Spring-Heeled Jack, East-End Disappearances & Other Mysterious Characters

Yeah but c'mon, the Quake thing does have a certain appeal to it...don't you think?
 
I also find it intriguing that many of the Jack reports (urban mythology) seem to mirror the earlier, rural mythology relating to Boggarts and the like. Saucer eyed, fire breathing, leaping THINGS. I wonder if there might have been an influx of migration to cities around the times of the various panic outbreaks?

By which I mean that either the archetypal panic image of the Boggart was imported into the urban environment or (and I prefer this one) the infuriated crossroads ghosts themselves went to seek their fortunes in the big smoke (with considerably more success then yer average peasant type).
 
You know, you might have a point, there was an increased migration to the big cities from the 1780's onwards due to the industrial revolution and the change in the rural economy.

The same folk tales would still be remembered & maybe, an old slant put on local events taking place in the new city!!!
 
So we get a kind of weird vision of belief at the time...

Urban events, seen through rural folklore. Then, in turn, these beliefs are filtered through urban media. So it's an urbanised spin on a ruralised version of urban events... :rolleyes: If that makes sense!
 
SHJ, a survival of folk-legend or the sign of rising mass
literacy and popular papers? Half and half?

His hey-day seems to have been the 1850s to 1870s but
once published, he was planted in the memory and could
be revived in any locality to explain something untoward.

After a while he goes to dwell abroad and adapts to a
new habitat. Alive and well this year as Monkey Man?
 
I was kind of thinking on the lines of: you can take someone away from their rural roots but he still has his folk tales & legends. I think most cultures seem to have the same basic fears & SHJ & Jack the R. take on mythological proportions. The oger in the forest becomes the creature in the dark alley, with the same feeling of terror.
 
I agree with all that, David. But one notable thing about
SHJ is that his name remains fixed despite wide geographical
distribution. People were reading about him.

It would be interesting to see if his other characteristics are more
fixed than folk legends, such as the black dogs, whose names
vary even within small regions. :rolleyes:
 
Good point James W.

It might be assumed that newspaper reporting would fix name, discription & method of operation of SHJ in the public mind. But, is this the case?

I regret that I don't have an answer to that!!!
 
Monkey Man & SHJ

James Whitehead - you're absolutely right that the Monkey Man panic has a lot of parrallels with SHJ. For example...

1. Both entities make escapes by making prodigious leaps

2. Both attack and leave flesh wounds with metal claws

3. Both are attributed with the ability to change into animals (this is only really mentioned in the very early SHJ reports)

4. Both are said to have glowing eyes

5. Both are tall (though this varies in the MM sightings... in some cases "he's" only around 4ft)

6. The description of both varies considerably, but both are said to either wear armour and a bizarre helmet, or dress in white (this being a main part of the Everton/Sheffield/Bradford cases)

7. Both inspire angry vigilante mobs!

Also the official line is that the MM wounds were self inflicted... which links it in with the Halifax Slasher, and the invisible assailants in Wild Talents .
 
I've been nosing at SHJ in penny dreadful type sites and it seems he was represented as a Robin Hood poor helping type. He also wore tight colourful outfits and had odd powers. Could it be that Jack was the first super hero?
 
Okay guys, so all this thinking and supposing is all fine and dandy, but the question is, What was SHJ, alien, cyborg, time traveller?
Some theories please, with or wthout reason...
 
Oracle - I think the general consensus on this thread is "folklore-inspired moral panic" rather than alien, cyborg, time traveller, ghost or any other beastie.

You never know, though...
 
Something I've always thought about Jack; the penny dreadfuls portray him as an avenging hero. The reports at the time describe a horned man, terrifying people in a decaying city, ridden with crime and vice.

So, there's this terrible dark ghastly place and there's this man in a cape with horns who terrifies some people and is seen as a hero by others...

Bob Kane? Did ye read of Jack?

