Spring Heeled Jack

My father would have been four, my mother's father fourteen on the last reported sighting of Spring Heeled Jack in Liverpool. It may have been the very last sighting of a character* that haunted not only the Victorian imagination but the dreams of small children growing up in the 1950s, such is folk memory—to the extent I’m still aware of him in the 21^st century, though I no longer have bad dreams he might carry me away for being naughty.

What makes these sightings relevant to my father and grandparents, was that they occurred in their neighbourhoods when they were children or adolescents, so the experience would have been directly or indirectly lived.

The first reported sighting of Spring Heeled Jack was in the outskirts of London in 1837 when a young Mary Stevens was out walking late one evening. Suddenly a tall dark figure leapt out at her, blocking her path. He was tall, cloaked, with sharp features and clawed hands. His eyes were red, his grin wide and unsettling. The final straw was when he spat out blue flame. Mary screamed. The figure turned, and with unnatural agility, leapt over buildings and walls. He struck again a few days later causing the terrified driver of a horse drawn carriage to lose control and crash. Soon all of London was talking of Spring Heeled Jack.

His final appearance in London took place on February 19^th in 1838 when a young Jane Alsop opened the door to a man claiming to be a police officer and asking urgently for a light; they had captured Spring Heeled Jack in an adjoining lane!

She ran for a candle but on returning to the doorway he ripped off his cloak to reveal a monstrosity: fiery red eyes, a nightmarish grin and tight white clothing that looked to her to be oilskin. Blue fire billowed from his lips, and he ran at her with clawed hands. He caught up with her, clawing her neck and arms. Her screams alerted her sister who came running to her help, and the monster escaped leaping over hedges and walls. 

Sightings were rare after that though he became a staple in comics and ‘Penny Dreadfuls’. In the 1870s he appeared again. In 1872 The News of the World reported that Peckham was “in a state of commotion owing to what is known as the ‘Peckham Ghost’ quite alarming in appearance.” He appeared again in Sheffield later that year, and in 1877 was shot at by troops garrisoned in Aldershot. He was seen in Lincolnshire that same year.

St Francis Xavier church in Salisbury Street.

In 1888 he appeared in Everton, North Liverpool where he appeared on the roof top of Saint Francis Xavier church in Salisbury Street, and again in 1904 where he performed an encore in William Henry Street. 

It was in William Henry Street, one moonless night, that a  twelve year old boy called Tommy crept out from his house like adventurous boys are wont to do. Wandering through the dim, gas-lit streets he heard an eerie cackling sound then, turning a corner he bumped into a tall, cloaked figure with fiery red eyes. Luckily for Tommy, the apparition leapt out of sight, bounding over chimneys and roofs to effect his escape—though to my mind it should have been Tommy bounding over roofs to effect his escape.

William Henry Street**

Soon all of North Liverpool was talking about Spring Heeled Jack. There were more sightings. People were afraid to go out at night. Again, it made the News of the World.

Spring Heeled Jack – Ghost with a Weakness for Ladies:

“Everton (Liverpool) is scared by the singular antics of a ghost, to whom the name of Spring Heeled Jack has been given, because of the facility with which he has escaped by huge springs, of his would be captors to arrest him. William Henry street is the scene of his exploits . . . So far, the police have not arrested him, their sprinting powers being inferior.” 

 

 

Despite the poor sprinting powers of Liverpool’s finest, the locals were more agile.

One legend has it that on the final sighting of Jack, an angry mob chased him as far as Toxteth where he leapt over the reservoir and was never seen again. 

The end of the story.

*Or is it? He was most recently sighted near the border between Herefordshire and Monmouthshire during the 1980s. A Mr Marshall was slapped by a strange jumping figure that bounded away across open countryside, his eerie cackling echoing across the fields. In my defence, I wasn’t living in Monmouth at the time, though I remember experimenting with springs tied to my shoes as a boy.  

