Lucy Scales and Spring-heeled Jack, Green Dragon Alley, Limehouse

By the winter of 1837 and 1838, London was living with a rumour. It began on Barnes Common in September 1837. Then Clapham Common. Then Blackheath, where witnesses spoke of claws, fiery eyes and a smell of sulphur. In January 1838 the Lord Mayor aired complaints at the Mansion House. A vigilance committee formed, and the Duke of Wellington reportedly joined a posse. On the night of 19 February 1838, at Old Ford, Jane Alsop said a man posing as a policeman threw off his cloak, breathed blue and white flame and clawed at her. The papers had a name for him. Spring-heeled Jack.

Wednesday, 28 February 1838. Lucy Scales and her sister had spent the evening at their brother's house in Narrow Street, Limehouse. At about half past eight they set off for home. Their way led through Green Dragon Alley. Lucy walked a little ahead.

Then they saw him. A person "standing in an angle in the passage." He was tall and thin, of gentlemanly appearance, "enveloped in a large cloak." In front of him he carried "a small lamp, or bull's eye, similar to those in the possession of the police." He did not speak. He did not touch them.

He "spurted a quantity of blue flame right in her face, which deprived her of her sight." Another report says he "puffed a quantity of flame from his mouth." Lucy dropped to the ground. The figure walked away.

Her brother, a butcher, heard the screams. He ran up the alley and found Lucy on the ground in a fit, her sister holding her up. She was taken home. The fits went on for several hours. The surgeon Charles Pritchel certified that she was "suffering from hysterics and great agitation, in all probability the result of fright."

Mr. Scales took the story to the Lambeth-street police office, accompanied by a sister of eighteen. He added one strange detail. Minutes before they left his house, one of his sisters had been reading the newspaper account of Spring-heeled Jack.

The Morning Post reported the hearing on 7 March 1838. Police detained and examined several people, but nothing linked any of them to the attack and each was released. One later account says police believed the attacker had blown through a tube in which spirits of wine, sulfur and another ingredient were ignited. Some writers date the attack to 18 or 20 February, but the surgeon's certificate names Wednesday, the 28th. Nobody was ever convicted.

The lantern and the fine cloak lead many writers to a human prankster in costume. Others stress the newspaper the sister had just been reading, and the surgeon's verdict of fright. Folklorist Jacqueline Simpson doubted that one man lay behind all the reports, pointing instead to panic amplified by the press. Researcher Mike Dash treated the Scales attack as the last real report of the 1838 wave, with later cases the work of imitators.

Rumour later settled on the Marquess of Waterford, an idea Peter Haining accepted in 1977. Dash judged parts of Haining's account to be inventions. No source ties Waterford to Limehouse.

Green Dragon Alley vanished in 1869 beneath the new dock entrance to Limehouse Basin. The legend did not. Spring-heeled Jack moved into penny dreadfuls and onto the stage, and reports followed at Aldershot in 1877 and Everton, Liverpool, in 1904. The Limehouse attack drew little press at the time. Yet it remains one of the clearest moments in the story. Two sisters. A narrow alley. A cloaked man with a lantern, and a flame of blue.