The Sheffield Park Ghost: Spring-heeled Jack scare and the nightly crowd hunts of 1873

Sheffield, 1873. Between Park Hill and Norfolk Park stood an obelisk, the Cholera Monument, raised in 1835 for 402 victims of the 1832 cholera epidemic. Around it lay the monument grounds, Clay Wood and a quarry. Elsewhere, an old legend had stirred. Spring-heeled Jack had first frightened London in 1837 and 1838, and in 1872 the "Peckham Ghost" brought him back. That spring, he seemed to reach Sheffield.

April 1873. People in the Park district began to report a figure robed in white. Tall, giant and of unearthly aspect. It came at all times of night, mostly to courting couples. It suddenly appeared in front of them. It suddenly disappeared when anyone tried to get a hold of it. Locals called it the Park Ghost.

Henry Tatton, a local historian, later wrote that it could "spring like a goat and jump through five-barred gates like a cat." It came out of the grounds of the Cholera Monument "springing and jumping about the quarry and over walls," then appeared on Skye Edge and Arbourthorne. One eyewitness told the Sheffield Telegraph he saw it clear a wall in one bound. On subsequent measurement, the wall proved to be 14'3" in height.

Two young girls said it leapt out, seized them, whirled them around and threw them over a fence. One night a vigilante shot it through the ankle. It bounded away "more merry than ever." Rumour soon gave it an origin. It had sprung up, some said, from the Cholera mass grave.

Terrified residents called the police. Men took up sticks and formed search parties. On 23 May 1873 the Sheffield Telegraph reported "not less than two thousand persons, principally youths and young men" in the haunted district.

They met in the Clay Wood quarry. They lit fires and split up to search, then tore branches from the trees to feed the flames. Neighbours complained. Scuffles broke out. When the police arrived, the crowd pelted them with stones, till the police charged with batons and the crowd dispersed. No ghost appeared.

The local press had an answer. The ghost was "a young fellow of weak intellect." Another rumour that May told of a tall man in a white sheet frightening women for a bet, an echo of the 1838 London wager letter. A 1919 letter to the Sheffield Times called him "a human ghost," who ceased to appear when a certain number of men went with guns and sticks to test his skin.

Nobody was ever identified. Folklorist David Clarke treats the episode as a ghost panic. The legend let people read pranks and rumours as something supernatural, and the crowds fed it. The mass grave, the quarry and the woods supplied a ready-made backstory.

The Park Ghost survives through Tatton's notes of 1934 and Clarke's book Strange South Yorkshire. A geocache tour now leads walkers between the sites. Some tellings tie the sightings to the Old Queen's Head on Pond Hill, said to bear a carving of Spring-heeled Jack in its timber frame. That claim remains unverified.

The name did not leave Sheffield. In the 1970s, two police officers in Attercliffe chased a figure that "walked up a wall" and escaped across rooftops. A different century. The same old name.