**With thanks to this excellent site 

Mr Sludge

The following short passage  is taken from one of my ghost stories set in late Victorian England. All of the characters but one are fictitious. The ‘reveal’ directly follows:

…. Miss Fiske nodded her head as one accustomed to doubt. “Ah we have a Voltaire amongst us; and yet had you been privileged to witness, as I have, the incomparable Daniel Dunglas Home floating from an upper-story bedroom window, passing with complete equanimity across a street seventy feet above—he raised his hat, sir, before re-entering his house by a sitting-room window.” Miss Fiske stared at each of them in turn. “A mystery most profound as is the Lord who allows such things.”

“The problem is, which lord?” the bishop muttered in an audible whisper. Eleanor sighed, sensing

another sermon coming on. 

“This restless doubting; this endless search for meaning in a world capering on the edge of lunacy, truly reflects the emptiness of our Godless time. Where has our puerile faith in technology, progress and profit for profit’s sake left us? Our sweet Lord who for our sins died on a pagan cross is to be replaced by…table rapping?" The bishop sighed deeply.  “This Gaderene rush towards that bleak precipice called progress…how many poor souls have been left behind, crushed beneath the wheels of mammon? How many souls, of the lower orders now find themselves embracing any and every ideology that may alleviate their situation…? How…” 

Laura cut him off. “I have always tended to side with Mr Scrooge on such matters. It was he— correct me if I am wrong my dear Septimus— that dismissed the spirit of poor Marley as a piece of undigested beef.”

The bishop considered the theological implications for a moment and allowed himself a tolerant smile. 

“Is it only through trance that the spirits can be contacted?” Eleanor asked. 

“The less gifted can of course avail themselves of the Planchette.” Miss Fiske shuddered delicately as if to suggest that such devices were little more than ethereal carving knives. “They are I believe quite popular amongst those for whom the other world is but a parlour game. Indeed, I do believe that there is now published ‘Spirit Rapping Made Easy.’” She shuddered again. “Can you imagine?”

            “Consecration in Five Easy Steps, perhaps?” Eleanor smiled sweetly at the bishop then turned again to the still shuddering medium. “Yes, indeed I do sympathise, Miss Fiske.”

Miss Philippa Fiske, though I wish otherwise, is fictional. Daniel Dunglas Home is not fictional, neither by all accounts was his ability to levitate at the drop of a hat.

An intimate account of his powers was given by Princess Pauline Metternich  in 1863 when with fifteen guests they sat around a table in a richly furnished room. “He was very pale,” the princess later wrote, “with light china-blue eyes, reddish hair thick and abundant but not inordinately long.”

Sitting on an armchair, someway from the table, Home sank into a trance. Soon after, taps were heard, sounds came from the chandelier and a chair moved across the room. A posy of violets drifted across the room from the piano and landed on Princess Pauline’s lap.

Some guests felt unseen hands and sensed movement beneath the table. The lights were switched on, the tablecloth removed, and table and floor thoroughly examined. Nothing was found. Suitably impressed, they adjourned for afternoon tea. 

Daniel Home came from a family of seers but as a small boy emigrated to America in the care of his uncle and aunt. His gifts were quickly recognised, so much so he was kicked out of his aunt’s God-fearing home and thereafter spent his life moving from place to place. In August 1852, at the home of a Connecticut silk manufacturer, he levitated several times during a séance, on one occasion touching the ceiling. 

Shortly after, he moved to England where he became a sensation. Lord Brougham, a former Chancellor and the scientist Sir David Brewer, witnessed a table lifting off the floor, an accordion and a handbell sounding without being touched. Despite a thorough investigation no trickery or rational explanation was found.

Between 1871 – 1873 the British scientist Sir William Crookes investigated Home’s ‘powers.’ On one occasion, he placed an accordion within an electrified cage to prevent tampering or fraud. The accordion sounded without Home touching the keys, and Crooke concluded that Home had genuine power.

