After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Spring-Heeled Jack: Terror of Victorian London

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

The grimy streets of Victorian London were stalked by a shadowy menace: Spring-Heeled Jack! He had glowing eyes and blue flames came out his mouth. He had claws, wings. He had a tail. He had smart boots. He had literal springs in his heels. Confusing...who was Spring-Heeled Jack?Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by Ceri Houlbrook, whose new book "Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present" with Owen Davies will be out in September.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitProduced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today we are talking about an urban legend that took hold in the Victorian era.

It's all got to do with Spring-Heeled Jack. And if you don't know who that is, then don't worry because Maddie is about to set the scene. In the eastern fringes of London, where the gas lamps mingle with the glowworm's light, there was a lane. Some way down that lane there was a cottage, and in that cottage there lived the Allsop family. At 9pm on the evening of the 20th of February 1838, the bell pull on the garden gate jangled, as though someone or something was making their way up the little path to the front door. Inside, 18-year-old Jane Allsop heard the sound. She got up, walked towards the door, opening it to find...

nothing. She looked about, puzzled, before her eyes fell on something extraordinary. She froze, blood pumping loudly in her ears. There, in the garden, was a figure. She stared at it for a moment, jumping when a voice emanated from it, barking, I am a policeman, for god's sake bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-Heeled Jack here in the lane. Jane's eyes widened. Could Spring-Heeled Jack, the ghoul every Londoner feared, really be in the lane outside her home? She rushed inside for a candle.

But as she approached the figure at the gate, her hand outstretched as she offered up the flame, she realised that something was wrong. Still shrouded in the darkness, the person, the thing, before her drew back its cloak. And in the flickering light, Jane saw a terrible sight. A man with eyes red as fire, dressed in tight white oil skins with horns growing from his head. As Jane stared, the monster's mouth grinned open and blue flames came vomiting forth. He leapt onto Jane, screaming she managed to escape and ran back towards the front door, but he was on her again, tearing at her clothes with what seemed to be claws rather than fingers.

Jane's sisters appeared in the door as he tore clumps of hair from her head. Bravely, they grabbed hold of her, pulling her inside, slamming the door in the attacker's face. As the family yelled for help and the police from an upstairs window, the demon below pounded furiously at their door. Then, all at once, he was gone, disappearing with unearthly speed across the fields, swallowed back into the darkness from which he had emerged. So you find yourself back in After Dark Towers and we're glad that you've joined us today. We are going to be talking about one of the most requested, we say that a lot, but this really is one of the most requested topics. I get DMs about this once a week at least.

I get DMs about this once a year. No, more regularly than that. Wow, this is a good start. Honestly, it is quite requested. And this was also Steve, who's head of podcasts at History Hits. One of his first things he said when we were talking about after dark was you have to do Spring Hill Jack. So Steve, we're doing it today. It's actually happening now only to keep us in a job. Yeah, we need this podcast. So to the Victorians, Spring Heeled Jack's name held terror and fascination. He stalked the streets of London and beyond throughout the 19th century and became a staple of the penny dreadful press.

We've done some previous spooky Victorian stories, some we've done plenty of previous spooky Victorian stories. We have done them, there are more to come. There are. The Hammersmith Ghost for instance, the Red Barn mystery. But to help us tell this particular legend, we are joined by a regular guest on After Dark. It's Kerry Holbrook. And Kerry is a lecturer in history and folklore at the University of Hertfordshire. She has a brand new book coming out in September and it's called Folklore, A Journey Through the Past and Present, which is written with Owen Davies. Kerry, thank you for coming back to After Dark. Thank you very much for having me. I'm always happy to talk folklore.

BA Now this one is an interesting one because we often talk about what we know and what we don't know coming into these episodes. And you know, often if we cover some Irish mythology or Irish folklore magic, it's like, oh, I haven't heard about this before. Well, this is one I had not heard about previously. Somebody said, we're doing Spring Heel Jack, and I went, I have absolutely no concept of who Spring Heel Jack is. But one thing I do know now is that he's an urban legend. What exactly is an urban legend? And how, if it does, does it differ from folklore? So urban legends are a kind of subcategory in folklore. So they're legends, they're stories that are circulated like rumours told as truth. So they're told in a way that's

