• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

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

The last time I read about him he didn't have wings and didn't fly, just kind of jumped over houses and 20 foot high walls.
 
River_Styx said:
The last time I read about him he didn't have wings and didn't fly, just kind of jumped over houses and 20 foot high walls.
Click to expand...

thats exactly what i read, springheeled jack was a man who could jump over buildings when being chased etc. and the mothman is a totally different phenomana.

NIEL do you have any online literature, we can take a butchers at?
 
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 ?
Click to expand...


Theres the same thing with alien sightings were apparently different types of alien are seen. Could they be classisfied under the same thing as these?
 
mrchopper said:
thats exactly what i read, springheeled jack was a man who could jump over buildings when being chased etc. and the mothman is a totally different phenomana.

NIEL do you have any online literature, we can take a butchers at?
Click to expand...
Oh and the whole spitting blue fire thing, or was it green? And thinking it through more his M.O. was more, knock on the door of a house and try to rape the woman who answered or attack the man. But don't quote me on that last part.
 
Spring-Heeled Jack was seen with a cape, so I can understand what people mean when they say thay he and Mothman are different, but there have been many sightings worldwide of caped and winged figures, including Lizard Man who at first appeared like a Bigfoot or swamp humanoid but was also seen to spring above vehicles. The Goatsucker is similar in that it seems to have large 'webs' under its arms in some descriptions but it doesn't seem to be able to fly. I still classify them in the same 'otherwordly' and subconscious realm but many appear very much of their time, just like the Men In Black and phantom airships. What I will say though, as far as I am concerned, any figure that leaps from a church steeple must have some magical ability to at least 'float, fly' or levitate even if wings are not apparent. I never perceived Spring-Heeled Jack as vicious hoaxer or crazy inventor, but as some kind of phantom trickster.
 
There was nothing to suggest SHJ was a winged animal form like Mothman, Jersey Devil etc (though early reports gave him the power to transform into a bear), but was either a superhuman man, a mere prankster built up in the press to the level of superhuman, or a moral panic.
 
Does anyone here think that the Monkeyman could have been springheeled Jack. Lots of witnesses reported him jumping over rooftops. The Monkey man didn't breathe flame though. The only problem is that Jack must be hundreds of years old. Maybe there is a relationship to the chupa as that is often desceribed as hopping about. A quick thought though, as I have got no evidence to support it.

:cross eye
 
The SHJ-Monkeyman connection is mentioned on the thread link I gave above too.
 
Well, to summise James Whitehead suggested that Monkey Man is a new form of SHJ, and I agreed stating the similarities between SHJ and MM:

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!
 
Evilsprout said:
Well, to summise James Whitehead suggested that Monkey Man is a new form of SHJ, and I agreed stating the similarities between SHJ and MM:

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!
Click to expand...
From what I remember reading SHJ's attacks seemed to be more sexually motivated than MM.
 
Of what i've read of Spring Heeled Jack he didn't especially reape women just attacked them and men too. I think the pictures of him are over done to make him look like the devil.

as for him being hyped up the victorians were very fastidious on being highly sceptical and apparently calm about the supernatural but i suppose they could of hyped it up in the news but probably not the police and army(most likely):hmph: .
I also heard SHJ dissapeared in 1904 or 1905 in leicester I think
:confused: .

I am in the argument with my mother though whether he was supernatural monster or loopy Circus worker who did all these leping tricks and taught his son them too(would explain the amount of time he was seen and a travelling circus would explain all the different locations too)

I also thought he was cool doing all that stuff I wish I could jump on the rooves and scare the S!*T out of the police :D
 
Sheffield Spring heeled Jack

Anyone have anymore information in regards to these incidents between 1972 and 1979 in Attercliffe, Sheffield.
I ask because I came across the story on mysterymag.com, and I gave a talk at University this morning regarding this in the context of Sheffield fortea, and one of the audience came to me and told me of her experience with SSHJ in 1978, and the ghastly eyes staring at her through the window in her attic at 3 in the morning when she was around 10 or 11.

:eek!!!!:
 
Very interesting!

We've discussed Sheff's very own SHJ before, on this rather meandering thread.

What course are you doing though where you can do talks on Sheffield Forteans?! I feel I've been cheated over the last three years doing boring media studies, where the only Forteana I managed to slip in was an essay on moral panics and urban myths!
 
