular, who's named
(03:24):
Mike Dash. So the legend is obviously huge. But was
there ever a real spring Heeled Jack and what was he? So,
just to give you some bearings before we launched into
this very mysterious before we spring and ring into this
story of our subject today could have been an alien
(03:45):
at least according to Flying Saucer Review, a supernatural being,
a nobleman carrying out some sick terms of a bet,
a series of copycats feeding off of a rural rumor,
or just an urban legend. And Sarah was saying that
the cool thing about this story is that even if
(04:07):
you walk away from it believing that nothing happened at all,
it's still really interesting to take a look at the
urban terrors and hysteria in the nineteenth century. Like if
you if you think about ours, the Satanist cults at Daycares,
thing that was going was in the nineties. So yeah,
we had no spring heeled Jack. But if you were
(04:28):
back in England at this particularly weird stuff that happened
exactly this is what you would be worried about. But
first we're gonna tell you a little bit of a
ghost story. So our scene is set February eighteen thirty eight.
It's less than a year into Queen Victoria's reign, and
we're at bear Binder Cottage in old Ford, which is
(04:48):
just east of London. So Jane Alsop, who's a young
woman who lives with her parents, here's somebody ringing the
bell at her family's front gate, it's a little late
for visitors to be calling. It's about a quarter to nine.
So she goes out and sees the man and asks
him what's wrong, and could you please stop bringing the
bell so loudly, And he says, for God's sake, bring
(05:11):
me a light, for we have caught spring hailed jack
here in the lane. So she hurries in. She grabs
this candle and she hands it to the man, who
thinks she thinks is a policeman, but that's not what
she sees. At that point, he throws off his cloak,
holds the candle up to his chest, and it illuminates
this horrible face with red eyes and a helmet and
(05:33):
tight fitting white clothing. And then he shoots blue and
white flames from his mouth and grabs her starts to
tear it her clothes and her skin with his metal claws,
and somehow she escapes from him and she runs to
the door of her home. There he grabs her again,
keeps on ripping at her hair and tearing at her clothes.
(05:54):
Finally one of her sisters opens the door and saves her.
So that sounds completely terrify even today. And this is
the first firsthand account of spring Hill Jack, which was
published in the Times of London, and the story was
followed up by two investigations, one by the newly formed
Metropolitan Police and other by a for Higher detective James Leah,
(06:16):
who's considered one of the most famous early detectives. But
Jane's account was almost entirely backed up by her family
as well as other witnesses, so she was believed to
be an entirely credible witness, at least for most of
the story. YEA, someone I think was it her cousin
who said there was no neighbor. Yeah, So the one
(06:38):
sort of major contested point, a neighbor said, yeah, I
definitely didn't see any flames, even though you know, I
heard someone ringing at the bell. But the rest of
the creepiness everything seemed to add up pretty well. Um,
but that's not where our story is going to start
because months before Jane's attack, rumors of a mystery assailant
had already swept through the countryside, and they started in Barnes,
(07:01):
a village southwest of London in September eighty seven, where
a quote ghost imp or devil was believed to be
attacking mostly women and over the next two months, there
were reports from more than two dozen other villages of
a similar phantom. So the story spreads. Of course, it's exaggerated,
maybe it was all made up. Serious newspapermen and police
(07:23):
who looked into these tales couldn't find anyone who would
actually admit to having seen the assail. And it was
more like, oh my gosh, yes i've heard you know,
you should go ask Sarah. And then Sarah would come
to me. I'd say, oh, I haven't seen it myself,
but go see old Joe down the road. What about me, Sarah,
You could have asked me about the imp. You can't
(07:44):
send him right back to you, Katie. So it seemed
like everybody had heard of this ghost, but nobody had
actually seen him and the other thing. And they look
into some of these accounts and they'd find that sensational
(08:06):
stories had pretty normal sounding causes, you know, they were
seeing a mounted policeman or something. It wasn't spring heeled jack.
But still it seemed like something had been happening, because
by January the Lord Mayor himself of London made public
a letter he had received from quote, a resident of Peckham,
(08:26):
and this was published in the time, some individuals of
as the writer believes, the higher ranks of life, have
laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion name
as yet unknown, that he durst not take upon himself
the task of visiting many of the villages near London
in three disguises, a ghost, a bear, and a devil.
(08:46):
The wager has however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain
has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses. Okay,
so this is putting forth this wager idea and sketch
rumors start flying all over the countryside. But possibly something
really is going on here. I mean, if the Lord
(09:07):
Mayor thinks that it's worth publishing, you never know. The
Gentleman in disguise story seems half plausible. And then in
February we have our first firsthand attack, which is the
Jane Alstop story from earlier. Um. In that case, the
principal suspect is this carpenter named Millbank, who's a squat man.
