Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories Spring-Heeled Jack: Cryptid or Conspiracy? About this episode Supernaturally-high leaps. Glowing red eyes. Fire breath. This monster violently assaulted young women, and terrorized others across London. Was he a band of upper-class criminals? A ghost? Or a business plan? Historian Dr. Mike Dash joins us to uncover the truth.
For more from Mike Dash, check out: www.mikedashhistory.com and his AskHistorians archive: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/mikedash/. His book, Spring Heeled Jack: Representation and Interpretation, A Multidisciplinary Approach releases next year.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Let me tell you a ghost story. Two hundred years ago, London has no streetlights. Walking on winter nights means braving the cold and the pitch-black alleyways. But this doesn't stop the Scale Sisters from staying out well past sundown. Heading home, the sisters' eyes scan the shadows, carefully selecting the safer sides of the road. Their heightened alertness lengthens each step of the short walk. Along Green Dragon Alley, they spot a man stopped ahead, back turned. His cloak obscures everything but his impressive height. The sisters speed up, not calling attention to themselves.
0:46 Speaker 00 As they near the stranger, he whips around, leering. He might mug them, spit on them, no! He exhales blue fire. Bright indigo flames blind one of the sisters. Her eyebrows singe, panic knocks her to the ground, screaming and shaking. The attacker springs into the air, rising to the rooftops before landing a block away, then bouncing over a high wall out of sight. The alley goes midnight dark once again.
1:21 Speaker 00 Later, the women learn they got lucky. The same mysterious figure has struck before. He slashed women's skin, ripped out their hair, forcibly kissed and undressed them. He even threw a woman in the river, drowning her.
1:41 Speaker 00 Some say it's a demon. Others, a band of costume elites conspiring to crime without consequence. And others, still, an alien hiding among us. But regardless of what they think their attacker is, everyone calls him the same name: Spring Heeled Jack.
2:04 Speaker 00 Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. You can watch our episodes and more on our new YouTube channel, @conspiracietheoriespodcast. And check us out on Instagram, @theconspiracypod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today, we're talking about Spring Heeled Jack, a mysterious attacker in Victorian-era London who frightened and assaulted young women. He, or "it," was never caught. This episode contains discussions of violence and sexual assault.
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4:53 Speaker 00 Today's conspiracy theories surround a monster. Spring Heeled Jack. He's far from the only famous London Jack. There's Jack in the Box, Jack O'Lantern, and of course, Jack the Ripper. Spring Heeled Jack is a blend of all three. According to reports, he pops out of the darkness and springs to supernatural heights. His chest somehow lights up and he breathes fire. He attacks women on the street in London's East End. In most accounts, Spring Heeled Jack wears a long, black cloak
5:33 Speaker 00 over a tight, white jumpsuit and a headdress or helmet, sometimes with feathers. He's tall and lithe, his fingers stretched to long, metallic talons, sharpened to tear through clothes and flesh. And in the center of his terrifying face, glowing red eyes. In a few stories, he's dubbed a shapeshifter, taking on the form of a bull, a bear, or a knight in armor. He breathes fire and is impervious to bullets. In almost all accounts, he jumps just out of reach, leaping over high walls, springing between rooftops. That's where Spring Heeled comes from.
6:17 Speaker 00 And in every account, there's a warning. Don't go outside at night. It could attack. Maybe even in your own front yard. That's just what happens in February 1838. Eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop lives with her parents and sisters in the London suburb of Old Ford. Their home has a name, not an address. Bear Binder Cottage. The property is gated, and visitors alert the family by ringing the gate's bell. Around 8:45 PM, the bell rings. And rings, and rings. Someone's impatient.
7:00 Speaker 00 Jane walks outside and crosses the yard to greet the family's visitor. A man-shaped shadow. He stands in the darkness, no lantern, ringing the bell anxiously. Jane calls across the yard, asking who he is and if he can stop ringing like his life depends on it. The visitor replies that he's a policeman, demanding, "For God's sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring Heeled Jack here in the lane." Jane's heart races. She's heard the rumors about the horrid monster attacking servant girls and read newspaper mentions of the bizarre encounters. Of course she'll help.
