The name Spring-heeled Jack is in The Times from February 1838, for a scare on the northern edge of London that letters already said had been going on for some time. The public session that put it in the paper was earlier. On 9 January 1838 Sir John Cowan, the Lord Mayor, read at the Mansion House a letter signed “a resident of Peckham,” which he had held back while he waited for more. The writer said persons of the higher ranks had wagered a companion that he would not go through the villages near London in three disguises, a ghost, a bear, and a devil, or into gentlemen’s gardens to frighten the houses. The wager, the letter said, had been taken, and seven ladies had been deprived of their senses, two of them not likely to recover. At one house the man had rung dressed as a spectre, and the servant who opened the door had swooned and not been in her senses since. Cowan called the story extraordinary if true. He said the hand was a very beautiful one, and he suspected a lady. The places named were outside the City, so he could not act on them himself. The next day he showed a crowded room a pile of further letters, from Hammersmith, Kensington, Lewisham, Blackheath, and other suburbs, about wicked pranks, claws, and fits. He said the greatest exaggerations had been made, and that it was impossible the ghost was performing the feats of a devil. Someone he trusted had told him of a servant at Forest Hill scared into fits by a figure in a bear’s skin. He thought the persons in what he called a pantomime display would be caught. Within days other papers had women frightened to death and children torn up. Those lines are not depositions.

The two complaints that are, both from the end of February, are narrower than the leap over hedges. On the night of 19 February 1838 Jane Alsop answered the door of her father’s house at Old Ford. The man outside said he was a police officer and that they had caught Spring-heeled Jack in the lane, and he asked for a light. She brought a candle. He wore a large cloak. When she handed him the light he threw the cloak off. She said he presented a hideous appearance, vomited blue and white flame, and had eyes like red balls of fire. He wore a large helmet and a tight garment like white oilskin. He caught her and tore her gown with claws she said were of some metallic substance, then caught her again on the steps and tore her neck and arms. A sister got her inside. He fled. The Times printed it on 2 March under “The Late Outrage at Old Ford.”

A man named Thomas Millbank had boasted in the Morgan’s Arms that he was Spring-heeled Jack. He was arrested and tried at Lambeth Street court. The officer was James Lea. Millbank had been in white overalls and a greatcoat, which had been dropped outside the house, and the candle he dropped was found. He was not convicted. Jane Alsop said her attacker had breathed fire, and Millbank said he could not.

On 28 February, Lucy Scales, eighteen, and her sister were walking home in Limehouse after visiting their brother, a butcher. In Green Dragon Alley a tall, thin man in a large cloak, with a bull’s-eye lantern of the sort the police carried, spat a quantity of blue flame into Lucy’s face. She said it blinded her. She dropped and was taken with violent fits that lasted several hours. He did not take hold of either sister. He walked off. Their brother heard the screams, found Lucy on the ground, and the police questioned several people and let them go.

After that the name left the lane. Penny dreadfuls and cheap theatres took it. Henry Mayhew, writing up Punch and Judy, noted that the devil in the show was by then commonly called Spring-heeled Jack. In July 1847, at Teignmouth, a Captain Finch was convicted of two assaults on women while disguised in a skin coat, a skullcap, horns, and a mask. That is a man in a costume, not a leap that no shot could stop.

The later reports are the name traveling, not a second deposition like Alsop’s. In August 1877 a story from the North Camp at Aldershot said a sentry challenged a figure, was slapped in the face, and that a shot had no visible effect before the figure left in astonishing bounds. Lord Ernest Hamilton, in a memoir of 1922, put similar scares in his own regiment a year or two later and said he believed they were a brother officer’s prank. In the autumn of 1877 the same nickname was put on a figure in a sheepskin at Newport Arch in Lincoln, chased by a crowd and said to have got away by jumping. Around 1888, in Everton, boys from the Saint Francis Xavier guild were told the figure was on Shaw Street; a crowd gathered by the church and the search found nothing.

The Liverpool Echo of 21 September 1904, under “An Everton Ghost Story,” is the piece usually called the last sighting. It says commotion in William Henry Street came from a rumour that a sort of spring-heel Jack was at his antics. Passed from mouth to mouth, the story became missiles thrown in one house by no visible agency, and tenants who left. The police, the Echo said, could find no ground for a ghost, and believed some foolish person had been playing pranks. The tall cloaked man bounding the rooftops is not what that article printed.

The Marquess of Waterford, Henry de la Poer Beresford, was the sort of man the Peckham letter had in mind: a rich peer whose cruel jokes were already in the papers, and who can be placed in London in the winter of 1837–38. He was not named in the Alsop or Scales complaints. He died in a riding accident in 1859. Within a decade, and in Brewer’s by 1902, he was written down as the man who had started it, springing on travelers for a bet. Later books repeat that as fact, and add mechanical springs and phosphorus. No such boots were produced in 1838, and nothing in the trials identifies him. David Clarke, who went back to the papers, found no convincing evidence that Waterford carried out those assaults. What 1838 does have is a wager story the Lord Mayor would not stand behind, a girl at Old Ford clawed by a man who asked for a light, another girl blinded by a flame in an alley, and a boastful drinker the court let go.