Casting about tonight, I ended up in the good ol’ Wikpedia and saw that the featured article today was about Spring Heel Jack (Spring Heeled Jack) . I knew I’d heard the reference somewhere but never the actual tale. After reading it, I think it seems to be a ghost story of the same sort as our (North American) Bigfoot or Sasquatch stories. What say you, friends across the pond?
The Wikipedia article is actually a good piece of work and covers much of the evidence very well. But there is one caveat…
The main modern secondary work on the subject is Peter Haining’s The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack (1977). But, as I’ve pointed out before, Haining has been known to invent evidence for his ‘non-fiction’ books.
Now, I haven’t read his Spring-Heeled Jack book, but if you check out the entry on it on Amazon, you’ll find one reviewer who claims that Haining was up to his old tricks again. It is specifically suggested that he invented the stories about ‘Polly Adams’ and ‘Maria Davis’, both of which the Wikipedia article mentions uncritically. (And, no, I can’t be bothered to change it.) So that and other sites that rely on Haining do need to be used with caution.
But what of the real Spring-Heeled Jack? Given that women being frightened by strange men on the streets at night is not exactly uncommon anyway and that accounts of what happened in such cases can easily get distorted (whether by witnesses or by others), there is a real possibility that this was just a media-fuelled urban legend being overlaid on to a series of unremarkable and unrelated incidents.
I love Spring Heeled Jack. Such a bizarre story, which seems to have come out of nowhere.
I don’t think he’s really much like Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. They’re more in the realm of cryptozoology, furry monsters and such like. Jack is a far more interesting (IMHO) creature.
If anything, with his claws and red eyes, he most resembles the Devil, and stories about meeting Hisself or simply devilish creatures were I believe very common at the time.
He also appears to be some kind of Victorian superhero, a cross between Superman and Jack the Ripper.
The madly varying descriptions of him in the Wiki article seem to suggest mass hysteria – one young lady got attacked, described it all out of logic and then some other imaginative folk went from there. No doubt next some naughty lads decided that pretending to be Jack would be a good way to get away with murder.
Great story though.
There’s a Stephen King story called “Strawberry Spring” that involves Springheel Jack. It’s in the Night Shift collection of short stories. In the story, he’s just kind of a Jack the Ripper type guy, lurking around a college campus.
Springheel Jack also shows up in Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates.
I once read a book on Spring-Heeled Jack that makes it pretty clear that he was originally an eccentric British nobleman who liked to play elaborate pranks. (I unfortunately don’t recall his name.) The first appearances of Jack occurred the vicinity of his estate and somebody noticed that some of the clothes he was wearing were the nobleman’s. But apparently the idea caught the public fancy and there were copycat Jacks jumping around England for decades after the original.