Spring heeled chimp

Wasn't there mean to have been a sort of 'spring heeled ape' of some description in India recently? There was a bit of mass hysteria involved there, if i remember right - although a lot of people claim to have seen it.
Anyone know anything?
 
*Large cloud of dust as ancient thread is stirred*

I was having a clear out of the saved email pile and came across a link for the Bulwer-Lytton prize for worst opening to a novel (very funny and worth a read). It's named after the efforts of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose name rings a faint bell as having some association with Forteana, I suspect the Spring-Heeled Jack phenomenon, though I can't be sure. If anyone knows what it is, please let me know as it's bugging the hell out of me. I found this quote:

"The last of his books to be popular was The Last Days of Pompeii, a cruder work than his best historical novels, though credited with inspiring Madame Blavatsky to her adventurous career as mystical hierophant and founder of the theosophical society."

Though I don't think it was that....

It's interesting how SHJ-type sightings crop up all over the world, seeming to suggest an archetype associated with mass panic. Here are a couple more, though he opts to wear white this time:

"In September 1904, South of Liverpool in England, Spring Heeled Jack appeared on the roof of a church. He was spotted hanging on the steeple of St. Francis Xaviers on Salisbury Street. Onlookers claimed he suddenly dropped from the steeple and fell to the ground. Thinking that he had committed suicide, they rushed to the point where he had landed (behind some houses) only to find a helmeted man, clothed in white, standing there waiting. He scuttled towards the crowd, raised his arms, and took to the air over William Henry Street.

"The final recorded event occurred in 1920 at the Central Railway Station in London. A man in a white cloak was seen jumping back and forth from rooftop to the street below."
 
Here's a nice one from 83 - anything more recent in the UK?


"During that year’s late summer (1983), there were reports of a bizarre flasher at a lonely spot known as Nannygoat Bank, near Tow Law, County Durham.

His similarity to Spring Heeled Jack was that he was seen to clear a six - foot wall in one leap and escaped into the night.

One of the best descriptions of the original Jack came from Jane Alsop, who answered the door in Bearhind Lane, Bow, East London, in February 1838. The man claimed to be a police officer requesting a light as Jack had been arrested. She handed the man a lighted candle, at which he shrugged off his coat to reveal a horned helmet and a tight, white costume. The police searched in vain for so conspicuous a figure.

Of course fashions change. The athletic flasher in County Durham wore pink tights and women’s knickers on his head as he exposed himself to traffic on the isolated stretch of the A68 road.

A four strong party of farmers from two remote farm houses nearby failed in their night time bid to catch him.

“I have never seen anyone get away so fast. He just took off and ran so fast, and then cleared a wall with one jump. We were trying to catch him, but we had no chance,” said 20 year old Alan Haley. “But if he carries on doing this and steps out in front of a car, he could get himself killed and get other hurt. And if he’s not stopped soon, he could start doing other things.

“He was sitting on the kerbside and just had tights and knickers over his head. It was freezing cold and he looked really strange. It was quite a shock. You don’t expect people to come up here looking like that and doing that sort of thing.”

He added: “We jumped out of the car to grab him, but he just ran off. So we gave chase, but he was too fast for us.”

Another farmer, who declined to be names, thought the man also wore a parka.

Police with tracker dogs late found the man’s sandals and knickers, but failed to find the flasher.

Is it justifiable to connect the original Spring Heeled Jack with this seeming pervert? Both share an amazing athletic ability, both determined to shock people, both dress oddly and both have the ability to evade vigilantes.

Perhaps even the acrobatic Superman, with his tight costume and tights with pants worn outside is an intermediary role model in the evolution of the Spring Heeled Jack phenomenon."
 
Perhaps even the acrobatic Superman, with his tight costume and tights with pants worn outside is an intermediary role model in the evolution of the Spring Heeled Jack phenomenon."
Click to expand...
There's a thought, Superman, perhaps even`Bizzaro Superman,' finally cracks and becomes the time-travelling, flasher, slasher perv,' Spring Heeled Jack!

Alan Moore and Frank Miller to write that one for DC? With a big finale, `Spring Heeled Jack v. Jack the Ripper!'
 
I've heard accounts of people with mental illnesses having almost super human strength. Perhaps SHJ and the County Durham flasher were really local nutters prowling the streets?
 
More on the West Ham Disappearances 1881-1890

Is it really October since I posted something about the West Ham disappearances? Well here's what you've not all been waiting for.
This information comes from 'The Who's Who of Unsolved Murders' by James Morton (under 'Eliza Carter').