7:44 Speaker 00 Jane races back inside and returns with a lit candle. As soon as she reaches the policeman and opens the gate, he snatches the candle. The light illuminates his face for the first time. His ghastly eyes glow fire-red. He is not a police officer. He's Spring Heeled Jack. He throws off his cloak and spits blue and white fire, almost burning her face. Jane runs, screaming, the open gate swinging behind her, but claws dig into her back and her dress. The monster pins her down, puts her in a headlock, metal talons shred apart her clothes. Jane fights back, collecting bruises.
8:29 Speaker 00 She wriggles out of his grip and stumbles back toward the house. She reaches the door, and boom, he's on top of her again. He scratches wildly at her neck and arms and rips out her hair. Jane fears what he'll do next. One of her sisters runs outside and starts hitting Jane's attacker. Jane manages to get free and the sisters dash into the house, locking Spring Hill Jack outside. Inside, Jane's two sisters try to calm her. She's lost a lot of hair and her dress hangs on by a thread. Their parents, who were already in bed, come downstairs at all the commotion. Outside, Spring Hill Jack wraps on the door.
9:14 Speaker 00 As the family tends to Jane's injuries, Jack knocks with the same fervor as he rang the bell. The family hides upstairs. They open a window and look down. He is still at the door, still knocking. The family screams for the police, hoping a neighbor will hear and fetch help. Eventually, Spring Hill Jack sprints away, his bright white suit vanishing into the fog. Later, neighbors find the Allsop family in a panic. Jane's father suggests a plan. He saw Spring Hill Jack run off without the cloak he arrived in. If they can find it, they may be able to use it to identify Jane's attacker.
9:57 Speaker 00 But when the group searches the area, there's no cloak. It vanished. Jane's father sees this as proof it wasn't a single criminal, but a team. One man attacked, another picked up the cloak, and maybe a third watched and laughed while his daughter was assaulted. It's a criminal conspiracy, an outrage. And the Allsops aren't alone. A few days later, around 8:00 PM, a family in a nearby suburb hears a knock. The homeowner, Mr. Ashworth, has his servant boy answer. The servant boy opens the door.
10:38 Speaker 00 Screams and slams it shut. He tells his boss it's a most hideous appearance. But when the Ashworths look outside, no one's there. Seems the monster didn't have an interest in a servant boy. Later that week, 18-year-old Lucy Scales and her sister walk home from visiting their brother in a third neighborhood. They're the sisters from the beginning of the episode. Frightened in Green Dragon Alley. Summoned to the alley, their brother finds Lucy and her sister in a panic. Lucy's sister gives a complete description, including the detail that Spring Heel Jack wore a "bull's eye like the kind used by police on his chest."
11:23 Speaker 00 A bull's eye is a lantern with a magnifier to direct the light, like an early flashlight. It's a bizarre detail, but both siblings are more concerned with Lucy. When the brother arrives, Lucy's in the throes of a violent fit. She's as hysterical as Jane Allsop, and Jack didn't even touch her. Lucy's fits, quote, "continued for several hours." I mean, it's bizarre, but she's not the only victim who experienced this. As I mentioned earlier, rumors of Spring Heel Jack have flown through Greater London for months. A few weeks before Jane and Lucy's attacks, a young unmarried woman walking home from
12:06 Speaker 00 a party was, quote, "nearly deprived of her senses by a white figure spitting blue fireballs." Other victims shook uncontrollably or fainted. One reported victim was so distraught, her family checked her into an insane asylum. Meanwhile, the week before Jane Allsop's attack, a butcher reported being attacked by what the newspaper calls "a hobgoblin." But descriptions of its height, agility, and freakish saucer eyes resemble Spring Heel Jack. Now the varied accounts merge into a bigger rumor. The devil himself has come to London.