Charles Darwin, too, was intrigued by Daniel Dunglas Home but was content to sit on the fence: “I cannot disbelieve Mr Crooke’s statement, nor can I believe in his result.”

One of his earliest fans was the poet Elizabeth Barret Browning. Both she and her husband, Robert Browning attended one of his seances in 1855 where ghostly hands placed a wreath of clematis on her head. Robert Browning, on the other hand despised the man, forbidding “this dungball” from his house and later writing a poem about him: “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium.’”

Despite Robert Browning’s disapproval, Daniel Dunglas Home was famous throughout Europe, conducting seances for Napoleon III of France, Tsar Alexander II and a ‘veritable who’s who of Victorian society.' He died in Paris in 1886 and was buried in the Russian cemetery in that city.

Burford. Ghosts and Saints

The A40 is one of my favourite roads, based in parts on an old Roman road and once the link between London and Fishguard. The stretch I find most attractive cuts through the Cotswolds en route to Oxford. 

We travelled it often and were always intrigued by the village of Burford twenty miles west of the dreaming spires. Recently, we took the left to Burford and spent an hour or two exploring it. 

The village is typically Cotswold, one long street with some interesting pubs (could spend a happy day there) gift shops and tea rooms. Off the main street are several interesting lanes, a car park that floods when the river Windrush overflows, and a very impressive church: St John the Baptist.

Inside the church is a tomb, which illustrates the beautiful complexity of history—that of the 'establishment'  as opposed to folk history. 

 The picture below shows St Peter's Chapel, once the private pew of the local Tanfield family. 

here hosting a Christmas Nativity scene

A close up of the chapel altar, 

                           And a  fascinating history of St Dorothy, whom I'd never heard of before.

For me, the centre piece of the church was not the high altar or the strangely arranged  chairs in place of pews

but the gorgeously ornate tomb of Lord and Lady Tanfield. 

At the head of the tomb is a coloured sculpture of their only child, Elizabeth Tanfield. 

At the foot of the tomb is Elizabeth's son, Lucius Carey

And here is what the tomb says of  Lawrence Tanfield

Clearly, the man was a saint—an establishment panegyric that would however cut little ice with St Peter. In reality, as a leading Treasury official, Sir Lawrence Tanfield was notoriously corrupt, and both he and his wife were hated as harsh and exacting landlords. Not a whiff of that here.

Soon after their demise, according to local folk lore, a fiery coach carrying the two of them could sometimes be seen flying through the streets and lanes of Burford—those unfortunate enough to see it cursed on the spot. The legend may have arisen years after an earlier tradition that began after their death—the burning of their effigies by the local people. Mercifully, the curse of the fiery coach carrying the two malevolent sprites ended after an exorcism. During it, the local vicar captured the ghost of Lady Tanfield and placed it into a bottle, which he promptly corked and threw into the river Windrush. During droughts, so desperate were the locals to prevent the bottle ever surfacing, they would attempt to fill the diminishing river with buckets of water.  The question though arises, what recourse did they have when the river flooded?

As it did when we were there. Our car is out of picture to the right, and we had to paddle out of the carpark.

Not everything about the family was bad. 

Their only child, Elizabeth, was something of a prodigy, her talent nurtured by her parents. She was forbidden candles, unless it was to read by night; a French tutor was hired when she was five years old and in just over a month she was speaking fluent French. From there she went on to learn Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew and Transylvanian. At fifteen, she was contracted in marriage to Sir Henry Carey, and when her new mother-in-law told her she was not permitted to read, she developed a gift for poetry instead—in between having eleven children. When, in Ireland, her eldest daughter Catherine saw a vision of the Virgin Mary on her deathbed, Elizabeth converted to Catholicism shortly after. As a result she was banned from court, her father disinherited her, her husband tried to divorce her, and when her four daughters also converted to Catholicism, they were taken from her. Elizabeth however fought back. The boys had been put in the care of her eldest son, Lucius, a staunch protestant. She instigated their escape and led by example. By the time of her death in 1639 six of her children had followed her into the Catholic Church, four of them becoming nuns. 