meant to be believed, set in real places, often with real people, and it's meant to have happened recently. So urban legend's a bit of a misnomer, it doesn't have to take place in an urban setting, it doesn't have to take place in an urban setting, it doesn't have to be a city. It's more that they're contemporary legends, so they've happened recently, currently, and often told as a kind of friend of a friend narrative. So this must have happened because somebody told me it's true, or a friend of my aunt Maria's told me about it. So it's somebody has some kind of loose connection to the narrative that's meant to convince you that it really happened. It's giving those group texts that were going around during COVID where everyone was like,

just to give you a heads up guys, my aunt's cousin's first next door neighbor works in the hospital and she overheard that Thursday next week were all kind of closing down. So they have that kind of, it tries to make it a little bit more believable or tangible, right? That's interesting. I didn't realize there was such a distinction. Well, we're in the 19th century with this. And this is a story that springs up in a very Victorian landscape in terms of the media. What do you think it is about that moment, Kerry, that allows something like an urban legend to flourish?

I think it's the amount of literacy at the time, more and more people able to read newspapers, more and more newspapers printing things like this, greater interest, and then obviously the penny dreadfuls really kind of gave it gave it life. So just for listeners who don't know what a penny dreadful is, what the penny dreadful was, can you just give us a little bit of a sense of that? Because it's a really 19th century phenomenon, isn't it? It lasts a long time, it really endures in terms of popular culture. Yeah, I guess a modern equivalent is the comic book. So it's you know, they were they were

cheap publications that were intended for children. But they were just incredibly popular and they really drew on tales of horror, gruesome tales, adventure. They were meant to be fun and really appeal to a kind of, I guess, a macabre sense of fun, which really characterises a lot of Victorian popular culture, I suppose, but this was kind of cheap, mass produced and aimed at the working classes and the children. It's interesting you say it's aimed at the working classes, because one of the things we know from our Dickens, for example, is the experience of working class London at this time, it's changing. It's an urban landscape that is changing rapidly. There's poverty,

there's crowding. There's, I suppose, a kind of aural storytelling within that tradition mixed in with the New Print media and these different forms. Do you think that Spring Heel Jack is a story that thrives in those communities rather than in more middling or elite communities? Or is this a story that permeates all of those and transcends class? I think it transcended class. I think everybody was interested. But it's interesting that, especially at the start, it was working class women usually who were attacked, or who, you know, the stories said were attacked. And, you know, as you say, these were overcrowded areas, a lot of

slums, a lot of poverty, a lot of anxiety around strangers in cities and these kind of shifting populations and how safe it was to be a working class woman and kind of walking the streets. So I think that's why it, I don't know, I spoke to something about people's kind of lived realities really in Victoria and London at the time. But I think the thrill of it probably appealed to people from all classes. So let's get to the heart of the man slash beast slash being himself. Who exactly was Spring Heel Jack? Answer, there has to be an answer. We want the definitive answer please.

We have no idea and it probably wasn't one person. So I mean, there were decades of sightings kind of stretching from the 1820s up to the early 1900s. So there were probably lots of copycats. Yeah, that's unlikely to be one human person. Yeah, yeah. In terms of who people thought it was at the time, I mean nobody knew. There were so many different stories, lots of common traits that we see getting repeated, particularly as the stories were printed in newspapers. But some of the descriptions describe Spring-Heeled Jack as a demonic type figure with red glowing eyes, who had the ability to shoot out fire, blue fire.

Not the ordinary skills of a human person then really. I'm from Spit for Yourself, I don't know about you but I am gifted. Anthony on a Friday night is on about vomiting blue flames. Is this a being that is meant to be part human, part demon? Is this someone who can sort of turn that part of themselves on and off? Is this a sort of Jekyll and Hyde type situation? He's an X-Men. He's a mutant. Well, he didn't exist, but if he existed, he's like a mutant. But yeah, what is it? It's demonic. It's a person. It's a caricature, all of the above. Yeah, absolutely. All of the above. I mean, he also had metallic claws, so kind of a precursor

to Wolverine, really. Absolutely. Sometimes it's kind of a mask-cloaked figure. So many different descriptions, and it's really hard to understand whether they saw him as a supernatural entity or a human who maybe could transform. Yeah, a lot of confusing, contradictory accounts, but also a lot of feeding off the newspaper reports as well. With the FIZ loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with FIZ. Switch today.

