Unmasking the Chilling Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack

When I was in high school, my friends and I went to the theatre to see what would turn out to be one of the worst movies I have ever had the displeasure of watching. As we were waiting in line to get in, we saw the audience from the previous showing walk out in silence. There wasn’t a single happy face among the hundreds of audience members, and one of my friends said to the rest of us, “If I walk out of the theatre looking that disappointed, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

The film in question was a horror movie, a genre that generally has severely lowered expectations from filmgoers, making it almost impressive that it seemed like no one had enjoyed the show. As we sat down and the movie began, it seemed promising at first. It did a good job of creating a suspenseful atmosphere, but within minutes the first lazy jump scare occurred.

Jump scares are a tried and true method for bad horror writers to elicit a cheap reaction from the audience, but there was a problem. Such a tactic relies on the element of surprise, but every single person saw it coming. After the movie’s initial failed attempt at scaring the audience, a wave of realization came crashing down upon all of us. It had been obvious all along, so obvious that we should have known better than to waste our time and money on this film.

The entire audience already knew everything that was going to happen in this movie before it happened, and we had known for years. But we had no one to blame but ourselves because we had voluntarily paid money to see a movie called Urban Legend, a movie that unsurprisingly was nothing but a collection of well known urban legends slapped together.

One of the main things that is supposed to make urban legends scary is that they’re allegedly true, and usually happened to someone that the storyteller was vaguely acquainted with. The other key aspect is that we usually hear these stories when we’re like 8 years old, when we’re too gullible and stupid to know it’s all made up.

In the case of most urban legends, there’s probably nothing true about them at all. Things like poisoned Halloween candy or people summoning the ghost of Bloody Mary are obviously false, but sometimes these stories spring from an element of truth. Such is the case with one story out of jolly old London, dating back to the 1800s.

While the phrase “urban legend” didn’t exist until 1931, such stories have almost certainly existed for thousands of years. But none of those older stories are from people who spoke English, which means they simply aren’t important. That’s why today we’ll be looking at what is often considered the original urban legend: spring-heeled jack.

The First Sightings

In the early 1800s, ghosts and demons frequently stalked the streets of London. Not really, but there were lots of reports of such things. One of the most famous of these was the Hammersmith Ghost from 1803 and 1804. That tale ended with a man being murdered because someone thought he was a ghost, and it set a really important legal precedent. The pertinent thing is that these sorts of sighting were all too common, and they tended to grab the attention of the public.

Jack made his first appearance in October of 1837. A poor servant girl named Mary Stevens was walking back to her place of work after having visited her parents. Suddenly, a strange creature leapt out of an alley and grabbed her. The monster began to kiss her face as its sharp, metallic claws tore her clothes and caressed her skin.

Mary screamed in panic, which drew the attention of nearby residents and caused the attacker to flee. Those that had come to help the screaming woman immediately searched for her assailant, but no trace of him could be found.

The next day, another attack took place in the same section of London. This time, the attacker jumped in front of a carriage, spooking the horses and causing the driver to lose control and crash, injuring himself pretty severely. There were several witnesses to the event, and they claimed that the man escaped by effortlessly jumping over a nine foot high wall in a single bound, as if he had springs in his heels. This earned him the name Spring-Heeled Jack.

These attacks continued in the coming months, and the stories became more elaborate. The reports of his attire differed, with early reports claiming he took the form of a white bull, and then later a white bear before his more humanoid and devilish appearance. However, all of the reports shared a few things in common.

Jack prowled the streets at night, and almost exclusively attacked unaccompanied women. He wore either a skullcap or a helmet, a cloak, and he tore at women’s clothing with his metal claws. The more sensible eyewitnesses stated that he was wearing gloves with metal claws rather than the claws being a part of Jack’s natural physiology. Then, of course, there was his supernatural ability to jump extreme heights.

He also reeked of sulfur, like a demon that had crawled up to London directly from the pits of Hell. Oh yeah, and he could breathe fire. Specifically, blue fire.

