Post by Joanna on Dec 4, 2013 2:14:09 GMT -5
The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack
It started with a ring at a gate, and ended with a demonic laugh.
The gate was the front gate of a lonely cottage that stood just outside the little village of Old Ford, to the east of London, and the bell on it jangled violently at about a quarter to nine on the evening of 20 February, 1838.
Inside the cottage, 18-year-old Jane Alsop looked uncertainly at her parents and her sisters. Who could be calling at such a time? It was already dark and chill outside, and there were few passers-by in such an isolated spot. But the bell rang again, longer this time and louder, so Jane opened the front door and walked the short distance to the gate.
Her eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark, but dimly she made out the figure of a man standing in the lane. Although enveloped in a cloak, he appeared angular, and some sort of headgear augmented his considerable height. Approaching him, Jane asked what was the matter. ‘I am a policeman,’ the man snapped back. ‘For God’s sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack here in the lane.’
Jane hurried back to the cottage to fetch a candle. Like every other resident of Old Ford – and all the other villages on the outskirts of London – she had heard stories about this mysterious demon, who had first been seen in the autumn of the previous year. Jack was said to appear as either a ghost clad in armour, or as a baboon, a bear or a devil, and his hideous appearance and preternaturally agile leaps were rumoured to have frightened quite a number of his female victims into fits, or worse.
Quickly, Jane ran back to the house, returning with a candle, which she handed to the waiting figure. His reaction was not what she expected. Far from thanking her and making off to secure one of the most wanted criminals in England, the man leaned back, threw down his cloak, and, holding the lighted candle to his chest, bathed his face in its eerie glow.
Jane could not help but scream. The face thus revealed was hideously ugly; its eyes blazed red as the coals of hell and its pinched, tight features were topped by a peculiar sort of helmet; the body, meanwhile, was encased in a tightly-fitting, shining suit, and a strange object, resembling a lamp, was strapped to the chest. There could be no doubt that, far from lending help to a policeman, Jane had been ensnared by Spring-heeled Jack himself.
She had no time to register more than these initial impressions before Jack attacked. Leaping forward, he vomited balls of blue and white fire into her face and seized her by her dress and neck, pinning her head under one arm. With mounting terror, she realised that, in place of fingers, he had sharp, long talons, which he was using to tear at her clothes and her face.
Shrieking with fear, Jane somehow wrenched herself free and ran towards her front door. Jack came after her, catching her on the doorstep, pinning her again, scratching her arms and yanking out clumps of her hair. As he did so, Jane’s younger sister Mary appeared at the door, but she was too much alarmed at Spring-heeled Jack’s supernatural appearance to render any assistance, and it was left to an older sister, Mrs Sarah Harrison, to come to Jane’s aid. Somehow the unfortunate girl was dragged free of Jack’s deadly embrace and the front door slammed in the assailant’s face. Even then, Jack did not give up; he banged heavily at the door until the rest of the Alsop family appeared at an upstairs window and called loudly for the police. Then, perhaps persuaded that he could do more mischief on this night at least, he vanished back into the darkness from which he had come.
The sensation that this, Jack’s latest and most daring exploit, caused when it was reported in the press was in no way lessened by two other appearances that occurred in the same month – attacks that suggested no-one in the eastern outskirts of London was safe from Spring-heeled Jack. Two days before his visit to the Alsop family at Old Ford, Jack lurked in the shadows of Green-dragon-alley, a narrow, twisting passage in the Limehouse area of London’s docklands, and waylaid 18-year-old Lucy Scales and her sister as they returned home from a visit to their brother, one of the many butchers of the district. As Lucy came up to the thin, cloaked stranger standing in the alley, he turned and spurted a stream of blue flames into her face. Temporarily blinded and terrified, the girl fell to the ground in hysterics. As Jack made off, her sister observed that he wore some sort of light strapped to his chest.
A few days later, and half a mile to the north, Jack reappeared, rapping on the door of a house in Turner Street and asking to speak to the owner, a Mr Ashworth. Before the servant boy who answered the door could answer, the leaping terror threw back his cloak to reveal the sinister features and bizarre costume that had been terrifying London. The frightened boy screamed so loud that Jack again made off ahead of any possible pursuit – but not before the servant lad had noticed one potentially vital clue: the hem of monster’s cloak bore an embroidered letter ‘W’.