Conditions apply. Details at FIZ.ca. And you say, Kerry, that the first sightings, the first reports of this creature, whatever it is, appear in the 1820s, and certainly by the 1830s, it's really started to take off. As a folklorist, I know that you're interested in tracing the ways in which these stories mutate. Are we able to get to ground zero of when Springfield Jack first appears? Or is this something that exists in a kind of murky past that we'll never be able to access? It's pretty murky because we've got so many stories kind of at the start of the 1800s that have some of the kind of similar elements. The Hammersmith ghost for instance, which

you've mentioned. Because I mean that's it, that's a sort of spirit that has a tangible effect in the world right that's for anyone who hasn't heard our episode go and listen to it immediately. But it's someone, something, attacking people in and around Hammersmith I think from memory haunting a graveyard in particular but there's a sort of element of the supernatural yes but also physical threat isn't there which I suppose Springfield Jack has all of those. Yeah yeah absolutely so at the start of the century, we're seeing elements of this in other stories, other urban legends, and it kind of just merges into a figure really.

And it isn't until 1838 when the newspapers start reporting on it and start giving this figure kind of one name, this catch-all name that kind of from that period on anything that happened that was slightly strange, any figure who kind of came out of the darkness in the villages around London, Spring Hill Jack. And that name would be applied to whatever that fret was. And it's an odd name. I mean, it suggests, let's see, it suggests somebody maybe appearing and disappearing quite quickly. Someone a bit bouncy. Bouncy is literally what I like impish. So there is this threat, there's like a real idea of

threat, but there's also then this idea of almost playfulness or something. And you know, you're talking about Penny Redfellows and I guess that would feed into that. But do we know why he became known as Spring Heel Jack. What's in the name, I guess? Emma- So the Spring Heel part is absolutely the bounciness. Early reports describe him kind of bounding over nine foot high walls, quite effortlessly laughing as he did. So that idea again of mischief. And a couple of earlier reports do describe him as wearing springed heels. So a kind of technological contraption that enabled him to jump over walls and bound effortlessly away.

I knew you'd like this. As soon as you said that, I was like, she's going to... That's so interesting because that suggests that in those versions, at least, he's not supernatural. He is a person and I mean, he's sort of a proto Batman making his own equipment to be able to... X-Men able to Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. To be a part of the same universe. Don't come for me, please. That, you know, he's able to literally jump over to move around the city to transcend it in a way that other people aren't. As we've said, at a time when there's overcrowding, there's

huge slum areas, there's poverty, Everyone's experiencing London in particular in a very different way to how they were even 50 years, 60 years earlier. And all this industrialisation, this grime, the city's literally grimy at this point. There's smog, there's dust, there's thick sort of grease on everything. And then you've got this creature who can kind of come out of those clouds of smoke and shadow, but who can leap over your roof, come into your bedroom at night, attack you in an alleyway. There's something that, you know, is he, could we view him maybe as a sort of manifestation of the city itself, that the

city is turning on people, that this urban experience is harmful to people? That's a good question. And he's very impressed. I'm not surprised. I do's a good question. And I'm still very impressed. I'm not surprised. I'm just asking a good question. I do ask a good question occasionally. Okay. Take this.

Yes. And that was an excellent answer. But yeah, no, I like that theory. I think, you know, there is something very much about the city growing up around them and these kind of higher, higher walls. I think also this idea of him being able to kind of leap from roof to roof. We love that idea today in kind of superhero stories and I think that it will have both appealed and terrified people.

So, I mean, he became the bogeyman and, you know, parents would warn their children that Spring Heel Jack could leap up and look at you through the bedroom window, you know. So this idea that he foundries couldn't keep him out. Absolutely haunting if you're a little Victorian child. I mean, if you're a little Victorian child, you were haunting yourself. That's the least of your... Well, and that, yeah. Compared to me, we have been provided with two pictures today. Two pictures that Kerry

is far more familiar with than we are. Again, I must admit this is a new personage to me. So, Maddie, I'll take the first one. I'm obsessed with these, by the way. And you take the second one. What's the glasses going on? It's serious. I'm looking at a black and white image from the very 19th century. It costs five P. I'm imagining there's some kind of penny dreadful situation going on here. It says, terror of London above the image of this devilish looking man. Then to the left of that, it says Spring Heel Jack. So, he's being very

clearly identified. There's a skull and a of a laurel wreath thing beside that as well. Okay, so Spring Hill Jack in this instance is, hmm, he seems to be, he almost has like the face of the Joker. It's very smiley but angular and evil looking. There's a very long square chin, isn't there? Yeah, that's the Joker element, I think. And then he almost has like devil horns slash ears on top of his head. Yeah, looks quite Batman-y or Catwoman even. Oh my god, he's Catwoman!

