Spring-heeled Jack, Mystery Assailant!

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? Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downey and it's getting
closer to Halloween, so we're getting a little bit spookier

(00:21):
in our series. Sarah had a really good pick for
today well, and this is 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 terrorized by this mystery assailant. And
sometimes he was dressed as a bear or a devil,

(00:43):
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 him the name of spring heeled Jack,
which is something people eventually began to take literally, like

(01:05):
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, and he started to appear in Penny Dreadfuls,

(01:25):
which were the best phrase, it makes me ful happy.
It's cheap, lurid fiction. I guess it makes me less happy.
But Penny Tacles is the name of my 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 at pictures of Jack from the

(01:46):
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 cloth, he has
black boots, he flies and jumps, and you and I
saw the batmobile on Monday Cathy's uh car collection at

(02:10):
Chick fil A headquarters. So that's so. I like to
think there's things are coming together. But then spring Hill
Jack mostly faded from memory. He was replaced by these
more generic ghosts and boogeymen like we think of. But
in nineteen sixty one, this story kind of gets a
second win when it's used as an example of pre
space age UFO visitation in a magazine called The Flying

(02:35):
Saucer Review, 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 Springhill Jack
has been seriously studied by one man in particular, who's
named Mike Dash. So the legend is obviously huge. But
was there ever a real Springhilled Jack? And what was he? So,

(02:59):
just to give you some bearings before we launched into
this very mysterious before we spring and ring into the
story of our subject today, could have been an alien
at least according to Flying Saucer Review, a supernatural being,
a nobleman carrying out some thick terms of a bet,

(03:21):
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
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

(03:43):
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
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.

(04:03):
So our scene is set February eight, it's less than
a year into Queen Victoria's reign, and we're at bare
Binder Cottage in old Ford, which is 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.

(04:26):
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 me a light, for
we have caught spring hild 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

(04:46):
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 tight fitting white clothing. And
then he shoots blue and white flames from his mouth
and grabs her starts to tear her clothes and her

(05:08):
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 out her
hair and tearing at her clothes. Finally one of her
sisters opens the door and saves her. So that sounds
completely terrifying even today. And this is the first firsthand

(05:29):
account of spring Hill Jack, which is 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, who's considered
one of the most famous early detectives. But Jane's account
was almost entirely backed up by her family as well

(05:51):
as other witnesses, so she was believed to be an
entirely credible witness, at least from most of the story. Yeah,
someone I think was at her then who said there
was no A neighbor. Yeah, so the one 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

(06:13):
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 Barns, a
village southwest of London in September eighteen thirty seven, where
a quote ghost imp or devil was believed to be

(06:34):
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
who looked into these tales couldn't find anyone who would
actually admit to having seen the assail and it was

(06:54):
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. He can't
send him right back to you, Katie. So it seemed
like everybody had heard of this ghost, that nobody had

(07:15):
actually seen him and the other thing. And they'd look
into some of these accounts and they'd find that sensational
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 eight, the Lord Mayor himself of London made

(07:39):
public a letter he had received from quote, a resident
of Peckham, 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.

(08:03):
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 sketchy
rumors start flying all over the countryside. But possibly something
really is going on here. I mean, if the Lord

(08:24):
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 all Stop story from earlier. Um. In that case,
the principal suspect is this carpenter named Millbank, who's a

(08:45):
squat man. 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 not drunk, So when how would he be

(09:07):
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
unless it's absolute calm, right, because got everything under control
and you're doing everything correctly, the wind blows the wrong
way and your face explodes. It's pretty dangerous. It would

(09:29):
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 Yeah, a short
string of events from eighteen thirty seven to eight thirty eight.

(09:50):
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 anybody heard. The third classic attack was when

(10:11):
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 flees. And this story doesn't gain as much
attention as Jane's for some reason, but I think it's
pretty good. One possibly because Lucy was Jane was the

(10:31):
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 on each other. Some men are arrested,

(10:53):
but people are also so obsessed by this 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
springhilled Jack. When it goes on for years and years,

(11:16):
his name is associated 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 then bound off on giant springs. So apparently

(11:36):
he's gone from fire breathing to chill hands and 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 Springhilled Jack appearance
occurs in nineteen o four in Liverpool, and he's more

(11:59):
apple than ever. I mean, he's practically flying by this
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 Poulter geist in the
neighborhood before, so everybody's on edge, I guess. So the
legend begins to fade away after this, So there's you know,

(12:22):
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,
Poulter ghost. It's the boogey man whoever, So what happened?
We've got to look at this from a few different angles. One,
it was Jack just a convenient boogeyman to blame for

(12:42):
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 and then you take the costume and the pared crime.