There's a US murder case from the 1920s where the killer was nicknamed SHJ. To paraphrase Norman Stanley Fletcher 'he done his wife', but didn't leave any footprints near the body (in snow, I think). If anyone has any more info...

Steven King used the name for a serial killer in the short story 'Strawberry Spring', but didn't seem to make the connection with our Jack; he mentions the above case instead. Interestingly, 'Strawberry Spring' is largely concerned with fear and social panic. What is it about this name?

Our man Mr. F did call them 'Jacks' though, didn't he?
 
I think there is this odd mixture of fear and a kind of warped
admiration for these figures. We know them as Jacks, a
friendly common name of Everyman and after all they are
acting out some of the primal savage aspects of human nature.

There was a similar public intimacy, I thought, with the totally
ghastly Fred and Rose West, serial killers but also figures of
burlesque, as if we could not really get our minds around them.

Of course being frightened is a more intense way of living than
feeling nothing so they earn our gratitude?

It does seem to require a high level of sacrificial blood-letting, or
at least the rumour of it to unleash this sort of response. Though
these days, I suppose tabloid reporting adds to the sense of
unreality. :(
 
-Oracle- said:
Okay guys, so all this thinking and supposing is all fine and dandy, but the question is, What was SHJ, alien, cyborg, time traveller?
Some theories please, with or wthout reason...
Click to expand...

Denfinately some sort of Moral Panic or Mass Hysteria, but the truly Fortean Question is - Why then and why like that.

I reckon something must have tipped the whole thing off. Perhaps there was a mad aristocrat running around getting his jollies by scaring the crap out of the proles.

Cujo
 
I like the tabloid thing. Here’s a thought - excuse me if it’s a bit off the wall.

What if this has something to do with the way we exchange information.

In a less literate society with little access to reliable news sources news would travel
generally by word of mouth so that even a relatively local event could take days to get
to an individual. Filtered through the passage of time and several retellings and the
original story could have changed dramatically. Maybe it needed a recognisable figure
to anchor the details of an event to. It may even be that in violent or unstable times it
was actually more comforting to believe that one, albeit frightening and outlandish
figure, was responsible for events rather than many unconnected individuals. (I’m
assuming the dates 1837 to 1877 are reasonably accurate for SHJ sightings).

Conversely the exploits of Jack the Ripper took place at the same time as the rise of
the tabloid newspaper and a general growth in literacy. For the first time people could
read about an event very soon after it occured. It may even be that as the tabloids
were a relatively new phenomenon the authorities had less control over them and less
machinery to censor reports. It’s unlikely that Jack the Ripper was the first serial
killer but he was the first to be “fixed” in the public imagination by the newspapers
 
Some good stuff in there, Spook, and it raises a few issues.
Until the arrival of papers with "official" facts, were news
items and legends distinct in people's minds?

I always find it interesting that we can go back a long way
into societies that were largely illiterate and we still find they
had notaries to record wills and legal documents. The material
base of society was as hard-headed as anything today. So
whenever we assume people were more open to the supernatural,
I bet there was also a strong vein of earthy scepticism too.

For all the occasional reports we have of people contracting to
marry the Queen of the Fairies - it happened! - my guess is that
as wide a range of responses to the uncanny existed as today.

As regards oral transmission, the academic view is that it is LESS
inclined to corruption than the written word. That does seem to be
counter-intuitive and the model was the trained bard or troubador.
Legends such as spectral black dogs are so widespread, though, it
would seem highly unlikely they grew from a single incident.

Where that leaves SHJ, I am not sure. The illustrated papers had a
field day with him, several decades before Jack the Ripper. To a
large extent these papers were taking on a rôle that gossip had
served before. How much people really believed is hard to say.
Commerce must have made some difference but these papers were
not a million miles away from the gallows ballads that had been
around for ages. :confused:
 
I wonder how much the education act of 1872 which declared education to be free, compulsory and secular and must have increased literacy massively changed the whole way stories were told and perceived. It struck me as significant that this date sat pretty comfortably between the two Jacks.
 