Despite these encounters with Jack taking place for months, nothing happened. The press never reported on it and it seemed that police couldn’t be bothered. That’s assuming that the police were even aware of the numerous attacks taking place, as crime often went unreported in Victorian England.

You see, Victorian England had a very strict class system. Even though reported crime rates were extremely high, crime was still underreported because the lower class didn’t trust the police enough to report most crime. This lack of trust came from the fact that crimes against poor people weren’t considered terribly important and were rarely properly investigated.

Some servant girl claiming to the police that she had been assaulted by a fire-breathing demon obviously wouldn’t have been seen as evidence of a crime, it would be evidence of female hysteria. The stories were circulated around town, but it wasn’t worth trying to file an official report with the police and being written off as hysterical unless the girl in question happened to have a crush on a really cute doctor; the treatment for female hysteria was a physician induced orgasm. Fun fact: Victorian doctors had access to electric vibrators to treat hysteria before most homes had electricity, because scientists know their priorities.

The Terror of London

It wasn’t until January the following year that the press finally took notice of the fear that Spring-Heeled Jack was instilling in the citizenry. At a public session held at the Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, Jack received his first official recognition.

Cowan revealed that, a few days before the meeting, he had received an anonymous letter from someone who signed only as “a resident of Peckham”. Since we don’t know who the letter was from, we don’t know whether or not the author was privy to any inside information regarding the true nature of Jack, assuming it was not actually a demon. Which it wasn’t, because this was taking place in reality. The most pertinent part of the letter read:

It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises—a ghost, a bear, and a devil…The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover, but to become burdens to their families.

The writer went on to state that, as this had been going on for months, the press was clearly aware of Jack’s existence but was choosing not to report on it. They further implied that the papers were being pressed into silence since whoever was responsible for the attacks was a member of the upper class.

Though Cowan was skeptical, the audience confirmed that these attacks had been taking place. It may have been common knowledge to the peasants, but the upper class had been spared the torments of Jack. This open session took place on January 9, and the story of the letter and Spring-Heeled Jack was already being reported by The Times that night with the other papers following suit the next day.

On the day that followed, Lord Mayor Cowan attended another meeting in which he revealed a pile of letters from all across London. The letters all described what were referred to at the time as being similar “wicked pranks”, because apparently jumping out of the shadows with knives on your fingers and making women believe that they’re about to be sexually assaulted or murdered is just a prank, bro. Hilarious.

Given the quantity of letters that had poured in and the attestations of those at the meetings, Cowan was torn. On the one hand, he felt that the stories were clearly being exaggerated because he knew it was impossible for a literal ghost or devil to be terrorizing London. On the other hand, there was definitely somebody out there scaring these people, possibly while wearing a bear’s skin. He finally ordered the police to find the person responsible for these attacks, something they should have been doing for months already.

It wasn’t until after the police became involved that two of the most detailed reports about Jack came out. One took place on February 19, and the attack was notable for two main reasons. The first is that the victim, 18 year old Jane Alsop, was a member of the upper class, which meant that suddenly people had to actually care about what was happening. The other thing that made this attack so different is that Jane wasn’t attacked while walking the street, she was in her home.

At around 8:45 pm, Jane went to answer the door as someone was fervently ringing the doorbell. When she opened the door she saw a man that she thought was dressed like a police officer. “For heaven sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-Heeled Jack here in the lane!” he yelled at her. When Jane retrieved the candle for him, he snatched it from her and threw his cloak to the ground, revealing the monster it had been concealing.

Jack spewed blue and white flames from his mouth before snatching at her with his metal claws, his eyes glowing red like fireballs. He sliced her gown almost clean off and tore off chunks of her hair as she turned around to flee back towards the house, but he caught up to her, the sharp metal on his fingers tearing at her neck and arms. Jane let out a scream and her sister came to the door, causing Jack to flee. Seriously, dude, great “prank”.

Finally, it was time for the police to take things seriously. When investigators came to question Jane, she gave a full description of what happened and Jack’s appearance. In addition to his more supernatural characteristics, she also said he was wearing a helmet and a white oilskin coat, a type of waterproof coat typically worn by sailors. Jane’s father also believed that there were multiple men involved, as the attacker had not returned to retrieve his cloak.