Elizabeth's  son, Lucius was a gifted intellectual who took an active part in the turbulent politics of the day. He fought for the king, whilst despairing at the intransigence of both sides and was killed at the battle of Newbury. There, his body was stripped and left until recognised by a servant and taken home and buried in an unmarked grave in the village church yard of Great Tew—which we have yet to visit.

 

'I am marrying a womb'

Josephine appeared in Napoleon’s life in 1795 when he was starting off as a soldier. Six years older, she was looking for a man with prospects. It’s fair to say she struck gold with Napoleon; the future Emperor of France, perhaps, less so. It was, in the early days, a love match—for Napoleon at least. 

Separated by his invasion of Italy, Napoleon makes his feelings clear: “Since I left you, I have always been sad. My happiness consists in lying with you. I constantly recall in my memory your kisses, your tears, your kind jealousy.”

During their marriage, and in between conquering most of Europe, Napoleon wrote 265 letters to Josephine. Josephine’s letters are in single figures—perhaps because as some argue, she was never in love with the man. Having got what she wanted, Josephine was too busy enjoying life, whilst her husband was fighting for the glory of France. 

Eventually Napoleon suspected that all was not right:

 “I had hoped to receive a letter from you, and your silence plunges me into a horrifying uneasiness. I beg you, do not leave me any longer in such uneasiness . . . How can you forget the one who loves you so ardently? For three days, I am without a letter from you, and yet I have written to you many times. The absence is horrible, the nights are long, tiresome, and insipid.”

Discontent turns to anger. 1796:

 “I no longer love you. On the contrary, I detest you. You are a wretched, clumsy, rude woman. You do not write to me . . . you do not love your husband. What do you do all day, Mademoiselle? What important business takes up your time to write to your good lover? What affection suffocates and makes you forget the love, the tender and constant love that you have promised him. Who can be this prodigious new lover who absorbs all your moments?”

Campaigns in Europe and Egypt saw them drift farther apart. Josephine continued to ignore him, and Napoleon’s love turned to indifference. When Josephine realised she had all but lost her meal-ticket she sought her inner ‘Stepford Wife;’ it was too late. 

Josephine, looking less than happy with her new title of Empress. 

The tragedy behind the expression is that by this time, she couldn't  have children andgive Napoleon the all important child. In 1796 she contracted either chlamydia or gonorrhoea and developed salpingitis which led to infertility.

Irrespective of fertility, Josephine's behaviour as  described above gives context to Napoleon's rather cold letter shown in the previous post, and possibly  shows Napoleon in a more sympathetic light. Having said that, Napoleon  sacrificed both Josephine and the Countess Maria Waleskwa in the interests of real-politick. 

In 1810 he divorced Josephine and put Maria on hold in Italy—in some degree of luxury—in the interests of a dynastic and more ‘respectable’ marriage. In his own words, 'I am marrying a womb.' 

The lucky woman was Marie Louise, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor and, ironically, the great niece of Marie Antoinette. Napoleon proved an attentive and considerate husband but the marriage was relatively short.

 The wedding of Napoleon and Marie Louise

Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma after Napoleon's exile, with her son. He had 'married a womb' and she had delivered, and thereafter had a better life than Napoleon.

When her family saw which way the wind was blowing after his first exile to  Elba, they made every effort to separate them. His defeat at Waterloo clinched the deal. Marie Louise, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor and great niece of Marie Antoinette, did not accompany him in his St Helena exile. Her family made sure of it.  Husband and wife never saw each other again. 

For me, the end of a journey from a random page in The Letters of Napoleon The rabbit hole continues, if you find yourself intrigued by the relationship between Napoleon and Marie Louise.  Alternatively try here. Wishing you a safe and happy journey.