(13:04):
You can go do whatever you want. Or did an
original Jack terrorize 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 was
just a combination of two urban legends. And there was

(13:26):
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,
and there was this gang of well off men with

(13:48):
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 the Sperry, the very
rakish Henry de la Poor Beresford, who is the Marquess
of Waterford, and he's still regarded by some people as
the chief suspect for the original eighteen thirty seven eighteen

(14:10):
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 noble one. Maybe the first string of attacks ended
because there was pressure put on the police not to

(14:31):
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 up this same position. I mean, it's called folklore

(14:52):
after all. Um that Jack was just a rumor and
part of this hysterical panic. He shouldn't be at the
seated with any one person because he was a product.
He wasn't a real flesh and blood man. But the
research of the historian Mike Dash forces to look at
Jack a little more closely and consider a few different angles.

(15:16):
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 the popeyed gentleman who propositioned her earlier in

(15:39):
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 these obvious questionable secondary sources of literature, Dash

(16:03):
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
of relying completely on some of this obviously sketchy secondary literature,

(16:25):
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
has concluded that there were elements of reality and fiction
in the case of springhilled Jack, which I think is

(16:47):
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 eight
thirty eight, but the attacks on Lucy Scales and and
Allsop we're probably done by the same person, and that
person was probably also the same one who was responsible
for those mysterious eighteen thirty seven attacks in the countryside,

(17:11):
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 kernel of truth.
So where there's there's fire, yeah, we think. But he
also discounts to surprisingly popular theories going back to that

(17:33):
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 But over the
years people have claimed that Jack couldn't have been human
because his talents, his fire breathing, his jumps would have

(17:57):
been out of range for Victoria in science. It sounds
so funny to actually say to someone, no talons, those
are beyond Victorian type. It does sound ridiculous, or fire breathing.
Even um So Dash has in 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,

(18:19):
as you mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, that
people started to take the name spring heeled Jack, which
was applied to this July. Yeah, they started to take
it literally, like he has actual springs hidden in the
heels of his shoes, or he has India rubber soled shoes.
She would saying would make it pretty difficult to get

(18:40):
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 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,

(19:02):
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 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

(19:24):
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
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 eight seven and

(19:47):
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 basis in actual weird people. Sometimes times it's just
folks getting hysterical and worked up about something. But this
is of course a story with a lot of research

(20:08):
left to be done. Sarah advises that you get out
your magnifying glasses and start pouring over newspaper archives. But
that brings us today to our listener meal. So our
first is a real meal and especially cool because it's
made out of an MRI E, a meal ready to

(20:28):
eat box. UM. So I always saw this cardboard card
postcard among our letters, like what is this? It's pretty awesome.
But it's from Nick and he's in the U. S. Navy,
and he wrote, Dear Katie and Sarah, I'm sitting at
Fort Jackson this morning, not too far from Atlanta, waiting
for a plane to take me to Kuwait tomorrow in
Afghanistan next week. I love the podcast and have listened

(20:50):
to all the episodes you two have done. Through the
miracle of the Internet, I get to keep listening overseas.
It would be great to hear about the history of Afghanistan,
maybe Alexander or the Persians or the Silk Road. Thanks
and keep up the good work. Thank you, Yeah, thank you,
and um Silk Road, that's definitely one on our list. Darius,

(21:11):
that's on our list, so for you, we'll see what
we can move them up the list. Yeah. We've also
got an email today about the Koey Nore podcast. Yeah,
this one is from Jackie and she wrote, I just
listened to her podcast on the Kohn York Diamond and
just wanted to mention one instance when the koheyn Or
appears in pop culture. I'm a big Doctor Who fan,

(21:31):
and yesterday before I listen to the podcast, watched an
episode from the new series second season. The episode called
Tooth and Claw featured Queen Victoria traveling with Kohynore and
claimed that the reason Prince Albert had it cut was
so it could be used to dave the Queen from
a werewolf. So that's pretty great. Yeah, I kind of

(21:52):
wish we brought that one up. That would have been
been a nice solid ending to that podcast. We have
found the Queen Victoria ties into every thing, and when
we visit a Dragon Comics year, we also saw lots
of dor dor fol costumes. Yes, we even saw a
Stormtrooper crossed with Doctor Who's So Doctor Who accessory wouldn't
pick between the two, Well, how could you really? So?

(22:13):
If you would like to send us some email where
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at missed in History And I think we have an
article that would go with that letter, don't we We do.
It's called how where Wolds Work? And it ties into
the cornerea. I think it kind of ties into spring

(22:35):
Hills different natural Yes, So you can search for that
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