Spring-heeled Jack shot at by a mob at Newport Arch, Lincoln (1877)

By 1877, Spring-heeled Jack was already a legend. The name reached back to London in 1838, to the attacks reported by Jane Alsop on 19 February and Lucy Scales on 28 February. Penny dreadful serials followed, the first in 1867.

That spring, The Times reported on "The Aldershott Ghost". Sentries at the camp in Aldershot said a cloaked figure had slapped one of them. Shots had no effect. The figure leapt away.

Then came Lincoln. Newport Arch stands in the Newport district of uphill Lincoln. It is a Roman gate from the 3rd century, a scheduled monument, and said to be the oldest arch in the UK still used by traffic.

Autumn, 1877. Probably October. A figure was seen at the arch, "wearing a sheep skin". The townspeople went after it. A mob chased it through the street. In one telling, they cornered him. Then he jumped on to the arch.

One of his pursuers fired. The bullet had no effect. Other versions say residents fired more than once. The result was the same. With long leaps, the figure escaped and vanished into the night. Nobody recorded lights, sounds or smells. None of the fire breathing, glowing eyes or claws of the London stories. Just a figure in a sheepskin, a crowd, a gunshot, and an empty arch.

The earliest known source is the Illustrated Police News of 3 November 1877, a sensational national weekly. It had run Spring-heeled Jack items in 1872, from February to May 1877, and again from September to December 1877. Lincoln sits in that last run. An engraving from the paper shows Spring-heeled Jack jumping on Newport Arch as he escapes an angry mob.

No witness was named. No exact day was given. No police or magistrates' inquiry has been found. The local papers of the time, the Lincolnshire Chronicle and the Lincoln Gazette, have not yet turned up a matching report.

Later retellings raised the stakes. Jack leapt distances of 20 feet or more across rooftops. He bounded right over the arch. He seemed impervious to bullets. None of this appears in the earliest cited report. The versions even disagree about the arch itself. Did he land on it, or clear it?

The sheepskin is the strongest clue. It points to a man in costume, one of the copycat pranksters and "ghost" impersonators of the 1870s. Writers on the legend have also suggested mass hysteria, attackers in disguise, and even early athletics that resembled parkour. The source of the story is a paper known for sensational and sometimes exaggerated crime reporting.

Researcher Mike Dash, whose essay in Fortean Studies gives the Lincoln citation, has suspected Peter Haining's 1977 book of embellishing or inventing some incidents. Dash's work at least ties the Lincoln case to a source from its own year. No hoaxer was ever named. No arrest is recorded.

The historian Karl Bell has treated Spring-heeled Jack as Victorian urban folklore. The last reported sighting came from Liverpool in 1904. But the picture from Lincoln endures. A crowd in the street. A shot in the dark. A figure on an ancient Roman gate, and then nothing but the night.