Speaker 1: You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Guests lit London
Speaker 1: streets lie shrouded in fog. Eighteen year old Jane alsops
Speaker 1: at her father's house when a loud knocking startles her.
Speaker 1: She goes to the door, and in the darkness, a
Speaker 1: cloaked man says urgently, we've called spring Hill Jack here
Speaker 1: in the lane. Believing he's a policeman, Jane rushes to
Speaker 1: bring him a candle, but when she hands it to him,
Speaker 1: she shocked to see him spit blue fire from his
Speaker 1: mouth before he begins to claw at her with metallic fingers.
Speaker 1: She screams and struggles to escape as he tears at
Speaker 1: her clothing, and finally she's rescued by her sister, who
Speaker 1: pulls her back into the house. The cloak strangers seem
Speaker 1: to bound off across the field. For this was no policeman.
Speaker 1: This was spring Hill Jack himself. It's actually quite unlike
Speaker 1: anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 2: A giant, hairy creature in part Ape and Party Match
Speaker 2: in Luckness, a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake
Speaker 2: in the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 1: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster. Monster. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Monster talk the Science Show about Monsters. I'm Blake
Speaker 1: Smith and in this episode, doctor Karen stoles Know and
Speaker 1: I will interview Mike Dash about the mysterious figure known
Speaker 1: as spring Hill Jack. This is an enduring legend which
Speaker 1: has been of interest to paranormal investigators and folklorists, as
Speaker 1: well as UFO enthusiasts and skeptics. Mike's research is fantastic
Speaker 1: and while he is compiling it into a book someday,
Speaker 1: be sure to check the show notes for links to
Speaker 1: his website. He loves solving mysteries and it shows in
Speaker 1: his work. More Instrutle, do you want to tell listeners
Speaker 1: about what your latest projects are like, about what you're
Speaker 1: working on. What's been going on with you?
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, I don't know. It feels like it's a
Speaker 3: bit premature at this stage.
Speaker 1: Still, well, you can talk about Swift articles.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I don't know if you checked out the
Speaker 3: latest article that I did for Swift. It was a
Speaker 3: mini investigation into a place called Silver Cliff Cemetery. Can
Speaker 3: you hear me? I can, okay, because it's just to
Speaker 3: me creepy.
Speaker 1: Because it sounds like you're really close, but I know
Speaker 1: you're really far away ah, silly mood apologize.
Speaker 3: Well, no, that that's good, that's apt for the show.
Speaker 3: But I'll start again. I just did an investigation or
Speaker 3: a mini investigation for SWIFT for the James Randy Educational Foundation,
Speaker 3: and it was into a place called Silver Cliff Cemetery,
Speaker 3: and it's one of the most haunted or the most
Speaker 3: haunted cemetery in America, or one of the most haunted
Speaker 3: cemeteries in America. Because they're all the most haunted.
Speaker 1: Is it egalitarian to believe that they're all equally haunted?
Speaker 3: I think I think it's only the fair thing to say,
Speaker 3: the only fair thing to say. But this place, it's
Speaker 3: a beautiful little cemetery out in the middle of nowhere,
Speaker 3: and they've only got an occupancy rate of about forty percent,
Speaker 3: so very just scattered tombstones. But this place has been
Speaker 3: famous for decades now for dancing blue lights. And actually
Speaker 3: the source of all of the claims, or the main source,
Speaker 3: contemporary source, seems to be an article that appeared in
Speaker 3: National Geographic Magazine back in nineteen sixty nine, and a
Speaker 3: lot of people or what you'll find online if you
Speaker 3: go and google Silver Cliff Cemetery, lots of entries about
Speaker 3: this original article. People claim that the article was an
Speaker 3: investigation or some kind of feature, but really it's just
Speaker 3: an afterthought. It's almost a PostScript. And the author of
Speaker 3: the article, I can't remember his name, Edward Linehm. I
Speaker 3: think it is just in the last paragraph or two
Speaker 3: of the article, and it's a travel journal piece about
Speaker 3: Colorado and the Rockies. And he just mentions these strange
Speaker 3: blue lights that appear in this cemetery, and he goes
Speaker 3: and checks them out, and anyway, he describes them as
Speaker 3: being this dim glow. Yet over the course of decades
Speaker 3: it's become the lights have become very different. Instead, they
Speaker 3: are bright lights there like a lantern light, round lights
Speaker 3: the size of a silver dollar. Sometimes there are one
Speaker 3: or two lights, other times there just spread across the cemetery.
Speaker 3: The original lights were blue, and the lights nowadays can
Speaker 3: be red or green or pink, any color that you like.
Speaker 3: And so the claims have increased over the years, but
Speaker 3: they really have taken on a life of their own.
Speaker 3: And so I went and checked out the cemetery. It
Speaker 3: was actually in the course of going and visiting a
Speaker 3: fundamentalist Mormon compound. But that's another story. Altogether, And so
Speaker 3: I checked out the cemetery and I didn't actually see
Speaker 3: those particular lights myself, but came up with a couple
Speaker 3: of possible explanations for the lights most people. There was
Speaker 3: an investigation done a short article by Skeptical Inquiry magazine
Speaker 3: going back about twenty years ago, and the authors claimed
Speaker 3: that the lights are reflections from the town from passing traffic,
Speaker 3: and that's a possibility. I think that there are lots
Speaker 3: of explanations, not just one explanation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you go to a cemetery at night and
Speaker 1: the claim is there are lights, then any light would
Speaker 1: seem to be a hit.
Speaker 3: Right, that's right, And there are lots of natural and
Speaker 3: human made sources for lights. There are stars, there's the moon,
Speaker 3: but people claim that the best time to see these
Speaker 3: lights is on a very dark night when there isn't
Speaker 3: any when it's overcast and there's no moon, and so
Speaker 3: there are just outside of that. I thought one of
Speaker 3: the main things that came to mind were phosphenes, the
Speaker 3: possibility that someone could be sitting out in this dark
Speaker 3: cemetery with no light for hours trying to see something,
Speaker 3: and you know, when you rub your eyes or when
Speaker 3: you sneeze and you see stars, those little lights that
Speaker 3: appear in your eyes when there isn't actually a light source.
Speaker 3: I thought that that could be one potential source for
Speaker 3: these lights in the cemetery, or another could be this
Speaker 3: new receptor that's been found that only sees the color blue,
Speaker 3: only picks up that color. So I think that could
Speaker 3: account for maybe those original sightings of this dim blue glow.
Speaker 3: But if people want to go and check out the
Speaker 3: article on Swift anyway, and there's more information there, and
Speaker 3: go and google it yourself to and see some of
Speaker 3: the other claims that are.
Speaker 1: Out there, put a link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 3: Sounds good, thank you. So yeah, that was a fun
Speaker 3: little diversion looking into that.
Speaker 1: But I think one of the first collaborative skeptical investigations
Speaker 1: every day was with Kylie Surgis for the Pinjara Cemetery.
Speaker 3: That's right, that was in Perth somewhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well wherever Pinjari. That was more her, you know,
Speaker 1: she drove a long way to go out there and
Speaker 1: help me, you know, test the hypothesis. It turned out
Speaker 1: to be correct, and in that case, it was a
Speaker 1: passing car had illuminated a stationary tombstone, and on video
Speaker 1: it looked like something just came to life and flew
Speaker 1: across the screen. But I was able to stabilize it
Speaker 1: and show that No, what was actually happening was the
Speaker 1: illumination was passing over the tombstone, but because the camera
Speaker 1: was moving, it created this weird illusion. So kind of
Speaker 1: a funn Yeah.
Speaker 3: Once again, I think that's accounting for a lot of
Speaker 3: the claims in Silver Cliff Cemetery. Though these very shiny marble.
Speaker 1: Yes, they're very reflective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and people think, oh, the town's too far away.
Speaker 3: It's really only about half a mile away. And there
Speaker 3: are two towns there right next to each other, so
Speaker 3: there are a lot of light sources.
Speaker 1: Well, it's always it's always bugged me that people would
Speaker 1: expect cemeteries and graveyards to be haunted, like the people
Speaker 1: who die have no ties to those places.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I think there are two theories. I think
Speaker 3: there's one theory that, of course cemeteries must be haunted
Speaker 3: because there are so many people buried there. And then
Speaker 3: there's another claim that people when they do come back
Speaker 3: and they do haunt, they will haunt the places that
Speaker 3: they visited during their lifetime. They're not going to be
Speaker 3: in a place where they're just the body is buried.
Speaker 1: Right, Like, I can imagine really easily some sort of
Speaker 1: hypothesis that you're tethered to your physical body even after
Speaker 1: you die, but you know, it seems like cremation would
Speaker 1: cure that, or you know, and eventually your body rides away.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't think there's much plausibility to that.
