The World of Lore

by Aaron Mahnke

  Sometimes he was covert about it. There are reports that he fitted a bouquet of flowers with a sharp object and would ask women if they’d like to smell the blossoms. Who could resist? Others say he attached small blades to his knees and then used them to stab women in the back of the legs. And as the stories spread, so too did the panic. They called him the London Monster, and within weeks the entire city was on alert.

  In the autumn of 1803, the people of London were obsessed with a new story. It seemed that a ghost had been seen in the Hammersmith area of the city. There were whispers that he was the victim of a suicide, doomed to haunt our world forever. And many people claimed to have seen him.

  After months of hysteria and rumor, a police officer actually witnessed the ghost while on patrol. Francis Smith pulled his gun, called for the fiend to stop, and fired. His shot was true, and the ghost fell limp to the ground. It fell because it was, after all, just a man. Thomas Millwood had been a plasterer by trade, and because of this, he wore all-white clothing. Officer Smith was tried for murder and found guilty.

  Few things can unite a city like fear. Hysteria spreads, in much the same way the plague moved across Europe in the seventeenth century. But that’s not the unusual part. What’s truly odd is the depths to which people will go to believe these fears. How easily they fall in with the public outcry and believe whatever it is they’re told.

  For as horrible as the London Monster and the Hammersmith Ghost stories sound, a new fear swept the city decades later. This fear permeated so deep, and spread so fast, that it left a mark still visible today. Fear, even when it’s built on lies, can spread like fire.

  But sometimes, on rare occasions, there’s a very good reason to be afraid.

  FROM THE SHADOWS

  On a cool September night in 1837, Polly Adams was on her way home from the Green Man, a public house in the Blackheath area of London. She was with friends, and they talked and laughed as they walked toward Shooter’s Hill. Nearly home, the group was startled when a figure seemed to jump out of the darkness of an alley.

  Before anyone could react, the figure grabbed at Polly. According to her later deposition with the police, the stranger was clad in a black cloak, but his eyes seemed to burn with light. Oddly, she remembered that the man smelled of sulfur, and then she added—as if it were a normal thing to notice about a midnight attacker—that he also spat blue fire from his mouth.

  Rather than help, Polly’s three companions ran quickly away into the night, afraid for their lives. And rightly so. The attacker ripped through Polly’s blouse with hands that seemed more like claws than anything else, but after tearing at the flesh of her stomach, the figure stopped. Pushing her to the ground, it turned and bounded away into the night.

  One month after Polly Adams was attacked while walking home from the Green Man, Mary Stevens was making her way back to work after a short visit with her parents in nearby Battersea. Mary worked as a servant in a home on Lavender Hill, just south of the Thames, and decided to cut through Clapham Common. Maybe not the smartest decision, no matter what century you live in.

  Yet Mary did just that, and set off on a quick walk through the dark trees and bushes toward her place of employment. Near the edge of the park, a figure jumped out of the shadows. The man grabbed her and pushed her to the ground, where he began to kiss her. Mary struggled, but the man’s grip was beyond tight.

  According to Mary, the stranger then ripped at her clothing with clawed hands that felt as “cold and clammy as those of a corpse.” Afraid for her life, she screamed, forcing the attacker to release her and flee the scene. The screams brought several nearby residents to her aid, and a search was organized to locate the stranger, but no trace of him could be found.

  The following evening, in the very same neighborhood where Mary Stevens lived, another dark figure was spotted. This time, rather than an assault, a mysterious person stepped out into the path of an oncoming carriage. The coachman, surprised by the appearance of the dark figure, lost control of the carriage before crashing into a building. The coachman was severely injured, and the mysterious man cried out with a ringing, high-pitched laugh that chilled witnesses to the core.

  Then, as if his work were done, the man jumped over a nearby wall and escaped. The wall, mind you, was more than nine feet tall.

  Three months later, the Lord Mayor of London, a man named Sir John Cowan, spoke up at a public session at the Mansion House about a complaint he had received in the form of a letter. This letter was anonymous, but the writer claimed to be a resident of Peckham, close to Battersea and the 1837 attacks. The letter described how the attacks had all been a prank put on by an unnamed aristocrat as part of a dare. Researchers have speculated for over a century as to who the nobleman might have been, but no theories have ever panned out.

  Later, in January 1838, the mayor showed off a pile of letters he had received from people in and around London, all claiming to have witnessed, or been the victim of, attacks similar to what Polly Adams and Mary Stevens suffered.

  Though the claims can’t be proven, some letters reported that people actually died of fright, while others were permanently traumatized by their encounters with this mysterious figure. And many of the reports contained eerily similar pieces of information. This stranger was said to be able to leap over very tall fences and walls. He was always described as having red eyes and clawed hands. And he always got away.

  Like a fever, the hysteria spread throughout London and the surrounding countryside. It didn’t matter that the Lord Mayor was skeptical of the whole thing; people everywhere seemed to be catching glimpses of dark shapes leaping tall buildings and terrorizing their neighbors and servants.