Unless someone else grabbed the cloak in the middle of the attack, I don’t really follow that logic. If he knew that Jack didn’t return for his cloak, then either he should have seen who did return for it or it should have still been there. Since neither of those things were the case, and no description was given of the person who did pick up the cloak, then I’m not sure how he would know that Jack hadn’t retrieved it himself.

Regardless, the police came to couple conclusions. They concluded that Jane really had been attacked, a pretty obvious deduction since she had multiple injuries, a torn dress, and was missing some of her hair. Their other conclusion was that the shock of the situation caused her to misremember the details. He didn’t breathe fire or have red eyes, and he wasn’t wearing an oilskin coat or a helmet.

They believed it was just a white shooting coat and a regular hat, and that Jane’s assailant was not Spring-Heeled Jack but instead was some rando having a “drunken frolic”.

If you’re wondering how they explained all the cuts on her body from Jack’s bladed fingertips, so am I. I’m also wondering how or why some drunken idiot would cleverly lure a girl from her home the way he had and immediately attack her. Then again, the attacks had been referred to as pranks, so maybe this sort of shit happened all the time back then.

Further investigations were conducted by Detective James Lea, who some accounts claim was the best detective in all of London at the time. Indeed, it wasn’t long before he made an arrest and took a suspect to trial. The suspect was one Thomas Millbank, a local carpenter who drunkenly boasted in a pub about being Spring-Heeled Jack. At trial he denied having attacked Jane and having made those claims, but he also admitted that he was black out drunk so he also might have and just didn’t remember.

However, Jane and her sister were hearing none of it. They insisted that the man that had attacked Jane was not drunk, or at the very least not as drunk as this guy had been. Jane was also adamant that her attacker had breathed fire, a talent that Thomas rather shockingly admitted that he wasn’t able to perform. Because of his inability to spew flames, Thomas was found not guilty.

The next major attack happened on February 28th. It was nine days after the attack on Jane, and day one of Millbank’s trial. Though the papers didn’t report Jane’s attack or the trial until March 2nd, there was a large crowd there and it’s possible that the real Jack was either in attendance or aware of the trial. He could have chosen that day for another attack as a means of taunting the police, although the increased police presence after the Lord Mayor ordered they investigate the crimes hadn’t slowed Jack down anyway, so he also could have just been an asshole.

Lucy Scales was the 18 year old daughter of a butcher. She and her sister had been at their brother’s house that evening and had just left to walk back home. As they cut through an alley, they saw a figure standing and holding a lantern. Lucy believed that the person was a woman, because they appeared to be wearing a bonnet. She approached the cloaked figure who spit fire in her face, knocking her to the ground and causing her to have a violent seizure that reportedly lasted for hours.

Lucy’s sister was blinded temporarily by the light from the flames, but she covered her eyes and ran to help her sister. By the time she reached her sister, the man had fled. They were close enough to their brother’s house for him to have heard their screams, and he rushed to the alleyway. Together, Lucy’s siblings carried her back home.

Unlike Jane, Lucy wasn’t from an upper class family so the newspapers couldn’t give two shits about what happened to her. But Detectives James cared. At the very least, he cared enough about helping the rich girl to interview these two plebs about what they had witnessed.

Both girls had similar stories. They described the man as being tall, thin, and having a “gentlemanly appearance”. He was carrying a lantern similar to the type carried by police, and they were absolutely certain that he had spit blue flames at them. The authorities were determined to find out the truth about this fire-breathing demon, and one answer would come from a rather unlikely place.

A Media Sensation

Though the papers did little to report on the attacks of Spring-Heeled Jack in the beginning, others were far more interested in publishing his escapades. In January of 1838, just months after the attacks had begun, three pamphlets were publishing that purported to be the true story of Jack. These stories are believed to actually have been a combination of fact and fiction, but we can’t say for sure.

The last known existing copies were being held at the British Library, but they were destroyed in German bombings during World War II as part of a global conspiracy to cover up the truth about Jack. Or because Nazis were assholes that liked destroying books, either way.