Speaker 3: There are both theories there, and I think if you believe,
Speaker 3: then you're going to come up with any any interesting
Speaker 3: theory to explain any any qualms you've got.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the thing is, though you're probably the same way.
Speaker 1: But I love cemeteries and and people I think forget
Speaker 1: that cemeteries are generally built for the living. You know,
Speaker 1: they're for you to go and reminisce and think about
Speaker 1: the people who've died and spend time.
Speaker 3: That's right. But the memorial parks, so yeah, people in
Speaker 3: previous times would go for strolls through cemeteries and have lunch,
Speaker 3: and they were social places they were.
Speaker 1: And what really bugs me is modern cemeteries. They're so lazy.
Speaker 1: They build like the flat tombstone so they can mow easier,
Speaker 1: and it's like, really, that's what's so great about that.
Speaker 3: It's terrible, Like we want the fancy or nature.
Speaker 1: I do. I love. I love the ones with statues
Speaker 1: and little mausoleums.
Speaker 3: And oh me too. The ones in Lanion's are fantastic.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, those are really cool. I just there's some
Speaker 1: really nice ones in Atlanta and Savannah. Yeah, gorgeous ones.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I went to the Bonaventure. Yeah cemetery that's
Speaker 3: in Savannah, isn't it. It is the famous one. But
Speaker 3: what's that book in the Garden of Good and Evil?
Speaker 3: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?
Speaker 1: Right with the little crying girl. They've taken her out
Speaker 1: of the cemetery because people get messing with their statue.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's on display. I think at a local museum instead.
Speaker 3: But I'd love to get to Resurrection Cemetery in Chicago
Speaker 3: sometime and check out the stories about Resurrection Mary.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and don't forget a lot of the voters
Speaker 1: come out of there at election time, so that's a great,
Speaker 1: great time to see ghosts.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 1: Today, we're talking with Mike dash who is a paranorl investigator, historian, author,
Speaker 1: and former editor of fortyen Times. He's written numerous articles
Speaker 1: in several books, most recently The First Family, Terror, Extortion,
Speaker 1: and the Birth of the American Mafia. He also writes
Speaker 1: the Past and Perfect blog for Smithsonian dot com. Welcome Mike,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Hey Mike. I just just kind of just
Speaker 1: not related to monsters at all, but really enjoyed your
Speaker 1: article about the family in Siberia. That was such a
Speaker 1: cool article.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's been remarkably successful. I've never quite experienced anything
Speaker 4: like it. Actually, it's had something like two million page views.
Speaker 4: Quite wow generated. Yeah, I mean it's interesting, isn't it
Speaker 4: what gels would be. I've been writing stories I've tried
Speaker 4: to get two million page revies on for years, and
Speaker 4: this is the one that's kind of caught far. It's
Speaker 4: interesting to see what it is that makes people sort
Speaker 4: of trigger those sorts of responses.
Speaker 1: Actually, yeah, and I have no idea because I've read
Speaker 1: a lot of your articles and this was of similar quality,
Speaker 1: which was great, But I know, wow, that's fantastic. Congrats.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I think there's obviously an element of
Speaker 4: you know, what would I do in those situations? How
Speaker 4: would I hope which if you know we'll touch on this,
Speaker 4: not one noteut, I mean there's an element of this
Speaker 4: in why spring Hill Jack is such a memorable figure
Speaker 4: and has survived in people's recollections a lot longer than
Speaker 4: similar bogeymen.
Speaker 1: Well, I tell you one thing it taught me, for
Speaker 1: sure is that before you retreat into the wilderness, makes
Speaker 1: sure you have some basic ceramic skills.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's the one thing they didn't seem to have
Speaker 4: with them. Maybe they couldn't find any clay, but yeah,
Speaker 4: that people.
Speaker 5: Commented on that one.
Speaker 4: Actually all right, But I don't think we're judgement too
Speaker 4: harsh to you, or I would have been dead a
Speaker 4: long time before they were.
Speaker 1: I think I believe you're correct.
Speaker 3: Can we link this one to the show? Notes?
Speaker 1: I get through that the show, that's for sure. Apparently
Speaker 1: it's a great thing to link to. Can you give
Speaker 1: us an overview of the spring Hill Jack's story, the phenomena,
Speaker 1: and why you think he's such an enduring figure?
Speaker 4: Yes, Well, the Springhiel Jack's story, as it is usually told,
Speaker 4: relates to a hideous, demonic bogeyman, as we would say
Speaker 4: in Britain, or boogieman you might prefer to say, who
Speaker 4: turned up in London at the very beginning of Queen
Speaker 4: Victoria's reign. We're talking about eighteen thirty seven thirty eight
Speaker 4: in the winter, then first of all in villages around
Speaker 4: the outskirts of the town, and later on inside London itself.
Speaker 4: What was remarkable about these stories was well, I mean,
Speaker 4: there were a couple of things. Firstly, they were extremely ubiquitous.
Speaker 4: A lot of people had apparently witnessed this strange.
Speaker 5: And terrifying creature.
Speaker 4: Secondly, and perhaps more intriguingly, spring Hill Deck himself was
Speaker 4: some sort of shapeshifter. In the very first sightings referred
Speaker 4: to him in a wide variety of guises, everything from
Speaker 4: a ghost.
Speaker 5: A bear, a devil, a figure.
Speaker 4: Clad in armor, a figure who was a gigantic baboon,
Speaker 4: even in one case. And it's only over a period
Speaker 4: of time period of some weeks that he slowly metamorphosed
Speaker 4: into the figure that we now know from the sort
Speaker 4: of forty and secondary literature, which is very much a
Speaker 4: devil figure. Essentially, he was a tall, thin gentlemanly had
Speaker 4: blazing red eyes, and his sort of signature move essentially
Speaker 4: was that he shot blue and white balls of fire
Speaker 4: out of his mouth when he attacked his victims, who
Speaker 4: are usually helpless young girls.
Speaker 3: I like the descriptions that he usually are vomited blue flames.
Speaker 5: That's correct.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, this is one of the things that's most
Speaker 4: commonly associated with him, although of course, in fact, when
Speaker 4: you go back to the original sources, you discovered that
Speaker 4: it wasn't quite as commonplace as one might be led
Speaker 4: to believe. That there are certainly two or three cases
Speaker 4: of eyewitnesses describing this happening. And one of the things
Speaker 4: I've looked into over the years is to what extent
Speaker 4: one could potentially duplicate this effect in a normal way.
Speaker 4: But the majority of cases certainly later, somealy after eighteen
Speaker 4: thirty eight, the later versions of spring hil Jack for
Speaker 4: one of a better word. We'll go into this later.
Speaker 4: Noteubt didn't exhibit this particular ability. This was unique to
Speaker 4: the spring Hill Jack of London at the beginning of
Speaker 4: Queen Victoria's reign.
Speaker 3: I wish there'd been some evidence of that captured on
Speaker 3: film or something.
Speaker 4: Well, it appeared just at the very beginning of photography.
Speaker 4: I mean, in eighteen thirty seven, photographs have just been invented.
Speaker 4: But you needed an exposure of ten to twelve hours,
Speaker 4: so you weren't going to capture something as fleet of
Speaker 4: foot Jack on an early plate, sadly enough, And he'cently.
Speaker 3: Been appearing even in recent years, hasn't he There have.
Speaker 4: Been some Yeah, absolutely, I mean, and this, of course
Speaker 4: is one of the fascinating things about him and one
Speaker 4: of the things that's kept me researching for very I mean,
Speaker 4: I've never had a research project that's gone on as
Speaker 4: long as my spring Hill Jack project. I began work
Speaker 4: on this in the autumn of nineteen eighty two and
Speaker 4: I'm just about ready to publish my results now. And
Speaker 4: one of the reasons it's taken me so long is
Speaker 4: that he's a figure who crops up in all sorts
Speaker 4: of strange places and times, and even relatively recently, we've
Speaker 4: had very very cases. It was very similar to spring
Speaker 4: Heel Jack in places like Argentina, Somalia, and it's a
Speaker 4: figure which has some sort of hold I think over
Speaker 4: people minds and memories, and I can testify to this person.
Speaker 4: I mean, my own interest in the subject really began
Speaker 4: in the early nineteen seventies when I was a kid
Speaker 4: and I used to get a magazine called World of Wonder,
Speaker 4: which is published in Britain and was sort of an
Speaker 4: educational magazine, but it had a feature in it called
Speaker 4: Strange Stories, and one week the strange story was about
Speaker 4: spring Hill Jack, and it was illustrated by a rather
Speaker 4: dramatic picture of him sort of leaping out of the
Speaker 4: page towards you with his sort of balls of fire
Speaker 4: I was shooting out of his mouth and it completely
Speaker 4: terrified me, and I was about eleven at the time.
