The Peckham Ghost scare: a leaping white figure in south London, 1872

Peckham had been uneasy for some time. In late 1871, and again in spring 1872, the district lived through window-breaking "ghost scares". Then, in October 1872, people began to report something new. A white figure.

Sunday, 10 November 1872. Just before 7 pm. At Dulwich College, 13-year-old Margaret Carver, daughter of the headmaster, Canon Alfred Carver, was getting ready for church. She opened the door onto the carriage drive. It was curiously dark. The nearest gas lamp had not been lit. Then she saw a tall white ghostly figure. "With arms outstretched the figure leapt across the drive not twenty feet from where she stood." Her older sister Constance and their governess, Mary Prentice, saw it too. But "he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared".

He had already been seen outside Honor Oak Church, vaulting over walls and fences, pursued by a group of navvies. A carrier who worked the roads between Camberwell, Peckham, East Dulwich and Honor Oak met him too. The Illustrated Police News later made that scene an engraving.

On 17 November the News of the World found Peckham "in a state of commotion owing to what is known as the 'Peckham Ghost', a mysterious figure, quite alarming in appearance". Dozens of people, mainly women and children, described it. Over six feet tall, sometimes a good eight. Gleaming white, in a white smock, sometimes a grey curly-haired wig. It approached its victims with arms wide open. It jumped high fences and ran at near-superhuman speed. It screamed and gibbered in a weird, penetrating voice. Some reports added horns, or luminous breath.

Inspector Arthur Gedge of the Metropolitan Police's P Division had the area scoured. Then, on the evening of 28 November, by one account the 27th, two 12-year-olds, Matilda Ayres and Arthur Ridgway, were frightened in Peckham. PC Hills arrested Joseph Munday, 43, a labourer of no fixed abode, in Bath Place. He wore a dark overcoat with a long white smock underneath. His pockets held peas, the usual ammunition for rattling windows. He said he had bought them to eat.

At Lambeth Police Court on 6 December, before Mr Chance, Munday said he had come to visit a man named Hall and been "set on and arrested". He would not have worn the smock, he said, had he known it would lead him to court. He could not find sureties of £10. He was held for six months.

Munday never quite fit. One account says the two children identified him. Yet the tall ghostly figure did not match the real man, who was brawny and "singular looking". The newspapers had a theory for the vanishings: a heavy overcoat with a white lining, flashed open, closed again, and the wearer slipped into the gloom. The News of the World went further. This was "Spring-heeled Jack, who terrified a past generation".

Then came 17 December 1872. About ten days after Munday was jailed, James Sanson was driving a cart near Bury, Lancashire. A tall white figure "shrieked and gibbered". It kept pace with his horses for several minutes, then vanished with a final wild shriek. An imitator, or the original still at large?

Mike Dash examined the case in his study of Spring-heeled Jack for Fortean Studies. Matilda Ayres later returned to Peckham and died in 1920. Arthur Ridgway stayed in Peckham and died in 1938. Of Joseph Munday, nothing further is recorded.