Then he has like gloves on his hand, but actually underneath he has almost Batman-like wings actually. So now he's looking very, very Batman-like. And then he's almost got Spider-Man type design down the thing. Although actually looking at it now, what it is, is it's vertebrae and ribs. But it looks like a military uniform as well. It does absolutely look like military. And you've got these glossy, very well polished, black, knee length boots. And then these sort of khaki, again, almost military trousers. Look what's going on there. That's amazing. Okay. I'm getting a little distracted because

there's loads of those ads, you know, the ads you see on the side of old buildings, you're seeing them in like, in situ here. Yeah. Yeah. They're kind of amazing. Actually, God, they're so present. And then he seems to be bounding over what I presume is London. So, I mean, you know, usually we have to ask the experts, is this what it is? But it's quite clear what's going on here. You know, it's a demonic, bad influence. It looks like he's breathing that fire that you mentioned. Is there anything that is specifically standing out to you in this image? Kerry, anything that you want to share with us that I missed? I think what really interests me about this is, by the time Spring Hill Jack was appearing

in Penny Dreadful's all kind of centering in them, he started to shift to become a kind of anti-hero, so a kind of Robin Hood type figure. Right. So think kind of vigilantes, think modern day superheroes. We keep saying Batman, but actually he's incredibly similar to Batman in that he is quite an ambiguous figure. He's not kind of all light and airy but he's there to stop the bad guys rather than be the bad guy. He eventually becomes kind of a figure of adventure and kind of rescuing the poor and the victims. So, you know, in this picture, I'm seeing, yeah, absolutely demonic and the

fire breathing, but also he's not necessarily the villain. It's so interesting that he is literally attacking people at the beginning and that he, because he exists in the outside parts of the city that even when he runs to someone's door and tries to get through that he can't transgress that boundary. But then later on he becomes, I don't know if this is fair, maybe a protector of those same streets. That's so interesting. And do you think, I'm going, I'm really doubling down on the, he is the manifestation of the city theory here, but doubling down on the, he is the manifestation of the city theory here, but is there a sense by the early 1900s, the later versions that we get of him, that people have become more comfortable with the city that they live in, that they've managed to kind of maybe come

to terms with the change that's happening in the landscape with industrialisation, that they've got a harness on it and are working alongside it rather than being completely oppressed by it? Do you think that's a fair summary of that? got a harness on it and are working alongside it rather than being completely oppressed by it. Do you think that's a fair summary of that? Possibly. I mean certainly something happened that made them want to kind of claim him as one of their own. Maybe it was just that need, turn something frightening into something that'll work for you or fight for you. Or maybe it was just it sold more. So it was a purely commercial reason. But yeah,

I mean, this is such a period of change. You know, London was growing so much. Yeah, the folklore will have changed to keep up with with all this progress. I love that that is mixed in with the commercialism actually, and that, you know, we think about the Marvel movies, for example, that just keep coming and coming. And actually, is there something of that in this, you know, there has to be a thousand reinventions of him because he does sell and so you have to keep it fresh. That's so interesting. I'm looking at the second image here, which is also titled Spring Heel Jack, The Terror of London, which is a great subtitle by the way. I would like to be billed as that anywhere

I go from now on. This is a black and white printed image, obviously from the front of some kind of illustrated magazine. This scene is a little bit more Gothic and it's less playful and darker, I would say. It's taking place at night, it's a sort of moonscape over the rooftops of the city of London and standing on one rooftop is Springhill Jack and he has shoved what looks to be a male victim down the chimney. This guy's head and arms are inside the chimney. I will say this guy's dressed not unconvincingly like a skinny Father Christmas, but that's probably beside the point and his legs are up in the air flailing. And Jack himself, he looks a little bit like the beast from Beauty and the Beast. He appears

to be naked, which is interesting given the version of him we've just had with these very polished boots and this almost kind of balletic pose in this military style uniform. He's very animalistic. I think he might even have a tail or some kind of, I don't know, these spikes growing out of the back of his spine. I think it's still got like winged appendages. Like if you look under his arms, he's still kind of like a bat. He is, but he has this terrible face again. He's got this kind of angular long face and horns this time coming out the top of his head. But he's also got this shaggy, crazy

mane. And I mean, this version is a lot more frightening. You wouldn't be pleased if you looked out of your little attic bedroom window as a Victorian child and you saw this guy on your roof. It's not great. Yeah, no, he's a little more... This one's giving werewolf. It's a very different thing. And I presume, Kerry, that that's just because nobody knew what they were talking about and so we have a huge array of things that he could be. I presume there's nothing more to it than that, really. Yeah, because there were so many different reports and everyone kind of focused on a different element. Yeah, they didn't know what he looked like. So they just, their imaginations went wild. Also, it probably reflected what was