But these were only the first of many, many works that would be written about Jack. In 1840, while Jack was still active, a production of the play Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror of London began running. Which is pretty fucking weird, if we’re being honest. That would be like going to the movies in the mid 1970s to watch a film about the killer clown that had already raped and murdered dozens of people, and was still going. But I digress.

In addition to the play, Jack became of a staple of the penny dreadful. For those who don’t know, penny dreadfuls, so named because they cost one penny per issue, were publications like the old pulps that were popular through the 1950s. And since that’s probably equally unhelpful because most of you listening are too young to know what pulps are, it’s creepypasta. Penny dreadfuls were magazines full of creepypasta, except not nearly as shit because they weren’t written by edgy 12 year olds.

We’ll talk more about the penny dreadfuls in a bit, but first we need to go back to the theatre. Investigators interviewed the employees there, but it was the owner of the Pavilion Theatre, Mr. Farrell, that gave them a big lead. He explained to the police that by dropping certain strong acids onto a sponge that had been soaked in spirits of wine, it could produce flames similar to those that had been described.

Depending on the type of acid that was used, a different colour flame would appear. Oh, and “spirits of wine” is the old-timey British way to say grain alcohol.

This was a pretty big deal, but it lacked a certain amount of practicality. Dropping acid onto a sponge is hardly the same as breathing fire, though it was a starting point. Detective James went to London Hospital where he saw a similar but more practical experiment that could recreate the fire-breathing effect. By blowing into a tube containing three ingredients, the ingredients would ignite and create the exact effect they were looking for.

Once again the first ingredient was spirits of wine. That’s 95% pure ethanol, so this would be the accelerant. The second ingredient was simply reported as “another ingredient”, possibly because the police didn’t want to actually give people instructions on how to breathe fire at one another. This second ingredient would have had to be the starter, almost certainly some sort of acid.

Finally was the ingredient that I first mentioned about 20 minutes ago. It was that scent of hellfire and brimstone that followed Jack around: the third ingredient was sulfur, a chemical element that burns bright blue. Through the power of science, the police were finally able to prove that Jack really could be spitting blue flames at his victims without the need for any sort of supernatural abilities. If he was blowing these ingredients out through a tube, it would also explain why he was always seems to be described as spitting fire rather than breathing fire.

There was just one problem: this wasn’t actually a lead. None of these ingredients were expensive or hard to come by. This discovery showed that the witnesses could be telling the truth without requiring Jack to be anything other than human, but that’s it. All they knew was that Jack was a human male rather than a ghost or devil, which was the assumption they had very rightly already been working on.

Things were only further clouded by the fact that there were innumerable copycats popping up. Some of the copycats were caught, but there was never any suspicion that they were the authentic Spring-Heeled Jack. A few arrests were made, like the one we mentioned earlier, but none of it amounted to anything. Nobody would ever be caught and identified as Jack, but there would be many theories.

We’ll get to the theories shortly, but first let’s take a look at how the rest of this 100 year long saga played out. Don’t worry, Simon, the other 100 years is very abridged, but if you need to pause to go get another coffee or Coke Zero I’ll understand.

Jack’s Legacy

In the years that immediately followed the initial attacks, Jack’s fame spread like wildfire across England. However, while incidents involved Spring-Heeled Jack became more widespread, extending well beyond the confines of London, they also became less numerous. By the end of the 1840s, the reports had largely died down, though they did not go away.

The most notable of the later reports of Jack came in 1877 from soldiers in Aldershot Garrison where Jack allegedly enjoyed taunting the soldiers. According to the official story, a soldier was on sentry duty one night when he saw a figure approaching the camp from the darkness. The soldier demanded that the intruder identify himself, but the man remained silent. He then walked right up to the soldier and slapped him across the face several times.

Another soldier opened fire, but the bullets had no effect as the man revealed himself to be Spring-Heeled Jack by vanishing into the darkness “with astonishing bounds”. It’s completely possible that the bullets had no effect because they were blanks, warning shots not aimed at the target, or because the soldier simply missed. It’s also completely possible that none of this happened at all and some bored teenagers that were conscripted into the military decided to make up a ghost story.

