The Dundee Ghost Scare: Blackness Quarry's "Big Black Man" and "Springheels" (1882-83)

Dundee, the winter of 1882. On the south side of Blackness Road lay Blackness Quarry, a large whinstone quarry reached by narrow lanes from the Hawkhill. The rumours started with the children. At first the old people "disdained to listen to the 'bairns' havers.'" Then they stopped laughing.

He was a "big black man," wrapped from neck to heel in a dark cloak, a slouched hat pulled well down to conceal his face. He was seen nightly, gliding noiselessly about the quarry, appearing suddenly to stray children and timid "auld wives." Occasionally, about midnight, he walked the quarry with a candle in his hand. At New Year he finally spoke. He followed a woman home and asked if she had anything left in her New Year's bottle. Women became afraid to leave their houses at night for water or coal.

Then an ex-policeman, "a son of Erin," peeped through his window shutters and saw the figure under a street lamp. He armed himself with the kitchen poker. When the poker glittered in the lamplight, the "black fellow" turned tail, darted through a gate, leaped down into the quarry and splashed into a quagmire. Soon after, a crowd chased a professional gentleman in black clothes through the lanes, until the ex-policeman cleared him. The quarry spectre was not seen there again.

By early 1883 a new figure was abroad in the Hilltown and across the north and east of the town, from Clepington to the Ferry Road. He was "rather tall," cloaked, with several yards of crape hanging from his hat. Occasionally he suddenly turned luminous. People said his cloak was lined with cloth dipped in phosphorus. For the rapidity of his movements, he was called "Springheels."

A Broughty Ferry butcher saw "a figure clad in white against the wall." He crossed towards it. It vanished, and seemed to go through the stone wall. A scavenger emptying an ashpit felt a hand placed heavily on his shoulder. At Lochee a young man asked the figure the time and got "a bovine roar" in reply. A young woman on the Arbroath Road had to be helped home. A boy was confined to bed with fits.

Early on Saturday, 17 February 1883, a clerk named William Anderson, of South Ellen Street, was arrested in the Nethergate. A Dundee paper wrote that "one or more young men" had been playing ghost for two or three months, showing "a hideous face" beneath a hat hung with crape. Anderson told the Police Court he had been drinking with friends. The magistrate warned him and let him go.

The fear outlasted him. A drunken Hilltown carter who ran out of his house to settle with the ghost was bound over. On 31 March 1883 a man struck a woman hard over the head with a poker. In her shawl, he had taken her for the ghost. He was sentenced to fifteen shillings or ten days in prison.

The papers always assumed a man under the cloak. Perhaps a student. Perhaps a member of one of the town's manufacturing families. Perhaps a bet. In 2017 the blogger Beachcombing revived the case on strangehistory.net, calling Anderson "just an idiot with a white sheet on his head" and arguing that the Blackness and Hilltown ghosts were different men. The name Springheels ties Dundee to the Spring-heeled Jack legend and its copycats across Britain. In 1927, over 5000 people would turn out at Craigie Quarry for another white clad figure.