(09:28):
He doesn't really match the description that Jane gives of
her attacker, who's this imposing, enormous fire breather with a
helmet but Millbank admits to being so drunk at the
time that he can't remember what happened. And Jane and
her sister are both very adamant that the assailant was
(09:49):
not drunk, So when how would he be a fire
breather if he was well? And that's the other thing
if we're gonna, if we're gonna take the fire breathing seriously,
it's very dangerous to do fire breathing, period, unless it's
absolute calm, right, because got everything under control and you're
doing everything correctly, the wind blows the wrong way and
(10:09):
your face explodes, it's pretty dangerous. It would be especially
dangerous to do while you were drunk. But still now
it is spring healed jack fever, and not just in
the countryside but in London too. So we're gonna move
on to talk about a couple of attacks, and these
are the classic attacks from a short string of events
(10:30):
from eighteen thirty seven to eighty eight. So the second
one was five days after Jane's attack, and again it
was in the East end of London. The assailant knocked
on the door of a house and when a servant
boy came to the door to open it, Jack frightened
him so much that he started screaming his head off,
and Jack was forced to get out of there before
(10:51):
anybody heard. The third classic attack was when Lucy Scales
and her sister were walking home from their brother's butcher
shop down Green Dragon Alley, which sounds very Harry Potter.
They're ambushed and the assailant shoots blue flames and then fleas.
And this story doesn't gain as much attention as Jane's
for some reason, but I think it's a pretty good one,
(11:11):
possibly because Lucy was Jane was the daughter of a
pretty well off family, Lucy less so. So at this
point we enter the copycat stage, and you have angry
men calling themselves bring you know, just standing up in
the bar and so I'm spring heeled Jack and attacking
women and boys dressing up as Jack to play pranks
(11:34):
on each other. Some men are arrested, but people are
also so obsessed by the story by now and frightened
frightened of it, that nearly any mystery assault gets added
to Jack's rap sheet. So it doesn't matter if it
doesn't exactly follow the pattern for what we've what we've seen,
if it's mysterious, it must be spring heeled Jack when
(11:57):
it goes on for years and years. His name is
so shaded with later attacks in the Midlands and the
Home counties in Middlesex, in Peckham and Sheffield, and famously
an alder shot in eighteen seventy seven, which is where
a British Army campus station and that's where he would
lay his chill hand over an isolated sentries face and
(12:17):
then bound off on giant springs. So apparently he's gone
from fire breathing to chill hands again. This is nearly
forty years later. Yeah, so it's extremely I mean, I
think we can discount that there would be one person
carrying out all these attacks. That would be pretty ridiculous.
But the last major spring hill Jack appearance occurs in
(12:39):
nineteen o four in Liverpool, and he's more athletic than ever.
I mean, he's practically flying by these better springs. Springs
have improved considerably over the decades, and the account of
this appearance is really sketchy. I think there had been
rumors of a poultergeist in the neighborhood before, so everybody's
(13:00):
on edge, I guess. So the legend begins to fade
away after this. There's you know, if there's something scary
and fishy going on in your village, you're no longer
so inclined to blame it on spring Hill Jack. You
might just go with a plane, garden variety, polter ghost.
It's the boogeyman. Whoever? So what happened? We've got to
look at this from a few different angles. One, it
(13:22):
was Jack just a convenient boogeyman to blame for weird
events happening in the nineteenth century. Weird stuff happens. You
have this convenient scapegoat. Did opportunistic hoaxeres and genuine criminals
sees this m o of eighteen thirty seven Jack and
make this rumor real. So you have all this gossip
(13:50):
and then you take on the costume and the prepared crime.
You can go do whatever you want, or did An
original Jack tar arized the London area in eighteen thirty
seven and eight, before giving way to these lesser copycats
over the next few decades. So, according to the Oxford
Dictionary National Biography, Folklori's usually assumed that spring Hill Jack
(14:14):
was just a combination of two urban legends, and there
was one legend among the servants and the working classes,
and that was Jack was real. He was a supernatural monster,
so like he really was the devil or a ghost
or whatever appearing in disguises. Among the more educated people,
there was a legend that it was a gentleman's wager
(14:36):
and there was this gang of well off men with
access to costumes and transportation and money, and they had
made some sort of sick bet with each other to
go around and try to frighten people out of their senses.