12:52 Speaker 00 Let's look at it. There's the fire breath, the glowing red eyes, how he almost flies from place to place without being caught. There's the way he looks a little different every time, ranging from knight in armor to man in bear skin. Even the fits experienced by Lucy and others sound like classic demonic possession. And those who don't think it's a demon, well, they say it's a ghost. Okay, now, many people who experience supernatural events seek supernatural solutions. But not the Alsops. The day after Jane's attack, they go straight to the local magistrate's office. While Jane wasn't the first to be
13:36 Speaker 00 attacked, hers is among the best documented. Jane had multiple witnesses, all from an upper-class family, so her report was deemed serious by the authorities and the newspapers. Ah, it's an early version of "Missing White Woman Syndrome," the phenomenon where a more privileged group's criminal case gets more attention and resources. For Jane Alsop, that means two different investigations. The local magistrate's police force seeks Jane's attacker, and so does the London Metropolitan Police. So the Metropolitan Police were established less than a decade earlier, in 1829. They're still ways off from the
14:18 Speaker 00 detective fame of Scotland Yard. Researcher John Matthews notes that this force is barely equipped to solve a burglary, much less a violent assault, but they still direct resources to Jane's case. Meanwhile, the magistrate's police assigns one of the best detectives in the country to the case: James Lee. About 10 years back, Lee helped solve the infamous Red Barn murder. He ferreted out the killer, who'd been on the lam for over a year. He's the best in the field, at least when it comes to solving crimes committed by humans. So while stories of ghosts and demons float through the city,
15:01 Speaker 00 Detective Lee keeps his theories on the ground. He has no doubts there's an evil terrorizing London, but he believes it's just one man. He doesn't even believe Mr. Alsop's theory that it's an organized group. Lee considers all the attacks stretching back the past few months, like a clergyman's daughter assaulted back in January, and reports of a tall, thin character in a Spanish cloak skulking around. Putting all the stories together, Lee deduces that the attacks are calculated. He tells a local paper that Green Dragon Alley, where the Scales sisters were accosted, is basically the perfect scene for a crime.
15:45 Speaker 00 Lee also realizes that the attacks all occur between 8 and 9 at night. The exact timeframe police patrols swap shifts. The attacker likely knows this and strikes when he's least likely to be apprehended. When you add the knowledge of police procedure to Lucy Scale's report of the bull's eye light and the tall hat and cape, it starts to paint a picture of a police inspector audacious enough to believe he's above the law. Naturally, Detective Lee doesn't pursue that angle. He focuses on the Alsop family.
16:27 Speaker 00 He thinks Jane's attacker knows them. After interviewing the witnesses, he zeroes in on reports of a man who told the Alsop's neighbors to get the police. This good Samaritan? He's a tall man in a dark cloak, but no one knows who he is. Lee thinks he's Spring Heeled Jack.
16:51 Speaker 00 And together with his counterpart from the Metropolitan Police, the other force on the case, detective Lee determines the attacks are the result of drunken antics taken too far. They interview locals who fit their suspect profile, but each possible suspect points fingers at someone else. None of the testimony lines up. And contrary to police opinion, the OSOPs all claim Jane's attacker was sober. He was so close to her, she'd have smelled alcohol on his breath. Plus, the OSOPs agree the attack was deliberately calculated. It's not the typical MO of a town drunk.
17:34 Speaker 00 All the while, the violence escalates. Spring Heel Jack enters a pub and swings a club at female patrons. He slaps a woman across the face. He rips a woman's clothes, then forces her to eat grass. The attacks stretch across London and its surrounding villages. Between 1837 and 1839, at least 15 Spring Heel Jack incidents get reported. Finally, someone pins down a man who looks like Spring Heel Jack and quickly discovers this suspect hasn't actually attacked anyone. He's a copycat, who heard the stories and dressed up like Spring Heel Jack to scare people. Two more copycats pop up,
18:18 Speaker 00 and all three are fine for creating a public nuisance. With no answers, terror reaches a fever pitch. A shape-shifting, fire-breathing evil is jumping over rooftops. He's hiding in the darkness, always just out of sight, always just above your head. No one can catch him. No one can stop him. And no one knows who or where he'll attack next. Hoping to put an end to the evil, vigilante groups gather reward money and scour the streets. Among the vigilantes, the story changes.
19:00 Speaker 00 Maybe the evil isn't supernatural. Maybe it's a massive conspiracy.
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20:11 Speaker 00 In the late 1830s, an uncatchable evil terrorizes London. He jumps impossibly high and blows fire in his victims' faces. His eyes blaze red, and his attacks feel random. Even the best detective in the country can't solve the case. As the panic continues across London, the mayor receives a letter from a local constituent. It's from a whistleblower complaining that Spring Heald Jack's identity is intentionally being brushed under the rug. The mayor has it published in The Times. It reads, in part:
20:51 Speaker 00 "Individuals have laid a wager: the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three disguises: a ghost, a bear, and a devil. The unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses." One victim, quote, "has never from that moment been in her senses, but on seeing any man screams out most violently, 'Take him away.'" The writer stays anonymous, signing off as "a resident of Peckham." Peckham is a London neighborhood. Perhaps they fear repercussions for whistleblowing.