Speaker 4: And the thing that was scary about him, I think
Speaker 4: was the way in which two things. Firstly, he was
Speaker 4: described as essentially ageless, I mean, and this goes back
Speaker 4: again to the spring Hill Jack legend. As it's usually
Speaker 4: told he turns up in eighteen thirty seven, but he's
Speaker 4: last seen in his original British Guys at least in Everton,
Speaker 4: which is a suburb of Liverpool, in nineteen oh four,
Speaker 4: which immediately says to you, well, it can't be a
Speaker 4: human being. If this is the same person and he's
Speaker 4: lived that long and he's still agile and still apparently unchanging,
Speaker 4: then there must be something supernatural about him. And the
Speaker 4: second thing, I think, which is particularly terrify fining and
Speaker 4: gets the imagination going about spring Hill Jack, certainly an
Speaker 4: eleven year old boys. Is the agility that's associated with him,
Speaker 4: the fact that he has this name and can leap
Speaker 4: over houses and so on. Of course, of what that
Speaker 4: really means if you're eleven years old, is there's no
Speaker 4: reason he can't appear on your windows cell that night,
Speaker 4: in the middle of the night when your parents are
Speaker 4: estaped tapping on the window to be let in. And
Speaker 4: I think that's essentially what got me going about him,
Speaker 4: and what's that terror? Essentially is what's motivated me over
Speaker 4: the years. I'm sort of trying to defuse that eleven
Speaker 4: year old boy's fear of the of the dark, of
Speaker 4: the unknown, and of course of of devils and demons
Speaker 4: as well. And it's kept me going for you know,
Speaker 4: thirty odd years, this particular project as a result.
Speaker 1: Wow, that is so similar to my background.
Speaker 3: Is that in mind too?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the I caught the things that used to
Speaker 1: scare the crap out of me as a child. You
Speaker 1: edits it that it's such a such a driver.
Speaker 5: Well and for and for good.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know a lot of good work has
Speaker 4: come out of it, you know, turning on your part,
Speaker 4: Blake and Hopefully my springhil jackwork will be you know,
Speaker 4: we'll do some good in terms of sort the week
Speaker 4: from the chat essentially, I mean, of all the subjects
Speaker 4: I've studied, and there have been a few over the years,
Speaker 4: I think the spinkle Jacket, the original spinkle Jack, the
Speaker 4: one in the original sources, differs perhaps most dramatically from
Speaker 4: the one who appears in the secondary forty and sources
Speaker 4: in terms of just how unlike the way in which
Speaker 4: is portrayed in the sort of secondary works, the original
Speaker 4: springhil Jack was.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about it just a little deeper. He has
Speaker 1: these powers. He can leap, he can jump, he can
Speaker 1: blow blue flames, he has glowing eyes. He's dressed a
Speaker 1: little bit oddly. Iron claws, Yeah, yeah, he has iron claws.
Speaker 1: I forget about that. And then but somehow in the
Speaker 1: contemporary accounts, I'm not clear on this. It's not that
Speaker 1: he's a rapist. He's kind of a grabbist. Is that
Speaker 1: his things?
Speaker 4: I mean, we were today, I suppose to call it
Speaker 4: sexual assault. Essentially, he leaps out of you know, sort
Speaker 4: of dark corners and grabs young girls, I mean teenage
Speaker 4: girls who are walking by, and well, I mean, this
Speaker 4: is what he did in his two most famous assaults,
Speaker 4: and then had these two assaults and not happen. I
Speaker 4: think we wouldn't remember from el Jack today. I mean
Speaker 4: the main reason for this being that the girls in
Speaker 4: question actually then did report him to the authorities, and
Speaker 4: there was a police investigation as a result, and a
Speaker 4: lot of people, of course naturally assume that, you know,
Speaker 4: if someone who's been has been attacked and goes to
Speaker 4: the authorities and gets the magistrates looking for this person,
Speaker 4: well there must be something in it.
Speaker 5: They're not going to be just lying about something like that. That.
Speaker 4: The first of these cases involved a girl called Jane
Speaker 4: Olsop who lived in a lonely house near Bow, which
Speaker 4: is in East London, but it was on the outskirts
Speaker 4: of London at this time. It was still a sort
Speaker 4: of semi rural area, and her house was on a
Speaker 4: sort of back pathway that was led past some fields essentially,
Speaker 4: and it was several hundred yards at least from the
Speaker 4: sort of nearest other house. And the story goes and
Speaker 4: then this is the sort of that Jane herself told
Speaker 4: that on the twenty second of February eighteen thirty eight,
Speaker 4: at about nine in the evening, there is a violent
Speaker 4: knocking at the gate of this house in Bearbinder Lane
Speaker 4: in East London, and Jane was in the house with
Speaker 4: her elder sister and her two parents, and she went
Speaker 4: out to find out what the problem was. And there
Speaker 4: was a tall, dark figure standing in the shadows. I mean,
Speaker 4: of course, this was before street lights and everything else
Speaker 4: was available in the middle of winter, who said, for
Speaker 4: God's sake, bring me a light, for we've caught spring
Speaker 4: heel jack here in the lane. Jane went back indoors
Speaker 4: and she went to fetch a candle, which she brought
Speaker 4: out to this figure standing by the garden gate, and
Speaker 4: when she gave it to him, he held it up
Speaker 4: underneath his chin, which of course is the sort of
Speaker 4: classic Halloween posture which you do with a torture in
Speaker 4: telling a scary story Halloween. But when she looked at
Speaker 4: his face in that light, she saw it had a
Speaker 4: sort of demonic aspect, and the eyes were glowing like
Speaker 4: red balls of fire, and he then breathed his blue
Speaker 4: and white balls a flame into her face and then
Speaker 4: grabbed her and he started clawing at her back and
Speaker 4: her dress with his iron claws and pinned her head
Speaker 4: under his armpit and started raking away at her, and
Speaker 4: she screamed, of course, and her sister came rushing out
Speaker 4: to try and help her. Between the two of them,
Speaker 4: after quite a long struggle that lasted at least a minute, apparently,
Speaker 4: she managed to finally to tear herself away with leaving
Speaker 4: large chunks of her hair and with scratch marks on
Speaker 4: her as a result of this. In the second case,
Speaker 4: this was a few days later. I had a week
Speaker 4: later involving a girl called Lucy Scales. It was a
Speaker 4: butcher's sister from Limehouse, which is a little bit further
Speaker 4: into the City of London, so this is the city
Speaker 4: of London proper, but still in the east end of it.
Speaker 4: She and her sister were walking through a narrow alley
Speaker 4: called Green Dragon Alley, just off the Thames, and they
Speaker 4: came across a tall figure standing in a corner of
Speaker 4: this alleyway who stepped forward and breed blue flames into
Speaker 4: Lucy's face, leaving her in a fit of hysterics on
Speaker 4: the floor. In that particular case, there wasn't an assault
Speaker 4: beyond the breathing of the fire, but those two cases
Speaker 4: together certainly convinced a lot of Londoners that there was
Speaker 4: something more than mere rumor to do with these strange
Speaker 4: stories of spring Hill Jack. Until that point, a lot
Speaker 4: of people, certainly the newspaper reading class than the middle classes,
Speaker 4: essentially thought that spring Hill Jack was essentially just a
Speaker 4: room with the sort of thing that servants would gosper about,
Speaker 4: but was just a wild tall tale. And suddenly, especially
Speaker 4: in the case of Jane Alsop, who was herself from
Speaker 4: this sort of educated middle class, you have someone from
Speaker 4: that and from your own class who's reporting in fairly
Speaker 4: hysterical terms that she's been attacked by a very real
Speaker 4: person or a very real creature of some sort, and
Speaker 4: that brings the whole thing very firmly into focus and
Speaker 4: puts the whole thing into the newspapers in a major
Speaker 4: way for the first time as well.
Speaker 3: So he was predominantly known for attacking women, but there
Speaker 3: were some cases where he reportedly attacked men as well,
Speaker 3: weren't there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And this, of course is one of the intriguing
Speaker 4: things about it. I mean, I think there's one thing.
Speaker 4: It's all very well saying, well, you know, this is
Speaker 4: the sort of thing that sort of you know, some
Speaker 4: sort of slimy pervert would do essentially. I mean, there
Speaker 4: are loads of cases of men attacking young girls. It's
Speaker 4: not a very brave thing to do, it's not a
Speaker 4: very dangerous thing to do. But spring Hill Jack, according
Speaker 4: to the stories that went around at the time, at least,
Speaker 4: was a rather more equal opportunity criminal. And he was
Speaker 4: also supposed to have beating up a blacksmith, for example,
Speaker 4: and a muffin man. You know, to take on a
Speaker 4: Victorian area blacksmith, that's quite a lot more challenging than
Speaker 4: a teenage girl. These are sort of rough, tough guys,
Speaker 4: and so you know, from that point of view, of course,
Speaker 4: then that becomes a little bit more difficult to believe
Speaker 4: that this is just an ordinary prankster or some drunken yob.