We know a fair amount about Victorian reading habits: the
notion of the family reading aloud around the fire sounds rather
sentimental but it happened. Also books got read and re-read, though the
most popular authors were not always ones which have survived.

Along with the staples we tend to think of: Shakespeare and the
Bible, Dickens, Wilkie Collins with Milton and Longfellow for poetry, there
was also the habit of fathers reading selectively? from newspapers. But
there was a lot of fustian stuff about, especially in the historical novel genre
after Walter Scott.

The education act was some sort of milestone but before it there
was a great deal of self-help going on, especially fuelled by Methodism and
Temperance beliefs. But the presses were kept turning by literature
that was far from improving in tone. The real poor could not afford
papers at all, so I guess at least some of the lurid stuff was read, at
least in private in "respectable" homes.

SHJ sits midway between the gothic chiller and the urban myth. I guess
he was mainly used as a bogey to frighten the kids into behaiving. Like the
modern urban myth, he would serve for people to remind each other just
how dangerous the world was getting.

At which point, it looks as if the original question in the thread has drawn
a complete blank. All those disappearances, I'm beginning to think they must have
happened, because we can't find any evidence! :)
 
East End Disapearances

Tom Slemen seems like a nice fellow but his writings tend to be in the style of the late Frank Edwards. His theory concerning Claude Conder is something that I've written about extensively on the message boards of "Casebook Jack the Ripper."
There is no evidence to show that Conder was anywhere near Whitechapel at the appropriate time. Tom thought that he'd found proof when he identified a street in North East London close to Whitechapel as the Conder family home. However a moments research in the 1881 census showed the Conder family living in Guildford. There is currently a street with the same name as their Guildford residence close to Whitechapel but it's not the one they lived at. So part of Tom's evidence is just a coincidence. The idea that cuts on Catherine Eddowes face could be letters in a strange dialect known to Conder is self-evidently daft.
Unfortunately, there's a tendency to find an interesting male Victorian and then hunt for proof that he was Jack! This is of course good for book-sales (cf James Maybrick) but adds nothing to genuine Ripper research. So Conder joins the list of unlikely Ripper candidates which comprise Prince Albert Victor, JK Stephens, Lewis Carroll and would you believe Weedon Grossmith?
In reality, the arch-fiend was actually Sooty in his previous incarnation as a wooly bedsock.
Peter Birchwood.
 
Conder and Slemen

As a fugitive from some of the crazies of the Casebook Jack the Ripper messageboards, I've had a lot to say about Tom Slemen and his unlikely Conder theory. Tom's a nice guy but his paranormal stuff (mainly ghosts) is in the style of the late Frank Edwards. If he has a book coming out on Conder and if TV production companies are interested in it, I really despair about the state of the media. For example: one of Tom's main planks in the theory is that Conder demonstrably lived close to Whitechapel during the crimes. Not true. Tom picked up his address and assumed that a street with an identical name near Hackney Dog Track was the Conder residence. (I think that street is fairly new and certainly the dog track wasn't there in 1888.)
In fact, Conder lived with his wife and family in the more salubrious Guildford area.
I really can't believe that Paul Begg has given his blessing to this theory. He has good Fortean credentials and apart from our differences of opinion concerning the absurd "Diary of Jack the Ripper" I have every respect for him.
 
The fascination with the ripper hinges on the belief that
the Devil has to be a gentleman.

All the speculation relies on the notion that only a middle-
class person could have had the privacy to wash off the
blood of the victims. A strange notion which displays profound
ignorance of the social scene - the first official Ripper victim
was discovered by a night-working horse-slaughterer!

The florid notions of upper-class conspiracy and police-masonic
corruption developed in the sixties and seventies in the wake
of the JFK conspiracy theories.

It is a mystery why a serial killer of such ferocity stopped so
suddenly. Suicide is the likeliest explanation.

