The tiny Green Dragon Alley was described in John Lockie’s 1810 ’Descriptive London Street Directory’ as “the second on the left about nine doors from Mr. Turner’s wharf, leading into Risby’s rope walk”.
Mentioned in 1732 but disappearing under an 1869 new dock entrance to Limehouse Basin, the alley was one of the central locations in the drama of the famed Spring-Heeled Jack of the Victoria era.
It snowed heavily during the night of 8–9 February 1855. The next morning, villagers around the Exe estuary in Devon noticed a single file of hoof-like ‘footprints’. Following the trail from their own village, they met folk from other villages coming the other way tracking the line from their own start point. The marks measured about 4 inches long, 3 inches across and between 8 to 16 inches. It was realised that the total distance of the tracks was between 40 and 100 miles. Houses, rivers, haystacks and other obstacles were travelled straight over. Footprints appeared on the tops of snow-covered roofs and walls, as well as leading up to and exiting drain pipes as small as 4 inches in diameter.
An 1855 issue of Bell’s Life in Sydney reported:
“It appears on Thursday night last, there was a very heavy snowfall in the neighbourhood of Exeter and the South of Devon. On the following morning the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the footmarks of some strange and mysterious animal endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the footprints were to be seen in all kinds of unaccountable places – on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and court-yards, enclosed by high walls and pailings, as well in open fields. The superstitious go so far as to believe that they are the marks of Satan himself; and that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been descanted on from the pulpit.”
The Devil’s Footprints was just one of a number of Victorian unexplained phenomena and one of many incidents attributed to the work of a villain called Spring-Heeled Jack, more normally seen in London.
In the early 19th century, there were reports of ghosts that stalked the streets of the capital. These figures were depicted as pale but human-like, preying on lone pedestrians. The stories formed part of a distinct ghost tradition in London which may have formed the foundation of the legend of Spring-Heeled Jack.
In October 1837 a servant girl called Mary Stevens was walking to Lavender Hill, Battersea where she was working as a servant, after visiting her parents. On her way and near to Clapham Common, a strange figure leapt at her from a dark alley. He grabbed her arms tightly and began to kiss her face while touching her with his claws, which were, she said later, “cold and clammy as those of a corpse”. She screamed and her attacker fled. The commotion attracted several residents who launched a search for the aggressor, but he could not be found.
The first claimed sighting of Jack was in the year Victoria came to the throne. He had a very bizarre appearance and an ability to make extraordinary leaps. He was described by people claiming to have seen him as looking like the devil with sharp metallic claws at his fingertips and eyes that “resembled red balls of fire”. Beneath a black cloak, he wore a helmet and a tight-fitting white oilskin-like garment. He would breathe out blue and white flames.
The very next day and nearby, a figure jumped in the way of a carriage, causing the coachman to lose control, crash, and severely injure himself. Several witnesses saw a figure jumping over a nine feet high wall while cackling with high-pitched, ringing laughter.The news spread, and soon the press gave him the nickname “Spring-Heeled Jack”.
On 9 January 1838, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Cowan, revealed a letter at a public session from ‘a resident of Peckham’ which the mayor summarised as follows:
“It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises—a ghost, a bear, and a devil; and moreover, that he will not enter a gentleman’s gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house. The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover, but to become burdens to their families.
At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses.
The affair has now been going on for some time, and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject. The writer has reason to believe that they have the whole history at their finger-ends but, through interested motives, are induced to remain silent.”
A member of the audience at that 1838 public session confirmed that “servant girls about Kensington, Hammersmith and Ealing, tell dreadful stories of this ghost or devil”.
The matter was reported in The Times on 9 January and by the 11th, the Lord Mayor was at a crowded gathering showing a pile of letters from various places in and around London complaining of similar “wicked pranks”. The quantity of letters that poured into the Mansion House suggests that the stories were widespread in suburban London.
A letter claimed that in Stockwell, Brixton, Camberwell and Vauxhall several people had died of fright and others had had fits; meanwhile, another reported that the trickster had been repeatedly seen in Lewisham and Blackheath.
The best-known of the alleged incidents involving Spring-Heeled Jack were incidents involving two teenage girls, Lucy Scales and Jane Alsop.