One of the big contributing factors to the decrease in reported Jack sightings is that people weren’t nearly as scared of him anymore. In the very beginning, before we had detailed accounts of his attacks, it was just a man dressed as a bull or a bear. Then, he transformed into a flame spitting devil with glowing red eyes and a nine foot vertical leap. From there, the stories only became more embellished. The more outlandish the tales of Jack became, the less he was able to instill fear.

But Jack had been a big moneymaker for the penny dreadfuls, and they weren’t ready to give up that bag quite yet. Since the decrease in attacks and increase in stories that were obviously bullshit meant that the people no longer feared him, it was time for writers to retool the character. Instead of terrorizing women just for laughs, what if he was a more heroic, vigilante type character who terrorized criminals?

Instead of a supernatural demon, the stories transformed Jack into a wealthy nobleman who used his considerable resources and inventive skills to leap from rooftop to rooftop, hunting criminals at night with a wide array of gadgets. If that doesn’t sound at all familiar, I should also point out that Jack’s cloak looked like bat wings in the illustrations. He was no longer the devilish terror of London, he was fucking Batman. The fact that Batman was clearly heavily influenced by Jack helps explain why, in the early days, Batman carried a gun and didn’t really think twice about killing people.

The last alleged sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack in England came in 1904, a mere 67 years after it had all begun. But that wasn’t quite the end for old Jack. He would make one final resurgence during World War II in German occupied Prague. There he was known as Pérák, the Spring Man of Prague.

Pérák went through the same transition from villain to hero, though he did it in the span of only a few years with cartoons featuring him fighting the SS first appearing just after the war ended. The character seems to have remained at least somewhat popular, as there has been a Pérák animated short as recently as 2016.

But aside from his future moves to Prague and Gotham City, this was the end for Jack. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, there wasn’t any evidence to go on in apprehending the criminal. All police had to go on was some shaky eyewitness testimony and an urban legend. So now it is time to look at the theories and see if, with the gift of hindsight, we can determine the most likely culprit for the identity of Spring-Heeled Jack.

Theories

Given the allegedly supernatural feats performed by Jack, obviously there were going to be some supernatural theories. Some people believed that he was an alien. Others that he was an occult sorcerer. And of course, many people believed that he was a genuine demon. There were variations on the origins of such a demon, with different theories believing he was intentionally summoned to Earth through the use of black magic, accidentally summoned, or that he was simply able to come to Earth of his own accord.

These are all obviously bullshit because none of that stuff is real. I mean aliens are probably real, but they haven’t ever been to Earth, and if one did come I’d like to think it would have more important things to do than scare random people in London. Then again, if I’ve learned anything from Doctor Who it’s that aliens almost exclusively visit London so maybe I’m way off base here.

The next two theories are that it was either a hoax or a case of mass hysteria. In this case, by “hoax” I mean that the events were all lied about and never took place, not just the more obvious hoax of a man pretending to be a demon. The argument in favour of mass hysteria is that there were various rumours and stories of different bogeymen plaguing England. These stories became continuously exaggerated until they evolved into the legend that we talked about today, with none of it being any more real than Slender Man.

Personally, I don’t really buy this. The thing with most urban legends and bogeyman stories is that they all happened to a friend of a friend that nobody can quite pin down. But Jack had confirmed victims with genuine, visible injuries. The police were able to determine a scientifically plausible explanation for his ability to spit blue flames, and the leaping over walls in a single bound could simply be the result of shitty or exaggerated eyewitness testimony.

It’s absolutely possible that the walls Jack leapt over were not anywhere close to nine feet and people just exaggerated. Alternatively, he may have just scaled the walls with such speed that to an already disoriented and agitated victim it seemed like a single jump, especially since street lights didn’t yet exist so he would have been performing these feats in relative darkness. It’s reasonable that he may have just been an early practitioner of parkour who also had more time and sulfur on his hands than he knew what to do with.