  Like any movement or public experience, the people of London went looking for a name. What would they call the creature—human or not—who was the center of all these stories? By late winter of 1838, they found it, a name that would forever become part of Victorian folklore.

  They called him Spring-Heeled Jack.

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  To this point, sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack had consisted of secondhand accounts and attacks on women with little power to demand attention. But in the winter of 1838, all of that changed.

  On the night of February 28, Lucy and Margaret Scales set off from the home of their brother, who worked as a butcher on Narrow Street in the Limehouse district. History hasn’t remembered their destination; all we know is that at about eight-thirty that night, the two young women walked off into the shadows, naively confident of their safety.

  Minutes later, their brother the butcher heard screams off in the distance, in the direction of a street known as Green Dragon Alley. When he realized that the voice was that of his sister Margaret, he dashed off to find her. I like to imagine he still had on his bloody apron, and most likely picked up a meat cleaver before making the run.

  When he found his sisters, Margaret was on her knees in the dark alley, Lucy’s body cradled in her arms. The young woman wasn’t dead, but she was unconscious, and Margaret was hysterical. As their brother helped the two women home, Margaret told him the story of what had happened.

  They had stepped a few paces into the alley, when a dark figure stepped out of the shadows and approached them quickly. Lucy had been standing in front of her sister, just a few paces separating the two women. Because of this, it was Lucy who took the full brunt of the assault.

  The figure, Margaret said, was that of a man. She described him as very tall and thin, dressed in the manner of a gentleman, and wrapped in a large dark cloak. He held a lantern known then as a bullseye, the small round type typically carried by officers of the law. And maybe that was why the women let him approach without becoming apprehensive.

  That’s when things took a turn for the worse. According to Margaret’s report, which she later filed with the office of the police in Lambeth, the cloaked man stepped close to Lucy and spat blue flames at her face. The flames, she claimed, erupted from the man’s mouth, and th
e sight of them blinded and shocked Lucy, who collapsed on the spot.

  Margaret worried that she was next, but she had also been concerned for Lucy, who lay on the cobblestones, writhing in the throes of some kind of seizure. And then, as if his mission had been accomplished, the dark figure leapt over Margaret and onto the roof of a nearby house before vanishing into the London darkness.

  Sometime during the same week, the shadowy figure of Spring-Heeled Jack made another appearance. Jane Alsop was reading a book around nine o’clock at night. She lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in the East End of London, along with her father and two sisters. On the night in question, it was she who was closest to the front door, which is probably why she was the one who heard the shouting.

  From across the small yard, a voice cried out in the darkness. There was a gate there that allowed access to the property and served as a small measure of security. But the voice belonged to someone professing to be a police officer. An officer, in fact, who claimed to have captured none other than Spring-Heeled Jack.

  The man had called out for a light, and Jane—being a dutiful citizen—grabbed a lit candle and exited her home to deliver it to the officer. As she handed it to him, the man tossed off his cloak, exposing his true appearance by the light of the flickering flame. This was no police officer; what Jane saw took her breath away.

  The figure was clothed in what appeared to be a tight-fitting one-piece suit of white fabric, along with a metal helmet. According to Jane, the man’s eyes glowed red and were set within a face more hideous and frightening than any she had seen before. And then, without warning, the figure spat blue flames from his mouth.

  This time, though, Jack wasn’t content to stop there. With Jane partially blinded by the flash of bright flames, he reached out and grasped her with his arms. In the report that her family filed later that night at the same Lambeth police office where Lucy Scales had told her story, Jane recounted that the man, if that’s what he really was, tore into her dress with fingers that felt to her like metal claws. He ripped through the fabric and then cut her skin, tearing deep, painful gashes in her abdomen. Jane screamed, perhaps from the pain, or maybe from her primal fear. And then she ran.

  Her front door was just a few yards away and open, and so she bolted quickly for that sliver of light. She was mere steps from the doorway, a heartbeat from safety, when Jack caught up. His clawed hands grabbed at her neck and shoulder. Sharp, metallic fingers tore at Jane’s young flesh. Patches of hair were pulled free from her scalp. Blood was everywhere.

  Her family had heard her screams, though, and just as her attacker was slashing at her face, her father reached toward her from within the house. Two sets of arms, outstretched to touch the same target—one set to harm, the other to save.

  Thankfully, it was Jane’s father who won. Grabbing her by the arm, he pulled hard and brought her back inside, slamming the door shut behind her.

  NEAR AND FAR

  Many of the details surrounding Spring-Heeled Jack—details that were so out of the ordinary—seemed to be echoed in each new eyewitness account. The red eyes. The white bodysuit. The sharp claws. But something set Jane Alsop’s story apart from all the others.

  She was well-off. Not part of the elite, but high enough up the social ladder that her story caught the attention of the local newspapers as well as the police. And when upper-class people feel threatened, they take action.

  When word spread that Jack was hunting women throughout London, the police began to arrest suspects, although none was ever brought to trial. Groups of vigilantes banded together and patrolled the city streets at night, both to assist the police in protecting the people of London and with the hope of capturing the mysterious attacker.