The first to disappear was supposedly a 67 year old woman who vanished on 12th April 1881 from her home on Keogh Road, West Ham. It is a classic disappearance in that everything appeared to be undisturbed. I say 'supposedly' because Morton casts doubt whether this actually occurred at all because he says it was not well-documented in local newspapers as the other cases were. If it did, he suggests "the onset of amnesia" (p. 57). Such disappearances aren't as uncommon as you'd think. In the hunt for Milly Dowler the body of an elderly woman was found in the Thames. She had been missing for a year(!) and there was nothing suspicious about her death.

The same cannot be said for the other disappearances.

14 year old girl called Mary Seward who disappeared on 13th April 1881. She had been told by her mother to look for her cousin and was not seen again. She was supposedly "a trifle backward" according to Morton. There was supposedly a sighting at a local fairground with a gypsy. The Home Office offered a reward of £25, but local people thought this showed that government valued the "lives of young girls... poorly" (p. 57).


The next to disappear was Eliza Carter (who lived only 10 doors away from Mary Seward in Church Street, West Ham) on 28 January 1882. She left her older sister's house to go to her parent's home in Church Street at 10 am. There were number of sightings between then & 11 pm. She first went to a laundry, but was not seen again until 5 pm. She saw a school friend outside West Ham Park (at The Portway) and told her she was "afraid to go home because 'of that man'" (p. 56). The next sighting was at about 11 pm when she was seen in with "an ugly middle-aged woman" (p. 56). After this she was not seen again.

However, her blue dress was found the next day on a local football field with the buttons cut off her dress. Arrowroot biscuit crumbs were discovered in the pockets and she might have been enticed into the park with them. Her abductor may have been a woman. Though not in the book I known there was a crime prevalent at the time known as 'child stripping' where children were lured into alleyways & then robbed of their most valuable clothes.

A case often linked to the disappearances occurred on 1st April 1882. 17 year old Charles Wagner disappeared and was found at bottom of cliffs at Ramsgate without it being clear how he got that. Morton's research shows this isn't quite right. He had been carrying some gold and had been robbed and murdered. John Walters was charged with the murder, but acquitted. He was, however, convicted of theft. He had apparently been with the victim on the previous day. Often murder cases (e.g. Jack the Ripper, etc.) throw up lots of coincidences like this with misconceptions building up over time to become facts. Of course, John Walters could be the person responsible as there was a hiatus of eight years in the disappearances (he could of served the time in jail, but as I know nothing more than the book says I'm only speculating). This is unless, of course, if the first set of disappearances were unconnected to the second, though I think this is ruled out by them occurring in the pretty much the same location.

Morton says three girls disappeared in quick succession in January 1890. However, he gives details of only one. 15 year old Millie Jeffs lived only twelve doors from Mary Seward's home. Her father gave her money to buy fish in Church Street at 6.30 pm, but she hadn't returned by 7.30 pm. A search produced no sign of her. However, unlike the others her body was found. Policemen searching for stolen lead found her body in a cupboard at 126 West Road, "known as The Portway" (p. 57). She had apparently been sexually assaulted and strangled. Her murder remained unsolved.

Morton says as a possible solution to disappearances of the girls is "that they were kidnapped for the purposes of white slavery and child prostitution" (p. 57). I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Morton's research, though he gives some good footnotes (e.g. as in the case of Charles Wagner), he seems to have read sources from the time (local papers) and he has a 3 page bibliography. All I can add is that it seems more likely to me that a serial killer was on the loose. Maybe there was some kind of organisation involved, but the hiatus strikes me as typical of serial killer cases where the offender goes to prison then resumes the killing spree on release. If it was the work of more than one individual why the gap? However, as the case was never solved and I don't know any more than what Morton has written this is just speculation.
 
I thought I heard noises in this old abandoned thread. Pretending to be ghosts, so as to scare the neighbours away, huh?

Another quick look through that old chestnut 'Mothman Prophecies' and it occurs to me that there's a SHJ reference in Point Pleasant. A number of farmers reported figures in white leaping impossible distances at night, usually when cattle were going missing.

I draw no conclusions.
 
Re Bulwer-Lytton

The most common Fortean connection is his book The Coming
Race, an early scientific-political fantasy about a race who
inhabit the hollow earth. They are powered by a mysterious
force called Vril. Some say the book has proto-fascistic tendencies.