Nothing Jack did is outside the bounds of reality, and it requires only very minor exaggerations or confusion from the witnesses with regards to his jumping capabilities. Between this and the known victims, I can’t simply write it off as mass hysteria. Those girls were clearly attacked by someone, and it’s hard for me to believe their minds would invent such fantastical stories involving the local bogeyman if it was just an assault by your run of the mill shitbag.

But speaking of the victims, there’s one other I didn’t mention yet. In between the attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, there was one very brief encounter between Jack and a servant boy. Once again Jack had come knocking on the door, and when the servant answered Jack whipped back his cloak to reveal his demonic appearance. The boy screamed, and Jack ran away.

It would have been a minor and largely insignificant incident were it not for one detail that the boy remembered. Before the cloak was pulled back, the boy saw that it had an embroidered coat of arms with the letter W on it. That W obviously stood for Henry de la Poer Beresford, better known as the 3rd Marquis of Waterford. But he was even better known as the Mad Marquis, because the dude was a giant dick.

The Marquis was in his 20s when Jack first landed on the scene, which would have made him young and stupid enough to think it was funny. He was frequently getting into trouble and making the news for his drunken fighting, vandalism, and overturning fruit stands, and it was also said that he both hated women and would do anything to win a bet. This lines up with the letter received by Lord Mayor Cowan that claimed Jack was a nobleman who was terrorizing women on a wager.

To give a little more insight into exactly what sort of man the Marquis was, we need to look at the events of April 6, 1837. This was just a few months before the attacks by Spring-Heeled Jack began, and that night is often regarded as the origins of the phrase “paint the town red”.

The Marquis and his hunting buddies had been drinking that night and were completely plastered. When they arrived at the tollgate on their return trip home, the tollkeeper demanded payment before he would open the gate, lest these drunken lunatics try to run past without paying.

For a man of such privilege, the toll would have been a mere pittance, a meager sum that he would never have missed. But why simply pay the toll when he and his inebriated friends could commit several crimes instead? Some sort of repairs or renovations were underway at the gate, and there were ladders, brushes, and cans of red paint laying around. The Marquis and his friends grabbed the brushes and paint and attacked the tollkeeper.

A police officer tried to intervene, but both he and the tollkeeper were beaten up, painted red, and thrown into the tollhouse. They nailed the door shut before also painting that red, then went on to town. The gang strolled through the streets, banging on doors and painting them red. They pulled down the sign from a local inn and tossed it into the canal, then they lifted up one of the men to paint a sign for another inn that was hung rather high.

Occasionally a lone police officer would come across the men, but each time the officer was assaulted and painted red.

Eventually, the police decided to show up as a group rather than one at a time, and they were able to disperse the rowdy aristocrats, hauling one of them off to jail. Was that the end of it, you ask? Fuck no, because the Marquis was still drunk. He and his friends went to the prison, breaking multiple locks and beating up the guards. They threatened to murder the guards if they didn’t produce the key to release their friend.

Once he sobered up the next day, the Marquis paid for all the damages they had caused. He and his friends were still brought to trial on charges of riot, but they were found not guilty because they were rich so of course they were. They did have to pay a fine of a little over $10,000 in today’s money, but that would have been nothing to them.

So that’s the sort of man we’re dealing with here. Add in some misogyny and a refusal to lose a bet no matter what, and it seems pretty likely that the Marquis could have been the original Spring-Heeled Jack. It’s also worth noting that he was living in the area of the attacks from 1837-1842, which corresponds with the dates when the attacks began and were most common. In 1842 he got married, cleaned up his act, and moved to Ireland which coincidentally coincided with the attacks slowing down.

He’s a pretty good suspect, but then again it could definitely still be aliens.

Wrap Up

Based on the contemporary information that is available, it seems very likely that the Marquis of Waterford was the original Spring-Heeled Jack. He is exactly the sort of asshole that would have gone around scaring women for laughs, especially as part of a bet, and his residency in the area lines up with the period when Jack was most active. If this was the monster’s true identity, there were of course copycats that kept the legend alive for decades afterwards.