21:33 Speaker 00 In the accompanying article, the mayor states he believes this letter tells the truth. It's not a demon, it's a criminal conspiracy. In the following weeks, multiple papers back up this theory with similar news stories. The Sun reports, quote, "The committee has been informed the Spring Hill Jack gang was made up of rascals connected with high families and that bets to the amount of 5,000 pounds are at stake." And a letter to The Times says the goal of the wager is to kill six women. Spring Hill Jack has escalated from haunted house scares to violent assault to murder.
22:18 Speaker 00 It's a terrifying idea, that people with wealth and power would hurt others for their own entertainment and get away with it. Now, some say the idea of shadowy elites is grasping at straws, but the theory gets way more real when people start naming names. The prime nobleman suspect, Henry de Lepour Beresford. His title is Marquis of Waterford. He's a well-known local bad boy. They called him the Mad Marquis. He inherited the marquis title at just 17 while still in school.
22:59 Speaker 00 His father died young, perhaps due to the Waterford family curse. Yes, a curse. We don't just have a demon springing through the air and spitting fire, we have a curse. How did it happen? Well, allegedly, the first Marquis of Waterford punished a man by hanging him. Seeing her son on the gallows, the man's mother cursed the marquis and his descendants to seven generations of painful deaths. Over the centuries, the sons who inherited the Marquis of Waterford title suffered lion maulings, drownings, gunshots, and car crashes. Several eldest sons died before they could even take the title. Other descendants died in train derailments and horse accidents.
23:43 Speaker 00 So, yeah, I think maybe there could be a curse. Or maybe they were genetically prone to recklessness. The mad marquis certainly lived on the edge. Not long after his father's death, he was kicked out of school for gambling and drinking. He was routinely caught brawling and fined. He'd pay the fines and keep brawling. Sometimes, he'd even pay random bar patrons to fight him. He adored chaos. He shot the eyes out of the family portraits. He'd flip over horse buggies as a joke to scare people. He once snuck a donkey into someone's bed. I mean, that's kind of funny. And no one could stop him.
24:25 Speaker 00 He may have been a party boy, but he was also the local big wig. He had money, status, and virtually no oversight. It's even said the marquis inspired the phrase "paint the town red." In April 1837, the marquis and his friends spent a day drinking, gambling, and cavorting at the horse races. On the way home, they stopped at the toll booth. The line was slow due to repairs, including a fresh coat of red paint. Annoyed at waiting, the marquis and his friends stole buckets of paint and went on a rampage. They painted everything in town red, even the toll booth operator.
25:09 Speaker 00 The next day, they were charged with vandalism. The marquis paid the fine and took his antics international. A few months later, in Norway, he finally got a comeuppance. A night watchman saw the marquis being inappropriate with a young lady and beat him up. Apparently, losing a fight was the only thing that could bring his spirits down. The marquis fell into depression. So, here's where we get into the conspiracy theory. Allegedly, the marquis's friends wanted to cheer him up, so they proposed a new way
25:48 Speaker 00 to be a menace to society: dress up as a monster and attack poor people. Starting in September 1838, this small group of noblemen, led by the marquis, takes turns dressing up in the scariest costumes they can find in their manners. And that explains why Jack is sometimes a helmeted humanoid, and sometimes a bear. They're using different costumes. Then, the aristocrats pick a dark area and wait around for the perfect victim. They target young women because they're easier to overpower.
26:27 Speaker 00 No one can stop the mad marquis and his friends from causing trouble as themselves, so of course they can't stop them when they're wearing costumes. Even if someone were to recognize the marquis in his Spring Hill Jack getup, what could they do? He's the local political authority and landowner. He has magnitudes of power over his victims. He'll never face repercussions. And some of the history lines up. Researcher John Matthews notes that on the marquis's return to London, he doesn't stay static. He moves around town, staying with various friends. From fall 1837 to spring 1838, the exact timeframe, Spring Hill Jack attacks.