A market now exists for anything published on the case. Almost
any Victorian figure can be fitted in the frame. How about Elgar?
He stopped ripping when he got married. . . .? :devil:
 
Does anyone recall the 'Tumblety' solution a few years back? Any idea on the standing of this now? Very Alan Moore, dance of the Gull Catchers and all that...

My personal favourite suspect was in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Jack is unmasked and revealed to be...God.

Look, it's good when you read it, honest.
 
I live in the heart of "Ripper Country", and a couple of years back Mrs Zygmunt and I went on a "Ripper Tour", fortunately we had a guide who was pretty level headed, and very knowlegable of the area and the real facts. When one of the tourists asked him who he thought did it, he said he didn't know, but he did say he thought it would probably be an unremarked nobody, and from the same community as the victims, which seems a pretty sound theory to me.

By the way, the ripper tours have to literally "queue" to get to the sites. They're so big now they have to stagger their visits. One evening I was late to meet a friend at the pub, because they blocked the whole street I was on!
 
Serial killers in the modern day tend to suddenly stop their pattern of behaviour because they're picked up and jailed on another charge. Whether this would apply to Victorian Britain is unknown to me, though if JTR is indeed the middle-class Victorian he's so often portrayed to be then a quick scan of court records or sensational cases of an upstanding citizen being indicted might turn up some interesting leads.

John Douglas, founder of the FBI criminal profiling team, selected Aaron Kosminski as the most likely culprit based upon FBI profiling techniques, though this was some years before the Tumblety evidence was unearthed. Suddenly leaving the country as Tumblety did would certainly bring things to a halt.

Speaking of the cult of the anti-hero, there is of course the Hollywood adaptation of the graphic novel about to be released in the US

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120681
 
Standard Hollywood fare then (i.e. desecrate the source material for the lowest common denominator)
I'm not familiar with either the book or the movie, just making the point that JTR still captivates audiences everywhere. Thanks for the scoop, GD.
 
A little enlightenment

I read an entry in a book on unsolved murders (called "Unsolved Murders" I believe, I'll have to return to the library to find the exact book & more exact details). From what I can remember about reading it is that it wasn't totally inexplicable. Several young girls disappeared from the East End (about 2 or 3, maybe more), some from only several doors apart. There was several cases at the beginning of the 1890s & some at the end. 2 bodies were indeed found, one I believe was strangled. From reading the article it seemed that several theories were put foward, though it seems to me a case of that it was the work of a serial killer who probably knew the area very well. (Strange disappearances do occur even now, but there not necessarily inexplicable. Research on child abductions in hospitals in the US indicates an abductor can remove a child & make them seemingly vanish into 'thin air' in as little as a few seconds). Like all cases of disappearance this one seems to have got entangled in myth & distortion. Supposedly an elderly woman disappeared from her house & no-one saw anything & all the pre-requisite items (uncooked meal, etc.) were left behind. But the book said it is unsure if the woman even existed. And the case may not be connected to the young girls. Another case of a man supposedly who disappeared & was found under cliffs at Ramsgate from the area (& no-one knew how he got there) was actually twisted & was a straight-foward case of robbery & murder, though the accused was acquitted. More accurate details if I can find them.
 
SPRING-HEELED JACK - THE ORIGINAL MOTHMAN ?

I have extensively researched winged entities which may be part of the 'cryto' bracket or indeed urban legends or ghost stories, but there seems to be an awful lot of 'winged' beasts etc, some more human-like than others. Owlman, Mothman, etc have all been given names to enable to society to mould them better, even though such abominations were nothing of the sort, and I have often wondered if Spring-Heeled Jack was in any way related to these phantoms. I certainly do not go with the hoax theories because such a character has been seen all over the world, from the Victorian era up until the present, and what with the Jersey Devil, Brentford Griffin, Big Birds, ancient harpies etc, there seems to be a cycle to many of these legends and yet they all remain too bizarre to almost except, yet clearly something has happened, whether in the form of them being tulpas projected by the mind, or real inhabitants of some other place we do not know about. Any theories ?
 
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