However, this all comes with a couple major caveats. First, the contemporary reports that are available are really limited, not counting the extremely fictitious penny dreadfuls. The original 1838 pamphlets detailing Jack’s exploits have been lost to time, and most of the specific accounts were written after the fact. The attacks on Jane and Lucy were investigated by the police and reported in the papers when they happened, but everything else came later.

Since the victims were generally poor, which in Victorian England barely even made them people, it wasn’t until Jack received official recognition that anyone was willing to take it seriously. This means there could be other evidence pointing in one direction or another that was never properly recorded.

The other caveat is that the Marquis was considered a prime suspect at the time, despite authorities obviously not taking action against a member of the upper class. It is said that he was such a legendary douchebag that his name instilled as much fear in people as that of Spring-Heeled Jack himself.

As this was already a popular theory while it was happening, it’s possible that the contemporary accounts that we have access to seem to incriminate the Marquis because that was the narrative that people were trying to weave. On the other hand, it was also a popular theory that Jack was a literal demon, but we don’t have any evidence pointing in that direction so maybe I’m just over thinking this.

Of course, I do have one other possible theory, which is a combination of the natural and supernatural. It is reported that the Marquis died in 1859, but what if that never actually happened? What if the Marquis not only didn’t die in the 1850s, but he is still alive today as an immortal demon? We know that Spring-Heeled Jack made the move from England to Prague where he is still active today, so can we really call it a coincidence that “I, Henry de la Poer Beresford, Marquis of Waterford” is an anagram of “Quaffed Beard Simon Whistler, Ye Errorproof Reader?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Spring-Heeled Jack?

Spring-Heeled Jack is often considered the original urban legend from London in the 1800s. He was reported to prowl the streets at night, attacking unaccompanied women, and was described as having the ability to jump extreme heights and breathe blue fire.

When and where did Spring-Heeled Jack first appear?

Spring-Heeled Jack made his first appearance in October of 1837 in London.

What were some of the early descriptions of Spring-Heeled Jack?

Early reports described Jack as taking the form of a white bull or a white bear before his more humanoid and devilish appearance. He was said to wear a skullcap or helmet, a cloak, and had metal claws that tore at women’s clothing.

Why did the police not take the initial reports of Spring-Heeled Jack seriously?

The police did not take the initial reports seriously because crime was underreported in Victorian England, especially crimes against the lower class. The stories were circulated around town but were not seen as evidence of a crime.

What was the significance of the letter received by Lord Mayor Cowan?

The letter received by Lord Mayor Cowan was significant because it was the first official recognition of Spring-Heeled Jack. It claimed that Jack was a nobleman who was terrorizing women on a wager, and it implied that the press was being silenced because the attacker was a member of the upper class.

What was the most detailed report of an attack by Spring-Heeled Jack?

One of the most detailed reports was the attack on Jane Alsop in February 1838. Jane was attacked in her home by a man dressed like a police officer who revealed himself to be Spring-Heeled Jack, breathing blue and white flames and tearing at her with his metal claws.

What was the police’s conclusion about the attack on Jane Alsop?

The police concluded that Jane had been attacked but believed that the shock of the situation caused her to misremember the details. They thought the attacker was just a drunken man having a ‘frolic’ and not the supernatural Spring-Heeled Jack.

What was the last alleged sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack in England?

The last alleged sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack in England came in 1904.

What are some of the theories about the identity of Spring-Heeled Jack?

Some theories suggest that Spring-Heeled Jack was an alien, an occult sorcerer, or a genuine demon. Other theories propose that it was a hoax or a case of mass hysteria. One prominent theory is that he was Henry de la Poer Beresford, the 3rd Marquis of Waterford, known as the Mad Marquis.

Why is the Marquis of Waterford considered a likely suspect for Spring-Heeled Jack?

The Marquis of Waterford is considered a likely suspect because he was known for his drunken behavior, misogyny, and willingness to do anything to win a bet. His residency in the area of the attacks corresponds with the period when Jack was most active, and he was living there from 1837 to 1842.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Unmasking the Chilling Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack
• Hero image source by Sadie-Michaela Harris / openverse, cc0.