27:11 Speaker 00 That could explain how he pops up in so many different neighborhoods. And researcher Carl Bell observes Spring Hill Jack never attacks in so-called "bad areas", areas where a member of the upper class wouldn't dare set foot. Okay, to sum it up, the mad marquis and his cronies certainly had the time, the money, and the attitude to be Spring Hill Jack. Look at it, the marquis loved a good bet. And the combination of costumes and status render him uncatchable. Feels like nothing can stop him, not getting kicked out of school, not fines, not even getting his ass kicked. Now, the marquis never confesses formally,
27:56 Speaker 00 but there's a hint of confession from beyond the grave. After he dies, his wife commissions an unusual memorial in his honor. It's a fountain in the town square. In the center of the fountain, there's a single column stretching above the nearby rooftops. The statue perches atop it. Up close, it's an angel. But it's so high, no one on the street can see the statue clearly. At night, the single figure leering down from the rooftops looks a lot like Spring Heeled Jack.
28:38 Speaker 00 And that's what memorializes the mad Marquis. A shadowy, sky-high figure who could jump down on them at any time. There's just one wrinkle in the nobleman theory. Decades later, long after the Marquis dies and his friends go gray, Spring Heeled Jack returns. In 1872, a tall, cloaked figure terrifies a young maid, Sarah Ann Foster. Other witnesses see him jump high enough to clear a six-foot fence. The editor of the local paper reports his own sighting, quote,
29:20 Speaker 00 "No man living could leap so lightly, and I might say, fly across the ground in the manner he did last night." Fifty years later, sightings occur in Bradford, far north of London. This apparition has glowing eyes and seems to be on springs. Other accounts pop up across England. The most recent, in 2012, almost 200 years later, people are still trying to solve the mystery of Spring Heeled Jack. And they've brought in more modern theories, like aliens.
30:01 Speaker 00 The alien theory started in 1954 during the post-Roswell craze. In an article, writer Valentine Dial proposed that Spring Heeled Jack wasn't a demon or a man, but an extraterrestrial. He pointed out the odd appearance of Spring Heeled Jack lined up with the more modern concept of a spaceman. He had a shiny, white, fitted suit, a big helmet, a strong, wearable light, and maybe the blue fireballs were actually blue laser beams. People in the 1830s didn't know what lasers were, so they used the closest terms they had to describe their experiences.
30:44 Speaker 00 The spaceman theory also explains the Spring Heels. An alien might come from a planet with higher gravity than Earth, so a regular footstep resulted in a jumping motion like astronauts on the moon. That's how Spring Hill Jack could clear high fences and rooftops. Looking at the accounts through a modern lens, they do line up with stories of aliens, but they also line up with another modern phenomenon: cryptids. If this is your first time listening, a cryptid is a creature like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, native to Earth but not scientifically identified yet.
31:27 Speaker 00 The giant squid, the platypus, and the okapi were all once considered cryptids. They're not supernatural, so different from ghosts and demons, and they're not aliens, though many cryptid stories include an alien visitor theory. But the reason people suggest Spring Hill Jack is a cryptid is because he looks and acts like several famous ones. First, the Dover Demon. It's a white humanoid with long fingers and glowing red eyes. It spooked young people around Dover, Massachusetts in 1977. We don't know much about the creature because after two days of sightings, it disappeared forever.
32:10 Speaker 00 A few years before the Dover Demon in 1966, the people of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, reported a tall, winged humanoid with glowing red eyes. The Mothman. The Mothman frightened and chased young people across town. It once pursued a car going 95 miles per hour. It ate someone's dog, and it was never caught. And going back to the UK, there's Cornwall's Owl Man. White, flying, half-man, half-owl, with glowing red eyes and sharp talons. If you're watching the video, you can see the similarities.
32:51 Speaker 00 But at the end of the day, we still don't know what any of these sightings actually are. Or if they even happened.
33:02 Speaker 00 Aliens, cryptids, fire breath, high jumps, claws, bear transformations. It all starts to feel like an urban legend, which leads you to wonder, was Spring Hill Jack a massive misunderstanding?
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34:24 Speaker 00 The theories about Spring Hill Jack are so bizarre, so terrifying, and so pervasive, it's hard to know what's real. So to get some clarity, I spoke to researcher and historian Dr. Mike Dash. Hi, Mike.
34:39 Speaker 04 Hi, it's good to see you.