Speaker 4: I mean, he's constantly able to do this. I mean
Speaker 4: there are again, I mean, this is assuming that all
Speaker 4: these early stories are literally true, which of course is
Speaker 4: something is very challengeable. But if you read these new
Speaker 4: sperper sods, there are probably ten or fifteen of these
Speaker 4: assaults and modus. You know, half of them at least
Speaker 4: probably are on men. And you do think on that basis,
Speaker 4: you know, he's constantly getting away. No one's ever able
Speaker 4: to lay a finger on him. What's going on here?
Speaker 4: It doesn't sound quite as obvious that it's actually a
Speaker 4: sort of genuine human being. And it's those sorts of
Speaker 4: suspicions that the power normal authors use when they write
Speaker 4: about Springhill got to imply that he's something more than
Speaker 4: a man.
Speaker 1: Essentially, we'll see. So, can you tell us about some
Speaker 1: of the attempts by law enforcement and the public to
Speaker 1: actually catch spring Hill Jack?
Speaker 4: Well, if we stay in eighteen thirty eight for a minute,
Speaker 4: there were a couple of significant things here to say.
Speaker 4: The first is that there were significant attempts to try
Speaker 4: to catch spring Hill Jack. Jane also and Lucy Scales
Speaker 4: both went to the local police office, which is a
Speaker 4: sort of magistrate's court that existed. This is in the
Speaker 4: very early days of modern law enforcement in London. The Metropolitan,
Speaker 4: the police that we know of today has only been
Speaker 4: founded in eighteen twenty nine, and it was still rather small,
Speaker 4: rather badly regarded in many cases force in this early stage.
Speaker 4: And there was a second set of authorities effective that
Speaker 4: worked in parallel at this time, so that each of
Speaker 4: the magistrates who ran London's police offices, and there were
Speaker 4: about ten of these offices had their own force of
Speaker 4: detectives who were linked to their court and were paid
Speaker 4: by them, and they could assign these people to do
Speaker 4: an investigation. So in the case of Jane also there
Speaker 4: were two separate investigations. One was by the Metropolitan Police
Speaker 4: K Division out in Stepney and East London, and the
Speaker 4: other was led by the detective who worked for the
Speaker 4: Lambeth Street Police Office, and his name was James Lee,
Speaker 4: and he was actually probably the most famous detective in
Speaker 4: Britain at this time. It was the sort of Sherlock
Speaker 4: Holmes of his day. And he'd been involved in two
Speaker 4: or three very notorious murder cases, the most famous of
Speaker 4: which is the Mariah Martin case, which is known as
Speaker 4: the murder in the Red Barn, which had taken place
Speaker 4: out in near Ipswich about seven or eight years earlier,
Speaker 4: and even today that's remembered in Britain at least as
Speaker 4: one of the most notorious murders of the nineteenth century
Speaker 4: and Lee had solved it. So we're not talking about
Speaker 4: some useless, incompetant watchmen being put onto this case. This
Speaker 4: is a genuine detective who has genuine police skills, and
Speaker 4: he and the Metropolitan Police did Paralleln inquiries. And what
Speaker 4: was interesting about this was two things. I mean, Firstly,
Speaker 4: they did manage to turn up a number of witnesses
Speaker 4: who'd been in bear Binder Lane at the time of
Speaker 4: the Jane Alsop assault. And the second thing is that
Speaker 4: Leed also arranged for some experiments to be done in
Speaker 4: the local teaching hospital to see if he could duplicate
Speaker 4: the way in which it was possible to produce bursts
Speaker 4: of blue and white balls of flame. And I'll go
Speaker 4: through those two things one after the other if I can.
Speaker 4: I mean, the first thing is to say that the
Speaker 4: witnesses in the in bearbind De Lane had a couple
Speaker 4: of interesting things to say.
Speaker 5: The first was that they would appear to.
Speaker 4: Have been at least two people involved, because at the
Speaker 4: time that spring Hilda was attacking Jaine, also his cloak
Speaker 4: fell to the floor and after he retreated away from
Speaker 4: the house, which incidentally, the people in the house saw
Speaker 4: him do this and described him as sort of heading
Speaker 4: off over the fields, but something not sort of bounding
Speaker 4: away with sort of his spring heeled leaps.
Speaker 5: He just ran off as an ordinary human being would
Speaker 5: have done, but.
Speaker 4: He did it without collecting his cloak, and yet somehow
Speaker 4: the cloak vanished. So the police sort of and Lee
Speaker 4: both concluded that there was an accompass involved who picked
Speaker 4: up the cloak and made himself scarce. The second and
Speaker 4: perhaps even more revealing thing was that two of the
Speaker 4: witnesses in Bearbinder Lane. One was a wheelwright who had
Speaker 4: a large wheel actually on his shoulder at the time,
Speaker 4: and the other wis his friend, and they were walking
Speaker 4: around aboute hundred yards away from the house when this
Speaker 4: screaming emerged from it, and they were absolutely adamant that
Speaker 4: they could see quite clearly into this garden.
Speaker 5: And they said at the police court.
Speaker 4: Had the assault on Jaine also been as fierce and
Speaker 4: as intensive as she described, you know, they would have
Speaker 4: known about it.
Speaker 5: And they didn't see this. They didn't see any blue
Speaker 5: and white balls of fire.
Speaker 4: And at this point the magistrate sort of Injectson says
Speaker 4: that it doesn't appear that she's got any very bad
Speaker 4: injuries on her either. So there is at least a
Speaker 4: suspicion that some of this sort of fierce attack that
Speaker 4: so sort of made a mark on the forty in
Speaker 4: literature was actually not exactly imagination, but certainly there was
Speaker 4: also sort of panic and overstatement. So I think that
Speaker 4: there's you know, it's quite a good thing. It's a
Speaker 4: very good thing. In this case, there was a proper
Speaker 4: police investigation because it has helped us to put things
Speaker 4: much more into perspective, you know. And similarly, Lee, when
Speaker 4: he went to the teaching hospital, was able to be
Speaker 4: used at least blue balls of fire by using a
Speaker 4: technique involving.
Speaker 5: Spirits of alcohol.
Speaker 4: And one of the correspondents I've had over the years
Speaker 4: when I've been working on this case tells me that
Speaker 4: in magic books in that period there was a technique
Speaker 4: producing balls of fire which would involve impregnating a small
Speaker 4: sponge with alcohol holding in your mouth, and then if
Speaker 4: you breathe out your sort of spiritus vapors near a candle,
Speaker 4: you can produce what's in the dark and at very
Speaker 4: short range, appears to be quite a surprising ball of fire. Now, now,
Speaker 4: this to me seems to tie together quite well with
Speaker 4: what the witnesses are saying. In other words, it's entirely
Speaker 4: possible given those two statements that Jane also at very
Speaker 4: close quarters was stunned by what to her was a
Speaker 4: huge burst of blue and white fire, but which would
Speaker 4: only been visible from a matter of a few feet away,
Speaker 4: in which the witnesses Smith and Richardson the names, who
Speaker 4: were on hundred yards away wouldn't have necessarily seen. So
Speaker 4: there's not necessarily a huge disconnect between those stories. But
Speaker 4: certainly what you don't have to assume is that this
Speaker 4: is some sort of know monster with fire breathing dragon
Speaker 4: ish type of abilities. I mean, the two things that
Speaker 4: strike one most about these accounts of Jane Alsop and
Speaker 4: Lucy Scales is that fire was involved in both of them.
Speaker 4: Jane also goes to get a candle, and she has
Speaker 4: to give the candle to spring Hill Jet before he
Speaker 4: breathes blue and white balls of fire. At Lucy Scales
Speaker 4: encountered somebody who was holding a lantern and who actually
Speaker 4: held it up at sort of head height before he
Speaker 4: blew his blue fire into her face. So I think
Speaker 4: that the witnesses could quite clearly be describing a genuine
Speaker 4: assault here, which involves somebody using effectively a sort of
Speaker 4: parlor magic trick.
Speaker 1: That is very cool. Have you talked to any magicians
Speaker 1: about trying to reproduce this.
Speaker 5: I probably need to do that. Yeah, if you know
Speaker 5: any good.