popular at the time. You know, there were so many different horror stories and different Penny dreadfuls going around. So yeah, this one is much more kind of bestial than the other ones. It's still demonic in the face. But yeah, this is a beast rather than a kind of a gentleman. Whereas the other one you can get to some of the descriptions where he was tall and thin and gentleman-like, whereas this is a monster. Will Barron Well, let's unpack that gentlemanly potential in Spring Hill Jack because there was a rumour that he was potentially an Irish aristocrat. Tell us about that. Why

did that come about? That seems oddly specific in a genre that is full of vagaries. So now we potentially have a name. I mean, it's not true, but there was a name attached to it. You don't know if it's not true yet. Wait and see. I was there. You were spring culture. So, in January 1838, so this was before Jane Orsopp was attacked, an open letter was written to the Lord Mayor of London from an anonymous source, just a resident of Peckham was how they signed the letter, saying that the newspapers had been ignoring a lot of attacks that had been going on in villages around London. Attacks usually on women and the person who wrote the letter claimed that

it was a group of men from higher ranks of life, is the quote, who were betting themselves, kind of wagering themselves to go and scare people dressed as ghosts, beasts and devils. So the idea was... Did this really happen? This is really people doing this. People actually went out and dressed up. This is what the letter said. Okay. So yeah, the theory was that people from higher ranks of life were betting each other to go and scare people dressed up as things. After that, a servant boy reported seeing Spring-Heeled Jack wearing

a cloak with a family crest with a W on it. The idea of aristocrats dressing up to prank people to scare people and then this idea that it was somebody who had a W on their family crest. There was already quite a nefarious aristocrat, the Marquis of Waterford, so W, who that period in London was present in London. A lot of rumours around around him causing brawls and playing quite dangerous pranks and later on people accusing him of lying in wait, jumping out to scare people and then his friends following suit. So at the time it was thought that it might have been the Marquis of Waterford and his friends dressing up to scare people just for a bit of fun. We don't know. Is there a class struggle going on here then? We've talked about how the main consumers of this story, at least at the penny dreadful end of the things, were predominantly working class people. And now we have a figure, someone privileged, someone with power, someone with

money in the city who's playing pranks on people, dangerous pranks. And you know, a lot of the attacks, real life attacks that are reported and then linked to Spring Hill Jack and you know, there's a sort of murk around some of those linkages and you know, whether or not the original victims of those attacks are claiming that it's Spring Hill Jack, we'll probably never know in most instances. But is there a sense that aristocrats are dangerous, that they are somehow to blame here. It just seems too good to be true that that would be the kind of figure who would be brought out as potentially being Spring Hill Jack. I think there are definitely class tensions going on here. The idea that there are these

wealthy men who have nothing better to do than kind of prey on working class women often. And we know that they did, you know, there is evidence of that. So I think definitely class tensions and you know, whether or not he was Spring-Heeled Jack, we do know that he did, he did do some dangerous things. You know, it may have been that people were copying him and that led to further attacks. Well, I can exclusively reveal while you've been talking, I have researched the coat of arms for the Marcus of Waterford and there is no W in that coat of arms. But it is bat wings. So we can exclusively exonerate Henry de la Puer, what's his name? Henry de la Puer Bersford,

the third Marcus of Waterford. You heard it here folks. On After Dark, he was not, well he at least was not that particular night seen. But I wonder, yeah, it's just interesting that like, the W, I mean nobody at this time has a letter in their coat of arms. It would be the most bizarre thing, but then you're talking about that class element and maybe the literacy element is coming in there too and saying, well there was a W because Waterford. It's also interesting that he's an Irish aristocrat and blah element and maybe the literacy element is coming in there too and saying, well, there's a W because water verge. It's also interesting that he's an Irish aristocrat and blah, blah,

blah. But it is it's, it's, it's an interesting way of inventing, I suppose. And that's what Spring Hill Jack is, is letting people do it's letting people invent and create for good and bad. There's something so insidious, isn't't there in the story we heard at the beginning about Jane Elsop that she thinks she's speaking at first in the dark to a policeman, someone, the police are a relatively new force in the 19th century, they do have their roots in the 18th century, but police as we understand them today really take form in the 19th century and they are put out onto the streets as people that you can trust, they are there to protect your community. And of course, there's nuance and discussion around that then and now. But there's

