Kevin Dixon : Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack

In July 1847 there was an “extraordinary case” of assault which “greatly excited” South Devon.
 
In response to the escalating concern, the police undertook “a Spring-heeled Jack investigation” and searched for “a delinquent of this genus who occupied himself during the winter in frightening and annoying defenceless women, some of whom were rather roughly handled.”
In one incident in January a servant of a Miss Morgan, a lady living in Teignmouth’s Bitton Road, had been twice assaulted between nine and ten at night.
 
What aroused most interest, however, was that the man was heavily disguised. He wore a skin coat, “which had the appearance of a bullock’s hide”, along with a skullcap and a mask with horns.
 
Eventually, suspicion fell upon Captain Finch of Shaldon, “a man of alleged ill health, and apparently sixty years of age, about the last person that could have been suspected”.
 
The Magistrates heard that the servant “belonged to the humblest rank, while Captain Finch had been considered highly respectable”. Nevertheless, though the Bench expressed pain at accusing an old soldier of such offences, Finch was found guilty and was fined 17 shillings for each attack. Social class seems to have been a factor for this lenient sentence considering the much harsher penalties being given at the time for far lesser crimes.
 
Why this caused national and international interest was that the attacks were initially blamed on Spring-Heeled Jack, a vicious phantom who terrified people throughout much of the nineteenth century.
 
Jack was a bogeyman, a means of scaring children into behaving by telling them that, if they were not good, Spring-Heeled Jack would get them.
 
By the time of the Teignmouth assaults, Spring-Heeled Jack had acquired notoriety during a decade of shocking appearances and attacks.
 
The first of these came in October 1837 when a woman by the name of Mary Stevens was walking to Lavender Hill in London when a tall and coated man leapt from a building into the street. He then grasped her with his metal claws, and while forcibly kissing her, began tearing at her clothes. After her screams were heard, the aggressor fled the scene, leaping back to the building he first came from.
 
Many other London sightings then followed.
 
The Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, received complaints describing a demonic creature “with eyes like balls of fire and hands like icy claws, and able to bound from roof-top to roof-top with ease.”  Women had been frightened into “dangerous fits” and “severely wounded by claws” and seven Peckham ladies had been “deprived of their senses” with two likely “to become burdens on their families”.
 
The police took the reports seriously and even the Duke of Wellington, although aged nearly 70, went out armed on horseback to hunt and kill the monster.
 
In 1870 the Army set traps to catch Jack after scared sentries in Aldershot reported being terrified by a man who sprang onto the roof of their sentry box. The same year, townsfolk in Lincoln were reported to have shot at him in the street, but he just laughed and bounded away, leaping over fences, and small buildings.
 
Then Jack made it to Brighton where a gardener saw “a bear-like creature run along a wall topped with broken glass, which then jumped down and chased the frightened man before scaling the wall and escaping”.
 
Jack was described as having a terrifying appearance, clawed hands, and eyes that “resembled red balls of fire”. It was claimed that, beneath a black cloak, he wore a helmet and a tight-fitting white garment like an oilskin. He possessed a “Devil-like” aspect, was tall and thin, and had the appearance of a gentleman.
 
Other reports describe his ability to breathe out blue and white flames and that he wore sharp metallic claws on his fingertips. Jack’s title came from the belief that he had springs on the heels of his boots.
 
Jack’s visits were then reported to be happening all over Britain and it was at this time that he made his first appearances in South Devon.
 
One place supposedly haunted by Jack was the coastal route that is now the A379 Teignmouth Road.
 
The historian Theo Brown remembers her father saying that during the nineteenth century, nothing would induce anyone to walk from St Marychurch to Shaldon after dark. From the medieval-style castle just past Brunel Manor – actually an 1830s ‘folly’ built by Mrs Groves of Sladnor Manor House – to the descent to the Teign, this road was said to be haunted by ‘Spring Hill Jack’ (sic). It was a place where “balls of fire would roll out of the hedges in front of people who ventured there at night”.
 
So why did Jack take residence in a quiet South Devon lane when he seemingly preferred leaping from city rooftops?
 
One suggestion is that his visits coincided with an increase in smuggling.
 
What had previously been simple small-scale evasion of duty had turned into a huge industry. The high rates of tax levied on tea, wine, spirits, and other luxury goods made their import and the evasion of the duty a very profitable venture for our impoverished fishermen and seafarers. On the other hand, if the men were caught, they were hanged.
 
Many local ghost stories have their origin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, years when the Revenue Men were becoming better organised onshore and had more and improved ships. Rather than freely land goods on the open beaches of the Bay, the smugglers were then forced to use the more isolated coves between Hope’s Nose and the Ness.
 
As with other supernatural manifestations in the area, was the Jack legend useful in explaining lights late at night, and a way of dissuading local folk from nocturnal excursions?
 
Even when smuggling declined, Jack’s notoriety continued. Between 1870 and 1890 he began to take on a more “devil-like persona and look”, with people saying they had seen wings instead of an overcoat.
 
Witnesses also reported that he had either the face of a “demon or devil” or was wearing a mask.
 
Due to the tales of his bizarre appearance and ability to make extraordinary leaps, the spectre started to appear in news articles, early novellas and ‘comics’.
 
Spring-heeled Jack was last seen in 1904 at Everton in Liverpool, vaulting up and down the streets, leaping from cobbles to rooftops. After some brave souls tried to corner him, he vanished into the darkness.
 
Though his impersonators such as Captain Finch were apprehended, Spring-Heeled Jack remained elusive, was never captured, and may still be out there somewhere...