Speaker 4: Ones to let me know, I have surely do I do,
Speaker 4: I do, and I genuinely would like to know, especially
Speaker 4: with a god. I need to speak to someone like Ricky
Speaker 4: Jay really, I mean somebody who would know a lot
Speaker 4: about the contemporary literaly to how widely known this technique
Speaker 4: if it existed was because I mean, obviously one of
Speaker 4: the key elements of my research has been is this
Speaker 4: some sort of fable or is there some genuine assaults
Speaker 4: going on? And really outside the Jane all sort of
Speaker 4: Lucy Scales assaults, It's pretty hard to be definite that
Speaker 4: anybody was ever inuin the attacked. I mean, you can
Speaker 4: try and track down some of these witnesses, and in fact,
Speaker 4: at the time, people did do this, And there's a
Speaker 4: very revealing account in a newspaper called The Morning Herald
Speaker 4: dating back to Jenuary the tenth or eleventh to eighteen
Speaker 4: thirty eight, which says, you know, we send a reporter
Speaker 4: out to look into these stories. This is when spring
Speaker 4: Hill Jack was just a rumor around the outside of London,
Speaker 4: and he asked people about it, and each person director
Speaker 4: you know said I don't know about it, but I
Speaker 4: can tell you who does, and send them on to
Speaker 4: another person who immediately said, no, I don't know anything
Speaker 4: about it in fact, but I've heard that this person knows.
Speaker 5: And of course this.
Speaker 4: Is classic classic urban legends stuff, isn't it. That it's
Speaker 4: a friend of a friend of a friend. And here
Speaker 4: we have an eighteen thirty eight before urban legends we've
Speaker 4: ever heard of it, you know, a precise description of
Speaker 4: the mechanism by which these stories spread, and so you know,
Speaker 4: we do have two very distinct sort of paths of
Speaker 4: inquiry here in that you know, Springhill Jack is ninety
Speaker 4: five percent effectively, you know, a spread of a legend,
Speaker 4: which is one type of inquiry, and here we have
Speaker 4: two or three very specific cacters are very apparently real,
Speaker 4: genuine physical as. So you know that those two things
Speaker 4: having how do they tie together? That's one of the
Speaker 4: main lines of inquiry I've been pursuing all these years.
Speaker 3: So outside of law enforcement attempts, were there any vigilante
Speaker 3: attempts to try and capture spring Heel Jack, Well.
Speaker 4: There were a number, I mean, and we don't these
Speaker 4: are not so well recorded. I mean a reward was
Speaker 4: put up for spring eil Jack. Edward Codrington is one
Speaker 4: of the most famous famous animals of the day. It
Speaker 4: was one of the first subscribers, and so that there
Speaker 4: wasn't There were undoubtedly people wandering around London hoping to
Speaker 4: lay their hands on spring hild Jack. And we have
Speaker 4: two or three cases dating to slightly later in eighteen
Speaker 4: thirty eight of you know, these these vigilante attacks having
Speaker 4: consequences because you know, unfortunate people who were in mistaken
Speaker 4: for Spring heel Jack were beaten up quite badly and
Speaker 4: ended up in one or two cases in police courts.
Speaker 4: I mean what happened, of course. And again this just
Speaker 4: muddies the water even further is as the story spreads
Speaker 4: and people start reading these descriptions, there's a definite sort
Speaker 4: of subsection society thinks that sounds pretty cool. I wouldn't
Speaker 4: mind how many go at that much. It must be
Speaker 4: quite fun to fronten some poor kid. And so there
Speaker 4: are cases of people, you know, dressing themselves up with
Speaker 4: sort of paper masks, and some pretending to be spring
Speaker 4: heel Jack being mistaken for Spring heel Jack by the
Speaker 4: vigilantes and set upon and beaten up and this does,
Speaker 4: as I say, considerably muddy the waters. And of course,
Speaker 4: going back in London a few years earlier, and this
Speaker 4: is one of the things that maybe we can talk
Speaker 4: about later because it does tie in. There had been
Speaker 4: a case called the Hammersmith Ghost Scare of eighteen oh four,
Speaker 4: where Hammersmith had been infested by reports of ghost dressed
Speaker 4: in white. And at the height of this scare, an
Speaker 4: unfortunate bricklayer who wore as part of bricks used to
Speaker 4: make white dust in those days, and so brick lays
Speaker 4: would typically wear white clothes so that the dust wouldn't
Speaker 4: show on their clothes.
Speaker 5: He was going home, going home.
Speaker 4: For the evening, and he was set upon by a
Speaker 4: vigil antian with a blunderbus who shot him dead. And
Speaker 4: there was a very famous murder case involved in this,
Speaker 4: because of course his defense was I genuinely thought this
Speaker 4: was a ghost.
Speaker 5: And this actually still.
Speaker 4: Bears even in British or even today on the justifiable
Speaker 4: homicide as you would call it, defense is whether or
Speaker 4: not you can actually not be guilty of murder if
Speaker 4: you genuinely think you're being attacked by a supernatural being
Speaker 4: or not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a famous sad case. Yeah. They Brian Dunning
Speaker 1: covered that on his Skeptoid podcast a little bit. Considering
Speaker 1: how much of this is legend and how much of
Speaker 1: this is fact, how did you approach your investigation considering
Speaker 1: how much you had to get through? How much material
Speaker 1: are its ouf there?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, you know, my background is that I'm
Speaker 4: in the story and the historian's tactic here essentially, you know,
Speaker 4: you try not to form too much an opinion early on,
Speaker 4: and you go and find as much stuff as you can.
Speaker 5: So I spend a very.
Speaker 4: Large amount of time, particularly in the early days before
Speaker 4: newspaper digitization came in, and thank God for that, you know,
Speaker 4: going through a large stack of old Victorian Erea newspapers
Speaker 4: I don't recommend to anybody because they were you know,
Speaker 4: they were all printed in six point type, no illustrations,
Speaker 4: no headlines, and you have to sort of scan through
Speaker 4: the whole thing looking for mentions of this story, which
Speaker 4: can come into a number of different guys is and
Speaker 4: it really does, you know, it's instant headache time, essentially.
Speaker 4: But I've read through sixty or seventy runs of newspapers
Speaker 4: for you know, five or six months at a time,
Speaker 4: and it does take a long time to go through
Speaker 4: that and over the I mean, but when I first
Speaker 4: published this, this is back in nineteen ninety six, as
Speaker 4: I said, before modern digitization came in, I'd managed to
Speaker 4: find forty five thousand words of original sources in eighty
Speaker 4: different newspapers. Since then, I mean, it's just give you
Speaker 4: an illustration of how different forty researches these days, now
Speaker 4: that we do have these fantastic new techniques available to us.
Speaker 4: My current total, you know, on this file is about
Speaker 4: nine to two hundred and forty thousand words, so I've
Speaker 4: you know, more than I've got about five times as much,
Speaker 4: six times as much material.
Speaker 5: A lot of it's duplicates essentially, but.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, I'm now reasonably satisfied that I
Speaker 4: have pretty much cornered the market essentially in spring Hill
Speaker 4: jacktype material, certainly from the nineteenth century. I mean, there
Speaker 4: may be some significant other cases there, but given the
Speaker 4: way that newspapers tended to copy each other quite dramatically,
Speaker 4: you know, they just lift news from one from the other,
Speaker 4: and you'd find stories from the Isle of Wight appearing
Speaker 4: in Glasgow newspapers and things like that, I'm reasonally confident
Speaker 4: that they're probably not any major reports that I have
Speaker 4: missed so far. So now that I have that, now
Speaker 4: I can start making some theories. And you start by
Speaker 4: looking at obviously looking at the material, and as I
Speaker 4: was saying, you effectively observe that you know, there are
Speaker 4: a number of different strands of this. There is obviously
Speaker 4: an element of urban legend and folklore, and all these
Speaker 4: shape shifting stories tie into that. And the interesting thing
Speaker 4: about them, of course, is that they don't just appear
Speaker 4: in newspapers. They appear also in sort of contemporary pamphlet,
Speaker 4: which is sort of prototype Penny Dreadfuls or Bloods as
Speaker 4: you might know them in the United States, which a
Speaker 4: sort of you know, the sort of tabloid literature of
Speaker 4: their day, and the more extreme stories appear in those.
Speaker 4: I mean, so the story of spring hil Jack appearing
Speaker 4: as a lamplight or walking on his hands with his
Speaker 4: ladder held between his legs and the big lantern on
Speaker 4: top of the ladder, or spring heel Jack is a
Speaker 4: sort of giant baboon up in the trees, or spring
Speaker 4: hil Jack as a sort of fox like figure dressed
Speaker 4: in hunter's uniform, all of those don't appear in newspapers,
Speaker 4: but they do appear in contemporar pamphlets, so you can
Speaker 4: sort of see that there are, you know, different strands
Speaker 4: of evidence depending upon your what sort of educational level,
Speaker 4: as what you would be thinking about spring Hill Jack
Speaker 4: in eighteen thirty eight, if you were a servant or
Speaker 4: reading one of these Penny bloods, you might get a
Speaker 4: bit of a thrill. This sort of essentially sort of
Speaker 4: earlier ere at sort of eighteenth century type of folklore.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, you can trace these types of
Speaker 4: shape shifting figures back to sort of early devil stories,
Speaker 4: and then you've got this sort of more modern monster
Speaker 4: who is using essentially sort of modern science and mechanics
Speaker 4: and all this stuff.