There was even a suspect for this theory, the very
rakish Henry de la Poor Beresford, who is the Marquess
of Waterford, and he's still regarded by some people as
(14:58):
the chief suspect for the original eighteen thirty seven eighteen
thirty eight string of attacks, because he certainly would have
had the resources. And again it's possible that the lack
of concrete information in rural areas from late eighteen thirty
seven comes from some sort of cover up, cover up
the nobleman. Maybe the first string of attacks ended because
(15:19):
there was pressure put on the police not to investigate
any further, or nor he was just getting it was
getting too risky to keep on doing this. The police
couldn't be expected to cover it up anymore, or he
fulfilled his his his bet that thing's all done after
those classic attacks exactly, and the magazine Folklore unsurprisingly takes
(15:41):
up this same position. I mean, it's called folklore after all. Um,
that Jack was just a rumor and part of this
hysterical panic. He shouldn't be associated with any one person
because he was a product. He wasn't a real flesh
and blood man. But the research of the his orian
Mike Dash, forces to look at Jack a little more
(16:04):
closely and consider a few different angles. He spent most
of his working life researching the Jack mystery, and his
research has exposed some of the most notable secondary sources
on Jack as being nearly complete fiction. So too famous
Jack stories that of the eighteen thirty seven attack on
the servant Polly Hill by a man she recognized as
(16:27):
the popeyed gentleman who propositioned her earlier in the day
seems made up, and Sarah was saying that was notable
because Henry Waterford was known for being popeyed. And another
the attack and murder of prostitute Maria Davis in eighteen
forty five, also seems entirely fictional and has no contemporary
evidence to back it up. So instead of relying on
(16:50):
these obviously questionable secondary sources of literature, Dash has poured
through records and newspaper entries from around the country, from
not just the Times but all over the English countryside,
even from the US because there are other similar events
happening here at the same period in time. So instead
(17:11):
of relying completely on some of this obviously sketchy secondary literature,
Dash has instead tried to go to the primary sources
as much as possible, which in this case there's some records,
but it's mostly newspapers, just trying to figure out what
the reporting suggests actually happened, and from his research, Dash
(17:32):
has concluded that there were elements of reality and fiction
in the case of spring heeled Jack, which I think
it's an interesting way to look at it. So he's
figured that there may have been a few Jacks in
the first string of attacks from eighteen thirty seven through
eighteen thirty eight, but the attacks on Lucy Scales and
Jane Alsop were probably done by the same person, and
(17:54):
that person was probably also the same one who was
responsible for those mysterious eight teen thirty seven attacks in
the countryside, and after Spring eighteen thirty eight, it was
probably copycat Jack's who were using this ruse to play
hoaxes or occasionally to sexually assault women. So there's rumor
and panic around this whole thing, but there's also a
(18:16):
kernel of truth. So where there's smoke, there's fire. Yeah,
we think. But he also discounts to surprisingly popular theories
going back to that UFO idea. Yeah, so he's pretty
sure Jack was not a UFO and he was not
a supernatural ghost or devil, and educated people at the
time never really thought he was a ghost or a devil. Um.
(18:38):
But over the years people have claimed that Jack couldn't
have been human because his talents, his fire breathing, his
jumps would have been out of range for Victorian science,
which sounds so funny to actually say to someone, no talents,
those are beyond Victorian type. It does sound ridiculous, or
(18:58):
fire breathing even um. So Dash has been his research
looking through all the papers, he's figured that jumping doesn't
really have enough concrete evidence to back it up. It
does seem, as you mentioned in the beginning of the podcast,
that people started to take the name Spring heeled jack,
which was applied to Yeah, they started to take it literally,
(19:22):
like he has actual springs hidden in the heels of
his shoes, or he has India rubber sold shoes. She
would think would make it pretty difficult to get around
the countryside. Actually, if you were actually wearing springs on
your feet, I think it would be very difficult to
not just wind up with a broken ankle and caught
by the detectives. So if we take the springs out
(19:42):
of the equation, you can say that the fire breathing
and the talents could easily have been produced in the
eighteen thirties. So if he did exist, we should assume
that he was at least as a man. Yeah, So
I think it leaves it open to you guys to
think about it a little. You know, do you think
he's a combination of an urban legend and some kernel
(20:03):
of truth or is it just an outright folk tale. Um.
I do like this story because even if you are
in the camp that assumes nothing happened, there's nothing real
about it, you're forced to still examine the hysteria that's
for real, that really did happen. Well, and it's it's
just cool because ideas of ghosts and things. I remember
(20:25):
watching Poultergeist in middle school and being completely terrified. Stories
of the supernatural just I mean they go back forever. Well, yeah,
ghosts like Jack have appeared long before seven and eighteen
thirty eight. I mean they just weren't attributed to spring
heeled Jack, and weird stuff happened that we don't have
an explanation for. Sometimes even now, sometimes it has a
(20:49):
basis in actual weird people. Sometimes it's just folks getting
hysterical and worked up about something. Fay so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook U r L or something similar over the
(21:09):
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio
dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History and you can subscribe to
our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart
(21:29):
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