Spring-heeled Jack in William Henry Street, Everton, Liverpool (1904)

Spring-heeled Jack was born in London in 1837 and 1838. A Victorian bogeyman, blamed for the attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales. The name kept coming back. The "Peckham Ghost" of 1872. Aldershot in 1877. Liverpool had its own brush with it in 1888. Boys of St Francis Xavier's Boys' Guild heard of a sighting on Shaw Street, and a crowd is alleged to have claimed the thing was clinging to the steeple of St Francis Xavier's Church. In 1904, Aldine's penny serial Spring-heeled Jack was running in the shops.

21 September 1904. The Liverpool Echo ran a story headed "An Everton Ghost Story." It concerned "a certain house" in William Henry Street. Missiles were being thrown "in a mysterious manner and without any visible agency." Tenants moved out. The police suspected a prankster.

A few days later the Echo returned to the street. A boy named Hugh Morgan had been arrested for breaking a window of the house. He had "determined upon the self-imposed task of interviewing the ghost."

Then London took up the story. The Star reported on 24 September. The News of the World followed on 25 September, with a headline about a "Ghost With a Weakness for Ladies." In its telling, the ghost escaped its pursuers "by huge springs." "He is said to pay particular attention to ladies."

Crowds assembled nightly, though only a few had seen anything. "'Jack' is evidently shy." And the police were outrun. "So far, the police have not arrested him, their sprinting powers being inferior."

No witness from 1904 is named. Later retellings speak of more than 100 residents watching a man in a flowing cloak and black boots, bounding 25 feet onto house roofs and down into the street again. None of that appears in the 1904 wording that survives. One legend says an angry mob chased him as far as Toxteth, where he leapt over the reservoir.

Mrs A. Pierpoint was of school age in 1904. In 1967 she spoke to the Liverpool Echo and placed the haunting in nearby Stitt Street. "As the police closed in on him, he would leap from one house roof to the next."

Mrs Pierpoint had an answer. Jack, she said, was a neighbour, "slightly off-balance mentally," with "a form of religious mania." He would climb on to the rooftops crying out: "My wife is the Devil!" Residents fetched police or a fire-engine ladder to get him down, and "that's what gave rise to the Spring-heeled Jack rumours." Yet she insisted the poltergeist in Stitt Street "was no myth." Some writers suspect the madman story is itself a later rationalisation.

A Fortean Times article credited to John Reppion argues that a poltergeist tale, rooftop antics and an old bogeyman's name were blended in a "journalistic game of Chinese Whispers." Mike Dash, in his 1996 study, argued that several key elements of the legend as told by Peter Haining were Haining's own inventions.

Everton in 1904 is remembered as the last sighting of Spring-heeled Jack. Historian Karl Bell's award-winning study of the legend runs from 1837 to 1904. In 2016 the drama Houdini & Doyle sent a costumed Jack leaping through Liverpool for its stunt scenes. No photograph exists. No trace was left. Only a street, a crowd and a story that kept growing.