Speaker 5: You know. One of the interesting things about and the most.
Speaker 4: Striking thing when you actually go through this vast pile
Speaker 4: of Victorian ERAa stuff, is that not the single line
Speaker 4: in a single story in any of these newspapers say
Speaker 4: spring Hil Jack is a supernatural being. I mean, he's
Speaker 4: known as the suburban ghost, but people don't literally see
Speaker 4: him as a ghost, or certainly not the newspaper writers
Speaker 4: were covering the story the newspaper writers were covering the
Speaker 4: story see him as a sort of you know, servant's
Speaker 4: legend essentially, and they sort of ridicule them, and the
Speaker 4: servants themselves largely seem to see him as not as
Speaker 4: a ghost, but as as a nobleman in fact, I mean.
Speaker 4: And then again, this is a trope which is quite
Speaker 4: common in those days. The idea of the sort of
Speaker 4: overprivileged buffoonish.
Speaker 5: Aristocrat with a lot of spare time in his hands, who.
Speaker 4: Is able to get away with anything because he's rich
Speaker 4: and well connected, is quite a commonplace in those days.
Speaker 4: And spring Hill Jack was seen by a lot of
Speaker 4: people as a brutal nobleman who went around with a
Speaker 4: gang of other noblemen. And this, of course has explained
Speaker 4: a lot of the facts has had emerged. How is
Speaker 4: spring Hill Jack able to get from the east end
Speaker 4: of London to the West end of London? How is
Speaker 4: he able to dress up in all of these remarkable outfits? Well,
Speaker 4: who can afford a suit of armor? How can you
Speaker 4: afford this amazing spring heel boots that he's got, And
Speaker 4: all of those things point to somebody very wealthy. And
Speaker 4: in fact, there was a lead suspect even at that
Speaker 4: time the Marquess of Waterford, who was one of the
Speaker 4: sort of great aristocratic thugs of his day and was
Speaker 4: well known for his sort of outrageous behavior and beating
Speaker 4: up watchmen and pranking people, and he was quite widely
Speaker 4: believed I think at the time to be spring Hill Jack.
Speaker 3: That sounds like some of the explanations for Jack the
Speaker 3: Ripper as well.
Speaker 4: Very true. I mean, you know, this is as I say,
Speaker 4: it's a troupe essentially. I mean it does come up
Speaker 4: again and again throughout the Nineteenthenturary, not just with this story,
Speaker 4: but you know, in a number of other cases, and
Speaker 4: you know, and people have pointed out and I think
Speaker 4: there's some truth in this that essentially spring hil Jack
Speaker 4: is also a prototype Batman. I mean, he's Bruce Wayne
Speaker 4: in the early Victorian Bude. He's got money, he's got
Speaker 4: a load of high text stuff that nobody else has got,
Speaker 4: you know. In some of the springhild Jack Penny dreadfuls,
Speaker 4: he actually hides in the cave in a graveyard. So
Speaker 4: there are some quite strong connections between Batman and spring
Speaker 4: Hiel Jack invent.
Speaker 1: But he's also a dressing really fancy and knocking women around.
Speaker 1: So he's kind of putting the pimp and pimpernel.
Speaker 4: Well, yes, batman esque some of them, of course. I mean,
Speaker 4: this is one of the interesting things about this, the
Speaker 4: way in which this develops, just to touch on this briefly,
Speaker 4: is that you know, by the time the penny dreadfulls
Speaker 4: get hold of him, they turn him into a hero.
Speaker 4: I mean, he is the sort of if he is
Speaker 4: a nobleman, he's a nobleman who's been wrong, you know,
Speaker 4: he's been deprived of his inheritance or whatever, and he's
Speaker 4: actually out to protect the heroine. And the only people
Speaker 4: who get beaten up in the actual in the bloods
Speaker 4: are you know, sort of bad guys.
Speaker 5: Who deserve it, is actually there.
Speaker 4: He backed women in fact, so there's a pretty seismic
Speaker 4: shift in the way in which he's portrayed.
Speaker 3: So what are some of the other theories about who
Speaker 3: or what spring hil Jack was or is. Well.
Speaker 4: I mean, over the years, a lot of strange things
Speaker 4: have been suggested. I mean, of course, inevitably, in the
Speaker 4: nineteen sixties, when Flying Source of Reviews started to be
Speaker 4: published and they heard about the story, he got sort
Speaker 4: of tied into the hole. Is spining heel Jack some
Speaker 4: sort of UFO occupant and rather than an elaborate theory
Speaker 4: was proposed in FSR in nineteen sixty two suggesting that
Speaker 4: he was actually a sort of a stranded alien. I
Speaker 4: mean that this is a theory which which positive that
Speaker 4: he was actually looking for a safe house and he
Speaker 4: kept knocking on people's doors because he was going to
Speaker 4: the wrong place, because he didn't know London very well,
Speaker 4: and he was only attacking people when they screamed, essentially,
Speaker 4: so he was sort of trying to shut them up
Speaker 4: because he was about to be about to be revealed
Speaker 4: to the authorities. And you know, this works only in
Speaker 4: the sense that, you know, the people who wrote this
Speaker 4: by this stage were getting old of a very perverted
Speaker 4: version of the spring Hill Jack story and adding some
Speaker 4: elements to it themselves, so that you know, they have
Speaker 4: Springhill spring Hill Jack was sort of weird cropped ears
Speaker 4: a bit, sort of like Spock and Star Trek. They
Speaker 4: have a spring hiel Jack who is much more alien
Speaker 4: than the original spring hil Jack actually was. So there's
Speaker 4: the UFO connection. I mean, there's the whole sort of
Speaker 4: escaped from an azerie type of connection, where spring hil
Speaker 4: Jack is supposed to be either an escape monkey or
Speaker 4: in some cases escape kangaroo even and there are then
Speaker 4: you know, there's the sort of more esoteric, sort of
Speaker 4: power dimensional type of theory which people like John Keel
Speaker 4: would have subscribed to, where spring Hill Jack becomes a
Speaker 4: sort of ultra dimensional figure who's come into this universe
Speaker 4: from some other universe or from some sort of you know,
Speaker 4: high gravity universe somewhere else, which which would allow for
Speaker 4: his spectacular leaping ability. Of course, none of which, of course,
Speaker 4: you know this is this is the point of my
Speaker 4: research in a sense that all of that is only
Speaker 4: really you can take it, even remotely seriously and as
Speaker 4: a sort of theory if you haven't read all the
Speaker 4: original sources, only if you've got the sort of perverted
Speaker 4: secondhand let's conflate every room we've heard and then double
Speaker 4: it type of forty and pot boiler. Can you actually say, Okay,
Speaker 4: if this is the evidence, and this is a theory
Speaker 4: that fits the evidence, the real evidence doesn't point to
Speaker 4: any of that. The real evidence really only points in
Speaker 4: two directions, which is that spring heeld Deck is either
Speaker 4: an urban legend or a person who's decided to do
Speaker 4: this either because he's drunk or foot prank or both,
Speaker 4: and neither of those is really a complete and full
Speaker 4: explanation on itself.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think it's there's a tendency among modern
Speaker 1: readers to sort of attribute a sort of superstitious ignorance
Speaker 1: to people from previous centuries. And I know, by itself,
Speaker 1: I'd like to believe that this kind of imaginative attribution
Speaker 1: by witnesses wouldn't happen now. But I saw that in
Speaker 1: your research. You point to the recent child deaths in
Speaker 1: the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh being attributed to pig Face,
Speaker 1: where all any magic flying van. So I'm guessing people
Speaker 1: still report extremely unlikely things.
Speaker 4: Now, that's true, and I think I'm not a great
Speaker 4: believer in sort of Young's idea of archetypes. But one
Speaker 4: of the intriguing things about this is, you know what
Speaker 4: causes this this figure, a very similar figure to crop
Speaker 4: up in so many different times and places. And this
Speaker 4: is something that I've researched long and hard. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 4: to be completely answered, I don't have an answer to
Speaker 4: this question yet. I mean a lot of spring heel
Speaker 4: Jack stories occur in the sort of places you would expect.
