In the autumn of 1837, a young woman named Mary Stevens was walking through Clapham Common on her way to work in Lavender Hill when a strange, almost diabolical creature sprang at her from an alley. Stevens later said the thing’s touch was cold as stone, and its hands were claws that tore at her flesh. When she screamed, the creature fled. It was the first recorded attack of a figure that would soon terrify London under the name Spring-heeled Jack.
By November of that year, more sightings followed. Witnesses described a being that appeared suddenly, leaping enormous distances in front of pedestrians and moving carriages. One account claimed the attacker jumped over a nine-foot wall while cackling madly. Drivers reported having to wrench their horses to a halt as the figure materialized and vanished within seconds.
Fear spread quickly through the capital. In early January 1838, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, published a letter in The Times attempting to calm the public. He assured residents that the sightings were the work of a prankster, a man who had been parading through villages near London in three disguises: a ghost, a bear, and a devil. The mayor suggested the hoax had been organized by a member of the aristocracy, who alone had the money to fund such an elaborate trick.
The attacks continued. On the night of February 19, 1838, eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop answered the door of her father’s house in Old Ford. She found a man pretending to be a police officer, wrapped in a large cloak. When she brought a candle to see him, he spat blue and white flame from his mouth, then tried to tear at her neck and arms with clawed hands.
After a terrifying struggle, he fled across the fields. A police investigation found nothing conclusive. A neighbor reported seeing a young man in a cloak near the scene, and a local carpenter named Millbank was questioned, but he claimed he had been too drunk to remember where he was. He had apparently boasted in pubs that he was Spring-heeled Jack, but police concluded he was merely a loud drunkard.
Some suspected Alsop’s story itself, since she was the only victim who claimed Jack had spoken to her before attacking. Dozens of similar attacks were reported in the following weeks. On the last day of February, Lucy Scales, also eighteen, was attacked in a narrow alley in Limehouse. She said Jack breathed blue flame in her face, leaving her hysterical.
Police offered a reward for information, but by then the first sightings had inspired copycats. It became impossible to distinguish genuine encounters from hoaxes and mass hysteria. Some newspapers worsened the panic by publishing sensational stories of people dying of fright after meeting Jack in the streets. The figure’s supposed abilities had become fixed in the public mind.
He moved with incredible speed and could leap between ten and twenty feet. Some saw supernatural forces at work. Others argued the mysterious figure wore springs attached to his boots, which launched him into the air and allowed those extraordinary jumps. That explanation gave the phantom his lasting name: Spring-heeled Jack.
By late spring of 1838, Jack was the talk of London, appearing in penny dreadfuls and even on stage. But at the height of his fame, reports began to fade. By the end of the year, official accounts of attacks in the capital ceased. A few reported appearances came from other parts of England, where rural imitators had been inspired by the news.
By 1839, the hysteria had largely died down, and Jack became more a literary character than a living terror. During the 1840s, he gained a legendary reputation as a supernatural highwayman who preyed on lone travelers on the roads out of London. As late as 1847, police in Teignmouth investigated an assault on a woman there, speculating that Spring-heeled Jack had returned a decade after his first appearance. The specter reappeared again in the early 1870s with ghost sightings in Peckham and Sussex.
The last reported belief in Jack’s return came from Liverpool in 1904, more than sixty-five years after his first appearance. Historians and cultural commentators have offered many explanations. Some turned to the supernatural, claiming Jack was an alien, a half-human beast, or a demon summoned by a cultist. Others argued the earliest sightings, by witnesses like Mary Stevens, were hallucinations caused by drugs, drink, or mental distress, with later reports fueled by hysteria and imitation.
One theory that gained wide traction, first suggested in the Lord Mayor’s letter, was that Jack was a hoax orchestrated by a nobleman who had lost a bet. Many believed the culprit was Henry de la Poer Beresford, the third Marquess of Waterford, an Irish aristocrat in his mid-twenties known for public drunkenness and riots. In April 1837, he and his rowdy companions had arrived drunk in Melton Mowbray, attacked a tollbooth and a policeman, and covered them in red paint. It was easy to imagine such a man funding a performer who could breathe fire, wear a special costume, and use spring-loaded boots.
The theory was plausible but impossible to prove. Perhaps the simplest explanation is the most likely. Nineteenth-century England was saturated with Gothic horror and tales of the supernatural. Ghosts and monsters were regular features of cheap penny dreadfuls, and this was the age of Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying stories, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and later Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
A single strange, unexplained event in late 1837, amplified by a public ready to believe in the extraordinary, may have been enough to create the legend. As the medieval philosopher William of Ockham argued, the simplest explanation is usually correct. The stories of Spring-heeled Jack were likely grounded in one bizarre incident, with everything that followed shaped by fear, imagination, and the entertainment of a nervous age.