I have a reference somewhere to a website which discusses the
work as a Victorian shock-horror reaction to the discovery of the
notion of entropy. Suddenly the sun seemed vulnerable to age and
a new inner light was called for.

The name Vril lives on - mainly in Bovril.

Wagner's third opera Rienzi was based on one of Lord Lytton's
historical novels.

His collected works can be obtained in some bookshops for a
few quid a yard, depending on binding. :rolleyes:
 
Familiar description?

People are fleeing Indian villages to escape a man who allegedly plucks flesh from his victims with long claws.

Around 50 villages in the Ghazipur district of Uttar Pradesh are in fear of the so-called monster man who is reported to have attacked 36 people.

One of the man's victims claims to have seen red and green lights coming from his body before he struck.

He is also rumoured to have long hair, blood-shot eyes and claws like a tiger.

...Director general of Police RK Pandit has launched an investigation into the alleged attacks by the man, known as Mooh Nochva.

...Sify reports his victims have included a woman called Pikkhi who had flesh ripped off her face, neck and arms, and student Jai Prakash Paswan whose face and arms were badly scratched.
Click to expand...

Here.
Mod Edit: Original link is dead. Archived link found via The Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/2002102...tory/sm_625113.html?menu=news.latestheadlines
 
Last edited by a moderator:
"Spring-Heeled Jim lives to love,
now kissing with his mouth full,
and his eyes on some other fool....
so many women, his head should be spinnin!"
 
It looks like SHJ's 150-year world tour is still ongoing...
 
DanHigginbottom said:
Pray silence please for the most impossibly unhelpful comment ever posted; (ahem) a couple of years ago, this got discussed in the FT letters page. As I recall, someone mentioned a book on the subject...and that's all I can remember. Sorry about that but if I can find the issue in question, I'll post the details.

Apparently, there was also a role playing game (!) based around the disappearances. I don't know much about 'em, but it was HP Lovecraft related; possibly some connection to the stories of sacrificial cults? It does seem a bit 'Call of Cthullhu'.
Click to expand...

I was the one who wrote a reply about these disappearances to the Letters section of FT :) I mentioned that the only reference to them which I'd come across was in Colin Wilson's 'The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2' (pp.326-327).
They seem to have been called 'The Vanishings', beginning in 1881, centered around East and West Ham:
11-year old Eliza Carter was seen by a friend to be in a state of terror, and was refusing to go home. Her dress was later found at East Ham football ground, with it's buttons missing, but she was never seen again (1881).
Charles Wagner, of West Ham, disappeared, his body later being found 75 miles away at the foot of the cliffs at Ramsgate. His body bore no signs of injury (he hadn't fallen or drowned).
3 girls from West Ham vanished on the same day (Jan. 1890). Only one was found dead later in West Ham park; she'd been strangled after a violent struggle.

Hope that sheds a little light on the subject. Personally, I think the disappearances of the girls are probably linked to a sex-related crime of some sorts. Charles Wagner's death is more obscure. I think the disappearances were also mentioned in a 'Call of Cthulhu' RPG sourcebook called 'Cthulhu By Gaslight'.
 
JerryB said:
Hope that sheds a little light on the subject. Personally, I think the disappearances of the girls are probably linked to a sex-related crime of some sorts. Charles Wagner's death is more obscure. I think the disappearances were also mentioned in a 'Call of Cthulhu' RPG sourcebook called 'Cthulhu By Gaslight'.
Click to expand...

Currently re-reading this sourcebook (second edition) for more victorian london resources for my Castle Falkenstien campaign. I'll check up on any references and post them here.
 
Cthulhu by Gaslight

Hmm...

Checked it out last night. Yeah, its mentioned in vague passing but very definately not in the amount that you could call a central feature. One section of the book has a timeline for 1880-1900, a paragraph per year. In two of those paragraphs it mentions that the mysterious dissappearances begin, and then later it mentions that they end. No further details, no further references. Unfortunate really as it does seem the ideal place to extrapolate a bizzare and esoteric theory to base a scenario around.

I don't think this is the roleplaying game based around them! :D

It does however cite 4 or 5 other roleplaying games and supplements that it used as resources (including a Sherlock Holmes one that I have). May be more information in there.
 
Yeah, I didn't think that there was that much about this subject in that sourcebook. I've not read it for years! I don't think there are any RPGs based around these events either, altho' I'm not on authority on things RPG-related nowadays.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top