34:41 Speaker 00 Can you introduce yourself for our audience?
34:43 Speaker 04 I'm Dr. Mike Dash. I'm a historian who specializes in history from below, so history of everyday people, and particularly in strange and exotic history. One of the subjects I've studied in that line is Spring Hill Jack. I started researching when I was about 19. I'm now 62, so it's been quite a long time.
35:02 Speaker 00 That is a long time. What inspired you to start your research?
35:06 Speaker 04 When I was 11 years old, I used to get a magazine in the UK. For curious kids called World of Wonder, which had a section in it called Strange Stories. And it had the story of Spring Hill Jack in it, uh, with a, with a scary illustration. And when I was 11, it sort of terrified me, really. Um, not least because of the implication that Spring Hill Jack was some sort of immortal being who could kind of turn up on your window, so in the middle of the night. So I've been researching it because I was scared as an 11 year old, essentially.
35:36 Speaker 00 So it's a lifetime of research, trying to understand your nightmares.
35:41 Speaker 04 I don't have nightmares about it anymore, thanks to all the work I've done on the subject, yes. But it does say something about the, about the vividness of the figure and the, the way in which people interpret it. I mean, I think has a lot to do with how powerful the, the story is and why so many people are still interested in it today, actually.
35:59 Speaker 00 Right, and you have a book coming out next year about Spring Hill Jack. Can you tell us about that?
36:05 Speaker 04 It's called Spring Hill Jack: Representation and Interpretation, a Multidisciplinary Approach. It's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it? But the main interpretation that we are advancing, which is new, is to say, you must pay a lot more attention to the people who put this stuff in print. When you read the original stories, you're seeing them through a filter in the sense that, that the, the first ones that come in are written by, um,
36:28 Speaker 04 people who are, uh, middle class and have servants. And they're writing about how, how annoyed they are that the servants are spreading these silly working class stories. So you're, you're seeing them through this sort of veil of not really how they were originally told, but through a disapproving, this is a sort of nonsense that servants believe type of thing. Then in February 1838, they change in the sense that two people go to the courts and some, and two girls say that they've been attacked by this figure.
36:54 Speaker 00 Right, and those, those two girls are Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales?
36:58 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly. And at that point, you're then getting material which had been written by court reporters. So the, the court reporters were not, in fact, um, staff reporters on The Times. They were freelancers, they were called penny aligners. And they basically could only make a living if they could sell these stories. They're starving hack writers who's, you know, living in a time when there's no social security pay, no social safety net. And if they can't sell a story to the newspapers, they don't eat. That day. And so they had a motivation to find the most sensational stories, write them in the most sensational ways. What you don't see is Spring Hill Jack appearing when Parliament is in session, for example, because then there's plenty of other stuff to fill the newspapers. That's a very clear thing when you're looking at those coincidences of date.
37:39 Speaker 00 So Spring Hill Jack is at least in part a conspiracy to sell newspapers.
37:45 Speaker 04 All I can really say as a cautious historian is that these are complicated sources and they cannot be read simply as accounts of exactly what happened. But the story effectively originates in rumours of working class people in London in the autumn of eighteen thirty seven. They talk about the rumours as they were then, and they're very bizarre. The figure is completely shape shifting. And at one point, it's like a lamp lighter walking with his lamp between his legs, on his hands. And at another point, it becomes a snowball that rolls down a hill. I mean, it's really very surreal. They're also sort of children's stories. So they're used by parents to quiet children down and keep them under control, basically.
38:24 Speaker 04 You frighten children by saying, if you don't do this, such and such will come to get you. You can see how the stories are used and spread by people who have other reasons for telling them than they think it's true or other reasons for telling them they think it's scary. And it doesn't fit very well with the idea of Spring Hill Jack as an actual sort of person who actually assaults people, in other words, is much more complex than that.
38:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, can we talk about the stories that are confirmed? I mean, earlier you mentioned Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, and they are definitely real, right?
38:56 Speaker 04 If Jane Alsop had never gone to the police, then we wouldn't be sitting here talking about Spring Hill Jack. That's my view after forty years of studying this story. The Jane Alsop case is the is the sort of the thing that makes you stick because, I mean, it happened in the to the extent that this girl went to the police, her family came in support of the story, they all told the same story about the assault. And she had, you know, at least some sort of marks of injury, bruising and so on on her body. So she was attacked, I think, by somebody. The real question is sort of how violently and how exotically Jane is, you know, a respectable, middle class girl. Nothing about her would suggest that she would suddenly make this stuff up or lie.