  Upon reading about the attacks that had begun to plague the good people of London, one seventy-year-old retired military veteran actually dusted off his guns, pulled on his boots, and rode off in search of the monster responsible. Though he was never successful in capturing—or even setting eyes on—the mysterious Spring-Heeled Jack, the gesture did much to calm the nerves of the locals.

  How could it not? He was, after all, the Duke of Wellington, the man who had fought Napoleon and won.

  Needless to say, the stories began to spread. Several penny dreadfuls were written about the mysterious Jack, whose exploits were perfect for the cheap serialized fiction that the genre was built on. In theaters around London, several plays appeared that featured the subject. Even the Punch and Judy puppet shows across London found a way to incorporate this shadowy public menace. In shows that once had featured the Devil, performers changed his name to Spring-Heeled Jack.

  There were a handful of additional sightings over the years to come. But while some of them were in the southwestern area of London, where the original attacks had occurred, and Surrey county beyond that, others popped up in some more distant locations.

  One report, in Northamptonshire, described an encounter with a creature that was “the very image of the Devil himself, with horns and eyes of flame.” In Devon, an investigation was mounted to find the man assaulting women in the area, and the suspect’s description had some similarities to Spring-Heeled Jack.

  Lincolnshire, on the eastern coast of England, was the location of another documented sighting in the 1870s. One witness described a caped figure who was seen leaping over cottages in a small village. When the locals grabbed their guns and tried to shoot the figure, they claimed they could hear their bullets strike him, but the only result was a metallic ringing sound. Jack got away.

  One of the last encounters of note occurred in Aldershot, on the very edge of Surrey County. It was geographically closer to London than most of the 1870s sightings, and some researchers believe that this proximity to the original reports lend this story more validity.

  On a night in August 1877, Private John Reagan was standing guard in a small booth near a military munitions depot. While inside, he claimed to hear something metallic being scraped along the wood of the booth. He stepped outside, rifle in hand, and patrolled the area to find the source.

  When he was satisfied that nothing was there, he headed back to his station inside the booth. And that’s when something touched him. Looking up, he saw the figure of a tall man, wrapped in a cloak and wearing a metal helmet. Then the figure leapt into the air and landed behind him.

  Reagan pointed his weapon at the figure and called out for a name, but he claims the visitor, whoever it was, simply laughed. The soldier fired, to no effect, and the figure advanced. Then, without warning, blue flames erupted from his mouth.

  That’s when Reagan did what any good soldier would do under the circumstances: he ran for his life.

  Spring-Heeled Jack never left the public mind. But as the legend slowly settled into popular culture, reports of actual appearances became less and less frequent. And then, just as Jack had seemed to cross the threshold into mythic territory, he did what every eyewitness claimed he was gifted at: he disappeared.

  A LEAP OF FAITH

  There’s a lesson deep inside the story of Spring-Heeled Jack. Like all of the most powerful and devastating diseases of the last thousand years, ideas have a tendency to spread like fire. Today we use the term “viral,” and in many ways, that’s close to the truth. Fear, panic, and hysteria are all communicable diseases. And when a culture is infected, sometimes there’s no way to stop it.

  But unlike the plague or some new strain of the bird flu, it stands to reason that we could, at the very least, calm our fears and put out the fires of hysteria. So why is it so hard to do so? Spring-Heeled Jack is just one of countless examples that have been repeated all around the world throughout history. You would think we would have figured it out by now.

  Maybe we actually like mass hysteria. Not the hysteria itself, mind you. What I mean is, what if there’s something about being part of a larger story that resonates with people? It binds us together. It unites us in a global conversation. It builds community.

 
The big fears never really go away. Although Spring-Heeled Jack disappeared from the public eye in the last decade of the nineteenth century, some think he’s still around. In 1995, a school in a small West Surrey village was closed by the town. The students and teachers wanted to mark the occasion, and so they put on a disco-themed celebration to say goodbye to one another and the school they loved.

  That night, as the party was winding down, a handful of students ran back into the school, screaming about something they had seen outside. When asked by the teachers about it, these students all told the same story. They had all left the party earlier and had been hanging out near the playground. While there, a shadowy figure had approached them in the darkness. As the shape moved closer, they saw more details. The man wore black boots and a dark hooded cloak. But it was what they saw beneath the cloak that frightened them the most.

  A one-piece suit of white cloth, and glowing red eyes.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1952, something bright flashed across the dark West Virginia sky and came to rest on a nearby farm. A trio of local boys saw it happen with their own eyes and ran home to report it. The mother of one of the boys agreed that it was worth looking into, so she gathered a group of older boys, and together they all walked over to find whatever it was that had fallen to earth.

  When they arrived, they found what they described as a ball of fire, and the air was thick with a mist that burned their eyes and noses. When one of the boys noticed a pair of red lights in the shadows nearby, he turned his flashlight on it. There, they say, stood a dark figure with bright eyes and a pointed head. They couldn’t see arms, but when it saw the light, it glided toward them and hissed. Naturally, they all ran away.