Jane Alsop reported that on the night of 19 February 1838, she answered the door of her father’s house in Old Ford to a man claiming to be a police officer, who told her to bring a light, claiming “we have caught Spring-heeled Jack here in the lane“. She found a candle, and noticed that the man wore a large cloak. That moment, he threw off the cloak and “presented a most hideous and frightful appearance”, vomiting blue and white flame from his mouth while his eyes resembled “red balls of fire”. He wore a large helmet and had very tight-fitting, white oilskin clothing. He caught hold of her and began tearing her gown with his claws which she said were “of some metallic substance”. She screamed for help and was rescued by one of her sisters as her assailant fled.
Soon after, one Thomas Millbank boasted in the Morgan’s Arms Lambeth that he was Spring-heeled Jack. He was then arrested and subsequently tried. Millbank had been wearing white overalls and a greatcoat, which he dropped outside the house, and the candle he dropped was also found. He escaped conviction only because Jane Alsop insisted her attacker had breathed fire, and Millbank admitted he could do no such thing.
Nine days after the Alsop case, on 28 February 1838, 18-year-old Lucy Scales and her sister were returning home immediately after visiting their brother, a butcher who “lived in a respectable part of Limehouse”. As they were passing along Green Dragon Alley, they observed a person standing in an angle of the passage. She was walking in front of her sister at the time, and just as she came up to the person, who was wearing a large cloak, he spurted “a quantity of blue flame” in her face. This so alarmed her, that she dropped to the ground, and was seized with violent fits which continued for several hours.
Her brother heard the loud screams of one of his sisters moments after they had left his house and on running up Green Dragon Alley he found his sister Lucy on the ground in a fit, with her sister attempting to hold and support her. She described Lucy’s assailant as being of tall, thin, and gentlemanly appearance, covered in a large cloak, and carrying a small lamp or bull’s eye lantern similar to those used by the police. The individual did not try to lay hands on them, but instead walked quickly away. Every effort was made by the police to discover the culprit – several persons were questioned, but were then set free.After these incidents, Spring-
Heeled Jack became one of the most popular bogeymen of the period, featuring in newspapers and penny dreadfuls. For decades in London, his name was equated with the bogeyman, as a means of scaring children into behaving by telling them, if they were not good, Spring-Heeled Jack would leap up and peer in at them through their bedroom windows at night.
Jack’s appearances became less frequent though in 1843, a wave of sightings swept the country again. The Duke of Wellington was part of a group who searched for Jack on the commons of south London.
The legend was linked in 1855 with the “Devil’s Footprints”.
By the end of the 19th century the reported sightings of Spring-heeled Jack were focused on northwest England. In 1888, in Everton (Liverpool), he allegedly appeared on the rooftop of Saint Francis Xavier’s Church in Salisbury Street. In 1904 there were reports of appearances in nearby William Henry Street.
In the early 1900s he was being represented as a costumed, altruistic avenger of wrongs and protector of the innocent, effectively becoming a precursor to pulp fiction and then comic book superheroes.
No one was ever caught and identified as Spring-Heeled Jack; combined with the extraordinary abilities attributed to him and the very long period during which he was reportedly at large, this has led to numerous and varied theories of his nature and identity.
Sceptical investigators have dismissed the stories of Spring-Heeled Jack as mass hysteria which developed around various stories of a bogeyman or devil which have been around for centuries.
A variety of wildly speculative paranormal explanations have been proposed to explain the origin of Spring-Heeled Jack, including that he was an extra-terrestrial entity with a non-human appearance and features.
Other researchers believe that individuals may have been behind its origins, being followed by imitators later on. Spring-Heeled Jack was widely considered not to be a supernatural creature, but rather one or more persons with a macabre sense of humour. This idea matches the contents of the letter to the Lord Mayor, which accused a group of young aristocrats.
As for the Devils Footprints, investigators are sceptical that the tracks really extended for more than a hundred miles, arguing that no-one would have been able to follow their entire course in a single day.
Author Geoffrey Household suggested that “an experimental balloon” released by mistake from Devonport Dockyard had left the mysterious tracks by trailing two shackles on the end of its mooring ropes.
Main sources
‘The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack’ – Peter Haining
‘The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes’ – Michael Newton
