Spring-heeled Jack and the "Suburban Ghost" scare, London, 1837 to 1838

October 1837. Clapham Common. A strange figure seized Mary Stevens, held her tightly and tore at her clothes with claws that were "cold and clammy". She screamed. He ran. It is remembered as the first claimed incident of a scare that ran until the spring of 1838, mostly by night.

9 January 1838. At a public session in the Mansion House, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, read out an anonymous letter signed "a resident of Peckham". It described a wager among aristocrats. One of their companions would visit the villages around London disguised as a ghost, a bear and a devil, and frighten the residents. The figure had succeeded, the writer said, in "depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover".

A member of the audience confirmed that "servant girls about Kensington, Hammersmith and Ealing, tell dreadful stories of this ghost or devil." Soon the Lord Mayor showed a crowded room a pile of letters about similar "wicked pranks", from Stockwell to Blackheath. He stayed sceptical. But he was confident the culprits would be caught.

February 1838. The 19th or the 20th, depending on the account. A violent knock at the gate of a house in Bearbinder Lane, Old Ford. A man in the shadows said he was a police officer. "For God's sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack."

Jane Alsop, 18, carried a candle to the gate. He threw off his cloak and held the candle to his chest. He wore a large helmet and a tight-fitting garment that resembled white oilskin. His eyes resembled "red balls of fire". He vomited out blue and white flames. Claws of metal tore her gown and her neck. She ran for the house. He kept clawing at her until her sister arrived. Then he fled. That same evening the family reported it at the Lambeth Street Police Office.

28 February 1838. Lucy Scales, 18, was walking home with her sister from their brother's house in Narrow Street. In Green Dragon Alley stood a man, "tall, slender, and well-dressed", in "a large cloak", holding "a small lamp or bull's eye lantern". He said nothing. He "spewed a quantity of blue flame" into her face. She lost her sight for a moment, fell, and had violent fits for several hours. The Alsop case filled the papers, the Times among them. The Scales case reached only one.

At Lambeth Street, a police officer, James Lea, arrested Thomas Millbank, who had boasted at the Morgan's Arms that he was Spring-heeled Jack. Millbank was not convicted. Jane Alsop insisted her attacker had breathed fire. Millbank could not. Later popular accounts add the Duke of Wellington riding out with pistols to hunt Jack. No primary source supports it.

The Peckham letter itself pointed to an aristocrats' prank. By 1840 rumour named Henry de La Poer Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, known for drunken brawls and cruel jokes. But he married in 1842, settled in Ireland and died in 1859, and the sightings went on for decades. Sceptics see a moral panic of rumour, superstition and sensational print. Mike Dash traced the shift from local "Suburban Ghost" to Victorian bugaboo. David Clarke notes that his "tremendous leaps and bounds" were "popularly attributed to springs concealed in his boots". Penny dreadfuls, Punch and Judy shows and, much later, Fortean Times kept him leaping. No culprit was ever convicted.