39:38 Speaker 04 And she and her family were sufficiently outraged that they went to and reported it to the local police court the next day. And the only other one from London at that time that was similar came about 10 days later. So this was a girl called Lucy Scales. The interesting thing when you read the case is that her brother, the butcher, says... The really odd thing to me was that it was only 20 minutes earlier that we were sitting in my parlour reading the newspaper stories about Spring Heel Jack. And so you suddenly realise again that this girl has in her mind the same name. And that, I think, has got to be significant. That in both cases, they're both the really famous cases, the only two cases in fact that we have in which there is some credible reason to assume that Spring Heel Jack did
40:20 Speaker 04 his most Spring Heel Jack thing, which is breathing blue fire. They are both stimulated by the name Spring Heel Jack before they even start. I think that that's got to be significant.
40:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, it does seem significant. And now you say that fire is the most Spring Heel Jack thing. What about his sky-high jumping ability? Is there any credibility to his spring heels?
40:45 Speaker 04 So there is a huge literature here effectively suggesting that maybe it would have been possible, that somebody invented some sort of spring-heeled type of boots. It would be difficult to control if you're in an area like Bearbine Delane, for example. That's a muddy path around muddy fields. Maybe it's more credible on a sort of, you know, a modern bit of asphalt or, you know, concrete paving or something. But it's not credible that people could control heavy-duty springs, get high leaps and not basically break their legs.
41:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, so you're saying it's not humanly possible for people to leap like that? So maybe they made it up to explain for why they couldn't catch him?
41:26 Speaker 04 Yes, yes, exactly. And that is a very important part of the story, isn't it? That he is never caught. It becomes scarier because the reality is always more boring.
41:36 Speaker 00 Ah, and more boring would be Jane and Lucy were attacked by ordinary men.
41:40 Speaker 04 Yes, there's actually very little in what Jane said that suggests that it could not have been done by somebody who wanted to scare a girl. And again, I mean, the Spring Heel Jack stories has been around for long enough that pranksters, people who like attacking girls, might potentially put on this persona.
41:59 Speaker 00 Like maybe the Marquis of Waterford?
42:02 Speaker 04 So I have looked into the Marcus of Waterford. And what I've done is, and again, this is only possible now that you can use digital archives. But I have recreated his itinerary across this whole period. Um, so I can say where he was and where he wasn't. So first of all, in the summer of eighteen thirty seven, the Marcus went with some of his mates to um Bergen and made a real fuss in this very quiet backwater Norwegian town. And the local watchman came on the scene and tried to break up a the the noise. And in doing so, he hit the Marcus of Waterford over the head with his iron tipped um club. And he was nearly killed and he was incommunicado and indisposed for the next three months.
42:43 Speaker 04 So now, if you believe the newspaper stories, the the stories of Spring Hill Jack started to circulate in September. Waterford was definitely not in a fit state to be impersonating Spring Hill Jack in September eighteen thirty seven. Um, around about the time of the Jane Allsop account, he wasn't in London either. He went down to Kent and stayed in Dover. This is about sixty miles, seventy miles away from London. And, you know, there are several major hills between Dover and London, which a horse and carriage struggled to get up in February. It would have taken at least a day, probably longer, to get to London and then come back again. Um, and he was definitely at this hotel, the Ship Hotel, in Dover the day before the Allsop assault.
43:26 Speaker 04 So again, I can be almost as certain as I can possibly be that Waterford could not have been a nobleman attacking a girl in the East End of London on the twentieth of February.
43:35 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, uh, well, could it have been other noblemen?
43:39 Speaker 04 There might have been other noblemen, but I mean, the whole idea of mad noblemen, the idea that they were young, boisterous, took wages in ways that sort of caused horrible trouble for ordinary people, goes back to the the early years of the reign of of James the First. In seventeen twelve, there was a very major scare in London involving a group called the Mohawks, who were again supposed to be young aristocrats who were sort of invulnerable, they could never be arrested. They have a different sort of elusiveness, in other words, their elusiveness is social. They can always bribe people or just sort of pull rank on people. There are different sorts of uncatchable. It's uncatchable because he's he's agile, or he's uncatchable because he's a nobleman who the watchman can't arrest or who will get out of prison if he is arrested.