Speaker 4: They occur in Newfoundland, they occur in Australia, they occur
Speaker 4: in New Zealand, they go in South Africa. In other words,
Speaker 4: in places where where you know, people who are emigrating
Speaker 4: from written to bits of the British Empire might conceivably
Speaker 4: carry these stories. And you know, and they are obviously
Speaker 4: very clear links. I mean in Newfound and there's a
Speaker 4: figure then as spring Heel Jackson who's very clearly a
Speaker 4: sort of perverted version of Springhiel jack There's just been
Speaker 4: sort of slightly changing the passages of a bit of
Speaker 4: time in a bit of a few miles, and somebody's
Speaker 4: taken the story from that they heard, you know, from
Speaker 4: their mother's nee or whatever, and told it again to
Speaker 4: their kids in Newfound and it sort of spread around
Speaker 4: that island. But the interesting thing is that they are
Speaker 4: also stories of spring Hill Jacking places where there was
Speaker 4: never any British imperial influence, you know, in the in
Speaker 4: the nineteen eighties, in Mogadishu, which is in Somalia had
Speaker 4: previously been part of Italian Somali that it had never been,
Speaker 4: but it had been a British territory for about two
Speaker 4: years in World War Two there was this figure the
Speaker 4: tall Man, who was supposed to be able to leap
Speaker 4: huge distances and would sort of appear at second floor
Speaker 4: bedroom windows. And clearly that's a spring Hill jack type
Speaker 4: of archetype, but he's not known as spring Hill Jackie's
Speaker 4: and as the tall Man. Similarly, in Russia at the
Speaker 4: time of the Russian Revolution, in Saint Petersburg, there were
Speaker 4: a gang of a gang of criminals called calling themselves
Speaker 4: the Leapers, who used to go sort of hopping about
Speaker 4: and pretending to be able to leap huge distances and
Speaker 4: allegedly actually genuinely wore springs on their feet to terrorize
Speaker 4: people so they could rob them. And you know they
Speaker 4: were originally they were tracked down by the Checker, the
Speaker 4: original KGB and executed, I mean, and again they seemed
Speaker 4: there were police reports describing these guys in the Russian archives,
Speaker 4: and you know they seem to be in genuine But
Speaker 4: where do they get this idea that it would be
Speaker 4: a good idea to dress up if it be like
Speaker 4: spring Hill jack from There's no obvious way in which
Speaker 4: that story could have got there, And the most famous example,
Speaker 4: perhaps like this, is Perak, the spring Man of the Prague,
Speaker 4: who in the later years of World War Two was
Speaker 4: seen by a lot of Czechs as sort of, you know,
Speaker 4: a defender of the Czech people against the Nazis.
Speaker 5: And there are a.
Speaker 4: Lot of urban legends and folklore in Czechoslovakia, in the
Speaker 4: Czech Republic as we would now call it, going back
Speaker 4: to nineteen forty four to forty five, describing this figure in
Speaker 4: exactly the same terms as spring Hill Jack, right down
Speaker 4: to the kind of iron claws and business. Where did
Speaker 4: it come from? I mean, I've done a lot of
Speaker 4: work investigating it. Did any British penny dreadfuls get translated
Speaker 4: into Czech in the early ninety hundreds, and in fact
Speaker 4: a lot did, but not the spring Hill Jack story.
Speaker 4: So I'm still completely at a loss to know how
Speaker 4: this story spreads. And it must be to a certain
Speaker 4: extent that there's something fativistic about about it whole figure.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's something that just grips the human mind
Speaker 4: that there could be somebody who has this sort of
Speaker 4: leaping ability and this sort of devilish parents that crops
Speaker 4: up again and again. This is what folklore is call
Speaker 4: a migratory legend, and unfortunately, and I got very excited
Speaker 4: when I heard about that they had this concept because
Speaker 4: it didn't exactly describe what I was finding in my research.
Speaker 4: But when you actually look into it, folklores have no
Speaker 4: real explanations to how it works, how this legend migrates.
Speaker 4: They just know that it does do. So you get
Speaker 4: sort of Jack and the Beanstalk type legends in lots
Speaker 4: of different countries that have no apparent connection to each other.
Speaker 5: But I still don't know.
Speaker 4: I would be very pleased to hear anyone who can
Speaker 4: explain exactly why this happens, whether there is some form
Speaker 4: of transmission that I'm not aware of, or whether it's
Speaker 4: just that the human imagination, because we're all human, works
Speaker 4: in very similar ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fascinating question. And those stories, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it seems like it ties a little bit into mimetics, right, yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean that's another interesting modern theory which I need
Speaker 4: to look into maybe a bit more. But I haven't
Speaker 4: again heard anything that specifically explains how this work. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's people sort of noticing phenomenon, sort of trying to
Speaker 4: grow towards an explanation. We really haven't got any firm
Speaker 4: answers to it yet, but quite plainly, this goes a
Speaker 4: long way beyond spring hiel Jack. I mean it would
Speaker 4: explain an awful lot of different forteing phenomena essentially, wouldn't it.
Speaker 1: It would, I think, And this is a project you'd
Speaker 1: probably appreciate. But I think in some way there ought
Speaker 1: to be And I know there are already like a
Speaker 1: list of tropes that people track in folk for, but
Speaker 1: it seems like these things are almost could be divided
Speaker 1: into discrete packets of information that you could measure with
Speaker 1: computer software. The reason I say it so like that
Speaker 1: there's a genetic piece of the story that's the spring
Speaker 1: Hill character, there's a genetic piece that's the fire breathing character,
Speaker 1: and that you could look at these legends and just
Speaker 1: sort of see where the pieces match up across lots
Speaker 1: of different pieces of the literature. It's something that's been
Speaker 1: intriguing me for a few years now. I wanted to
Speaker 1: know if there was a software solution.
Speaker 4: Google then grand Viewer I suppose would allow to track
Speaker 4: of mentions of the name and things like that. But yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean the actual You're right, I mean folklores of
Speaker 4: course have their sort of you know, in fotal index,
Speaker 4: you know, they sort of assign numbers and letters to
Speaker 4: all of these stories, and spring Jack fits into that category.
Speaker 4: But that again just tracks what exists rather than explains
Speaker 4: why it exists in the in the strange places.
Speaker 1: Two parts, two parts, at least two parts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the closest theory would be in anthropology
Speaker 3: or linguistics, the idea of diffusion, where you've got some
Speaker 3: kind of whether it's language or whether it's some kind
Speaker 3: of cultural element, and it just diffuses and spreads throughout society,
Speaker 3: and then you know, travels overseas as well, as you
Speaker 3: were saying to other countries that have been influenced by
Speaker 3: Britain in so far as spring heel Jack is concerned
Speaker 3: countries like India and Australia from Singapore, and that would
Speaker 3: explain the claims leaping to those countries as well. That's
Speaker 3: absolutly right to some extent anyway.
Speaker 1: Well, in much like mimetics, the idea would be the
Speaker 1: ideas are transported but also mutated. So and I think
Speaker 1: you've probably covered that to some extent, but maybe we
Speaker 1: could talk about that a little more so, how did
Speaker 1: especially the journalism, how did the news reports, in addition
Speaker 1: to the folklore, shape the way the spring Hill Jack
Speaker 1: story emerged.
Speaker 4: Well, I think this is a very worthwhile point, and
Speaker 4: I mean it does two things. I mean, it helps
Speaker 4: to explain how the story spreads, because you know, stories
Speaker 4: that are cropper in one place get copied in newspapers
Speaker 4: a long way away, and so the story spreads you
Speaker 4: through this through the new newspaper press and to sort
Speaker 4: of newly literate classes in a way that hadn't been
Speaker 4: possible even sort of forty.
Speaker 5: Or fifty years before. And one of the key things
Speaker 5: that happens in this.
Speaker 4: Period is that, you know, the British press, in order
Speaker 4: to control it, pactively sense of it, although I didn't
Speaker 4: like to put it that way, had been subject to
Speaker 4: what we call the stamp tax. So everyone who published
Speaker 4: a newspaper had to have each copy stamped and pay
Speaker 4: tax on it. And this effectively raised the price of
Speaker 4: a newspaper to something like six or seven old pence,
Speaker 4: which at that time was you know, the whole wage
Speaker 4: of a daily labor would be about the same man.
Speaker 4: So it would be like being asked you to part
Speaker 4: with one hundred, one hundred and fifty bucks to a
Speaker 4: newspaper these days. Obviously that meant that only the sort
Speaker 4: of very rich, literate people who could be trusted with
Speaker 4: this new form of communication were actually buying newspapers. And
Speaker 4: it wasn't until the sort of mid eighteen hundreds that
Speaker 4: the stamp tax was abolished, and suddenly you get these
Speaker 4: sort of unstamped papers and this story explodes, and I
Speaker 4: don't think it's a coincidence. And after the original spring
Speaker 4: Hill Jack stories of eighteen thirty eight, there's a sort
Speaker 4: of lull, I mean they gone for a couple of years,
Speaker 4: well after eighteen forty. There was a lull until the
Speaker 4: eighteen sixties where not a lot is happening in spring
Speaker 4: Hill Jack world. And then there's an explosion of springhil
Speaker 4: Jack reports. Again he's seen in place like all the
Speaker 4: Short Army Camp and Culchister Army Camp in the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 4: for example. And this ties in very closely to the
Speaker 4: explosion of publications of penny dreadfuls and understanded newspapers. And
Speaker 4: so I think that quite clearly you could at least
Speaker 4: posit here that you know, the story has been revived
Speaker 4: and been spread by these much more widely circulated newspapers.