something so terrifying about the fact that she believes that and that Spring Hill Jack is potentially taking on the form or imitating these figures of authority in order to get closer to his victims and that it's there's some kind of illusion and trickery there that's, it's really unsettling actually. And you know, going back to the sort of the changing city and the changing society, there's so much there about not being able to trust people in positions of power, aristocrats, policemen, and that the working class and female experience in London in the 19th century is incredibly dark. And that brings me to a question I want to ask about Jack the Ripper, because, and I

suppose other fictional characters as well, as Jack who obviously has roots in reality and very terrible crimes, but also became a sort of character in his own right. We've been joking the whole way through really about Spring Hill Jack having these descendants in terms of Marvel characters or DC characters or whatever and sort of being a superhero. But in the 19th century, I mean, I'm thinking about Jekyll and Hyde that we mentioned earlier. I'm thinking about the version of Jack the Ripper that emerges in the press. And also characters like Sweeney Todd, are these all born from Spring Hill Jack? Because we know that he first appears in stories really early on in the 1820s and 30s, which is, I believe

predates all of those versions. So is he the origin point of these kinds of horror figures that are the origin point of these kinds of horror figures that are moving with discretion and skill through the urban landscape and targeting specific victims? Or is he just one in a slew of stories that we tell forever? I mean, they definitely fed on the Spring Heel Jack stories. I think he kind of represents this kind of awakening of interest in these kinds of figures. And Jack the Ripper certainly did feed off it. It's probably why he's named Jack. It's kind of a direct allusion because obviously we don't know what he was called. But the letter that was written to the newspaper saying, I am Jack the Ripper, Unless his name was Jack, we are assuming that it came from

kind of Spring-Heeled Jack. Jack being this kind of almost catch-all generic term that was used for anonymous male figures in folklore. Like Joe Bloggs or something. Exactly, yeah. You know, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack and the Green, Jack and Jill, you know, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack and the Green, Jack and Jill, you know, everyone's named Jack in folklore. So certainly fed off that. And I think that Jack the Ripper was, you know, a very different phenomenon in that it was very real and it was very horrific and people did die. And it kind of overtook, overshadowed Spring Hill Jack. You know, you see that transition by the time we get to kind of Jack the, overshadowed Spring-Heel Jack. You see that transition by the time we get to Jack the Ripper. Interest in Spring-Heel Jack has started to wane and all of a sudden

you had this, I'm not going to say more real threat because I imagine Spring-Heel Jack was, did feel quite real to people who were living in London at the time, but you had this kind of very obviously tangible evidence of what he was doing and there was no denying it. But yeah, I think a lot of the ideas about what these later gothic, horrific figures were probably did stem from Spring-Kill Jack. And it sounds like he becomes subsumed within, you know, you're talking about reality, but it sounds like he almost becomes subsumed within the reality of figures like the person we call Jack the Ripper. It's almost like the reality starts to take over because it's so horrific in itself, it starts to take over from this element of invention.

Do we see that with urban legends generally? Is that a way in which urban legends that don't last tend to peter out, that they just become part of other stories or other realities or other new stories? Does that account for why he hasn't really stuck with us today? I mean again, I just wasn't familiar with the name. Yeah, I mean it's the nature of urban legends to shift, constantly shift, because they're representing anxieties of the time, they're of the time and of the place. That's what makes them urban legends. There aren't really any that stick because the society is always changing. Spring Heel Jack wouldn't necessarily work today because we have so much better lighting in our urban centers. Everyone carries a phone, you know, you could capture

them on the phone. And also because there's so much of the macabre, so much of the horrific on our TVs that there's almost less of a need to kind of get that violence out there through stories like that. But yeah, urban legends like folklore are always changing. And this was one that lasted quite a long time really, when you think about it from kind of the 1820s up to the early 1900s. And it didn't just stay in London, you know, it traveled. There are examples of sightings in the Midlands, in Scotland. So up and down the country for nearly a century he was being cited. So it did actually lasted longer than most urban legends, it's just not as relevant today.

I love the idea that we may have lost the use for him now but he might still be out there that's such a great place to end. Kerry thank you so much for this discussion it's been absolutely fascinating and I know we'll have you back for many more folkloric episodes to come. If you've enjoyed this episode, then you can leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're not doing so currently, you can watch this episode on YouTube. If you are watching that, you already know that. Congratulations. Yes, go. We have a new YouTube channel where you will be finding all of our content from the podcast and some extra special content as well. So take a look at that.

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