44:21 Speaker 04 You can see in a sense that the the story itself is mutating. But it's the same basic fear that something could happen to you and that person will not be brought to justice.
44:32 Speaker 00 Well, that is a very genuine fear that kind of keeps us all up at night. And how about, yeah, for you, after forty years of research, what still keeps you up at night?
44:42 Speaker 04 The most mysterious thing perhaps for me is how widespread stories of Spring Heel Jack are. I mean, they appeared pretty literally all over the world, everywhere from Argentina in the nineteen sixties, seventies, eighties, back to Russia at the time of the revolution. They appear in Somalia in the nineteen eighties, in Czechoslovakia in the nineteen twenties. And it is very difficult to know exactly how this happens. When Spring Heel Jack appears in New Zealand, in Australia, in Canada, it's with the name Spring Heel Jack, and it's probably something which has been spread by British immigrants. Sometimes you get slight variants, for example, in Newfoundland, he's called Spring Heel Jackson, but it's still a very identifiable name.
45:25 Speaker 04 But weirdly, some of them come from places where there was no British presence at all, and that's what I find most puzzling. At one point, I was working through a long list of all the British penny dreadfuls that were exported and translated into Czech, and weirdly and frustratingly enough, Spring Heel Jack wasn't one of them. So I still can't explain why Spring Heel Jack was banding around coalfields in the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, as it was called then in the nineteen twenties, but he was. Russia, during the time of the Russian Revolution, there was a sort of street gang who called themselves the Leapers and who got dressed up in sort of weird, like risen from the dead in a graveyard type costumes, and sort of hopped around scaring people and robbing them. Gang of this sort were arrested by the new Bolshevik government in St Petersburg, Petrograd,
46:08 Speaker 04 Leningrad, in nineteen seventeen, eighteen, and quite a few, three or four of them were executed. There are some Soviet archives on this, which again, I've managed to get hold of and get translated. And I really struggle to quite understand, and I've spent a lot of time worrying about this, how that character has ended up in a place like Somalia, which had appeared in Somalia in the eighties, when it was beginning to be destabilized quite badly. They thought it was an unusual story in the sense that they didn't have, they didn't have a tradition of a figure. Called the Tall Man. It suggests that there's something about this archetype that's so scary and so unique that it has a way of travelling or potentially a way of simply coming into
46:49 Speaker 04 existence in different places because it meets the same need, society, of being spooky, of scaring us. I'm still utterly baffled as to how he gets to some of the places he gets to. And, you know, for me, who wants to explain it as a sort of sociocultural phenomenon, it's, that bothers me because I can't.
47:07 Speaker 00 Wow, that, it's incredible, the scope of it, that it's not just back in the 1800s or just in England, but that Spring Hill Jack has become this worldwide fear and phenomenon. Wow. Thank you so much for joining us.
47:21 Speaker 04 I'm really pleased you've helped.
47:22 Speaker 00 One last report of Spring Hill Jack we haven't mentioned yet. In 1888, London's Metropolitan Police receive a letter. It confesses to attacking women on the street. It's signed, Spring Hill Jack. The attacks mentioned were the work of another Jack, Jack the Ripper. Like Spring Hill Jack, he was never caught. And maybe that's why Spring Hill Jack faded away in the 1900s, why he's not as famous as other cryptids and conspiracies, because the new terror lurked in the darkness, warning people of the dangers outside their homes.
48:04 Speaker 00 No matter what's actually under the costume, there's nothing scarier than not knowing what's after you. And whatever Spring Hill Jack is, it's still out there.
48:25 Speaker 00 Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at the Conspiracy Pod. And if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on Spring Hill Jack, amongst the many sources we used, we found Mike Dash's academic paper, "Spring Hill Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo From Suburban Ghost", extremely helpful to our research. And for more from Mike Dash, check out his book releasing in 2026, "Spring Hill Jack: Representation and Interpretation: A Multidisciplinary Approach". You can also find him moderating Reddit's "Ask Historians" page, which we linked in the show's notes.
49:10 Speaker 00 Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Maggie Admire, edited by Mickey Taylor and Pete Ritchie, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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