Spring-heeled Jack was more than just an East End bogey. In the autumn months of 1837 he had appeared a score of times in the villages and hamlets to the south and west of London, and attacked a servant girl named Polly Adams on Shooter’s Hill, breathing fire into her face and tearing her clothes from her body. She was certain that the monster who had assaulted her was actually a gentleman who had attempted to seduce her earlier that day. In the aftermath of the ‘flap’ of spring 1838 Jack broadened his activities still further. He preyed on travelers throughout the Home Counties, hovering in the unlit lanes until he found an unwary passer-by, then leaping from his hiding place to scare his victims half out of their wits before making good his escape with enormous bounds.
He roamed throughout southern England between 1840 and 1870, appearing as far north as Warwickshire and as far south as Devon, scaring the townsfolk of Yarmouth in the eastern counties and the nursemaids of Herefordshire far to the west. His favoured targets were women, but on occasion he would take on coachmen, postillions, blacksmiths and anyone else foolish enough to be abroad after dark. The awful, fiery breath was seldom seen, but witnesses often remarked on Jack’s blazing eyes and always on the inhuman leaps he made, clearing hedges and gates, even mail coaches, in a single bound.
This period of Jack’s career is poorly documented, perhaps because in avoiding the metropolis he also eluded the attentions of its newspapermen. But Spring-heeled Jack did return to London at least once during this these years. In November 1845 he suddenly appeared in the rotting tenements of Jacob’s Island, hopping up to a young prostitute named Maria Davis as she stood on one of the rickety wooden bridges that criss-crossed the open sewers of the slum. Before the terrified girl had the chance to escape, Jack seized her in his taloned hands and breathed his fire into her grimy face. Then the mysterious attacker lifted his victim above his head and hurled her into the muddy waters. Maria struggled, briefly and hopelessly, before succumbing to the sewer’s stinking embrace. Spring-heeled Jack was now a murderer.
It was more than 30 years before the agile killer did anything as daring. He was at large again in Peckham around 1872. Then, in the spring of 1877, he began to haunt a place so dangerous his very presence there seemed to confirm he was no ordinary man – if indeed he was a man at all.
The barracks at Aldershot, Surrey housed the headquarters of the British army. Perhaps 10,000 troops were billeted there at any given time, guarded night and day by armed sentries. And it was the sentries that Jack chose to torment when he came to camp. On several occasions he appeared at lonely sentry boxes in outlying parts of the camp, clambering onto sentry boxes and passing an ice-cold hand over the faces of the startled soldiers within, then making off across the heath with his usual agility. At least twice the sentries recovered their composure in time to loose a round in his direction, but if any of the balls struck home, the phantom attacker showed no sign he had been hurt. And in the autumn he returned, repeating his antics of the spring.
If the combined resources of half the soldiers of the Empire could not catch Jack, what chance had the citizens of Lincoln when confronted by the bounding bogeyman? A few months after his last appearance at Aldershot, the elusive figure was seen at Newport, where he appeared clad in a bizarre sheepskin costume, leaping 20 feet or more as he sprang along the rooftops and over an ancient Roman monument called Newport Arch. At least two people took pot-shots at him, but the hide he wore seemed impervious to bullets. After taunting the townsfolk for a few moments more, the agile villain made his escape once again.
Little more was heard of Spring-heeled Jack for a further three decades. It was not until 1904, when his legend had been all but forgotten, that he returned for what would prove to be his last appearance. This time he turned up in Liverpool – farther north than he had ever ventured before – where for several successive nights he terrified the people of William Henry Street by bounding up onto their roofs and then down into the street again. Two young girls and two women, out walking in the road, were flung to the ground by the leaping terror. At last, one day at the end of September, Jack appeared in William Henry Street in broad daylight, clad as usual in a mask, black cloak and long, tight boots, springing up one side of the road and down the other before hopping a full 25 feet onto the roof tops and making off. As he did so, he turned one last time and laughed a mocking, sinister laugh before vanishing ... this time forever.
Sources: MikeDash and Fortean Times.