Speaker 4: And we're talking about a situation where you know, the
Speaker 4: Times newspaper goes from a circulation of five or six
Speaker 4: or seven thousand to a circulation of six figures. So
Speaker 4: newspapers are being much much more widely read, as indeed
Speaker 4: our penny dreadfulces. And you have this whole new literature,
Speaker 4: and it's a whole new literate class of people who
Speaker 4: are reading them. And it all ties into this sort
Speaker 4: of spreading education in a sort of industrial revolution society,
Speaker 4: which is something the historicals done a lot of study of.
Speaker 4: Now that's one thing. The second thing, and this again
Speaker 4: is something I wasn't aware of when I started my work,
Speaker 4: and it's become much clearer in the last few years
Speaker 4: with newspaper digitization, because you know, you can only search
Speaker 4: so many blank crampieces of paper for things that probably
Speaker 4: aren't there before you get fed up, in my experience,
Speaker 4: But now that we've got this ability to do keyword
Speaker 4: searches and we don't have to search the springhel jackets,
Speaker 4: so you can search for phrases like iron claws or
Speaker 4: you know, red balls of Fire or whatever it's going
Speaker 4: to be or spring Boots is one interesting one. And
Speaker 4: when you start doing that, you discover that there are
Speaker 4: earlier versions of this story in print, which nobody had
Speaker 4: spotted before because nobody had been able to sort of
Speaker 4: go through every newspaper ever published for years and years,
Speaker 4: and the story goes back well, I mean the earliest
Speaker 4: version I've traced actually dates to a pamphlet published in
Speaker 4: London in sixteen seventy seven, which is about a devil
Speaker 4: appearing in Suffolk who has very close similarities to springheel
Speaker 4: Jack and you know, is very ajulant, can leap over
Speaker 4: sort of fifteen foot high walls, but he's in It's real.
Speaker 4: It's a man who's done according this is the story
Speaker 4: anyway at the time. It's a man who's in league
Speaker 4: with the devil. He's signed away his soul in exchange
Speaker 4: with this sort of ability to rob people and get
Speaker 4: away from them for three or four or five years.
Speaker 4: And then there's another gap where something's going on but
Speaker 4: I haven't traced yet, And then we have the Hammersmith
Speaker 4: Ghost Scare of eighteen oh four, where again, yeah, there
Speaker 4: are distinct parallels with the Spring hil Jack story of
Speaker 4: eighteen thirty eight. The Hammersmith ghost is described as wearing
Speaker 4: a cow's hide, for example, which is a phrase which
Speaker 4: is using exactly the same terms in the very earliest
Speaker 4: period of the Springhill Jack stories, when he's still touring
Speaker 4: around the villages outside London, he's and he's in all
Speaker 4: these different guys as one of them is dressed in
Speaker 4: animal hide. And then in eighteen oh nine there's a
Speaker 4: thing called the Croydon Monster, who's a man dressed in
Speaker 4: sort of military style uniform with a long cloak, but
Speaker 4: who can leap about. And in eighteen twenty five, eighteen
Speaker 4: twenty four to twenty five there's a ghost down on
Speaker 4: the South coast and Hampshire and the Isle of Wight
Speaker 4: who is exactly the same as Springhill Jack, down to
Speaker 4: having large claw gloves and wearing wearing a suit of armor.
Speaker 4: And again in Hammersmith in eighteen thirty three. Now, so
Speaker 4: of course, you know, all of this led me to
Speaker 4: ask what the heck is going on here? I mean,
Speaker 4: is this actually some sort of genuine supernatural creature?
Speaker 5: Who's you know?
Speaker 4: I mean, this is obviously what the UFO crowd would
Speaker 4: ten to interpret it as I'm sure I don't want
Speaker 4: to knock them too.
Speaker 5: Much, but they would tend to see this is a
Speaker 5: j real stories.
Speaker 4: It's in the newspaper, it must be real, and therefore
Speaker 4: you know, spring Hill Jack has been around for long
Speaker 4: and wethink. Actually, now this is the key thing. You know,
Speaker 4: you need to study how journalism worked in those days,
Speaker 4: and basically you can't consider that newspapers as they existed
Speaker 4: in eighteen ten eighteen thirty were like newspapers a day
Speaker 4: where the sort of a large staff of experienced reporters
Speaker 4: would be sort of sent out to do to look
Speaker 4: into these stories and come back with a true story
Speaker 4: having interviewed lots of people that just simply did not
Speaker 4: happen in the Victorian period. A newspaper in those periods
Speaker 4: was an editor, and it was a large national newspaper,
Speaker 4: being an editor and a parliamentary staff, so it'd have
Speaker 4: some guys who went along and reported on what was
Speaker 4: going on in parliament and everything else in it, all
Speaker 4: of the sort of sensational and stuff. All the crime
Speaker 4: stories were supplied by freelancers who are called penny aligners
Speaker 4: in those days, and they would live by their wits
Speaker 4: they could only know they could only publish stories if
Speaker 4: they could get them into the newspapers. The newspapers didn't
Speaker 4: there was no retainer. They only earned from the stories
Speaker 4: that were published, and those stories would tend to come
Speaker 4: in parliamentary recesses when because the newspapers in those days
Speaker 4: again we're not like modern newspapers, large with multiple supplements
Speaker 4: and endless space for news, they were very restricted.
Speaker 5: I mean, and this again goes back to the stamp
Speaker 5: tax business.
Speaker 4: And this is one of the reason why they're so
Speaker 4: crammed and there's no headlines is that you want to
Speaker 4: get the maximum amount in this very small space. They're
Speaker 4: normally four pages long, so if you've got something going
Speaker 4: on in parliament then there's no room for these stories.
Speaker 4: But in the parliamentary recesses there's suddenly much less news
Speaker 4: and their penny aligners come alive and they start selling
Speaker 4: all these stories. If you plot the times of which
Speaker 4: Parliament is sitting in England in this period and spring
Speaker 4: Hill Jack stories, there is a direct correlation between when
Speaker 4: the stories appear and when Parliament is not sitting. That's
Speaker 4: one interesting thing that I've discovered. The second thing is
Speaker 4: what do these penny aligners do when there's no sensational
Speaker 4: murders happening. And you know the answer is they copy
Speaker 4: out old stories and they sell them again, and they
Speaker 4: do this repeatedly. So what's happened, almost certainly, is that
Speaker 4: the spring hil Deac of eighteen thirty eight is exactly
Speaker 4: the same as the Springhiel Jack of eighteen thirty three
Speaker 4: and eighteen twenty five and eighteen twenty four and eighteen
Speaker 4: oh nine. He's just got a bit more traction because
Speaker 4: of the Alsop and the scales stories where somebody perhaps
Speaker 4: has gone and actually done us. You know, this is
Speaker 4: a copycat crime essentially, that's all that differed. It distinguishes
Speaker 4: the Spring eil Jack of eating thirty eight from these
Speaker 4: earlier versions. So what's probably happened is that, you know,
Speaker 4: a newspaper journalist down on his luck, needing to earn
Speaker 4: a few pounds for his dinner, has gone through some
Speaker 4: old newspapers and found an earlier version of the story
Speaker 4: and just transposed it to the London of eighteen thirty
Speaker 4: seven thirty eight, and it's just caught on in this
Speaker 4: particular case, and then everyone's forgotten over the years. I
Speaker 4: mean over the years, they forget the eighteen thirty eight
Speaker 4: spring or Jack much. That's the early ones. But even
Speaker 4: in eighteen thirty eight they'd forgotten the early ones because
Speaker 4: it had just been one newspaper story in one newspaper
Speaker 4: ten years earlier. So journalism has a huge amount to
Speaker 4: do with this, and understanding how journalism works explains how
Speaker 4: this story spreads.
Speaker 1: And then the all sub story. He says, I've caught
Speaker 1: spring hil Jack and she goes to get help or
Speaker 1: in like like, so she must have been expected to
Speaker 1: know who the character was, right.
Speaker 4: Sure, absolutely, I mean the early you know, I mean
Speaker 4: the first versions call him steel Jack. I mean this
Speaker 4: is back in December eighteen thirty seven, and it's sort
Speaker 4: of and by by early January with there newspaper stories
Speaker 4: calling him spring Jack, and then you know, springhel Jack
Speaker 4: as a phrase actually first comes up in the Awesop story,
Speaker 4: but as in terms of its publication. But as you say,
Speaker 4: at some point between early January when this phrase spring
Speaker 4: Jack appears in the West Camp Guardian and the twenty
Speaker 4: second of February when spring heel Jack appears in the Times,
Speaker 4: Something's happened in London that we can't now trace and
Speaker 4: you know the phrase has been born, but they're just
Speaker 4: giving a name to a sort of you know, a
Speaker 4: figure who's existed effectively in newspaper stories for some time
Speaker 4: under there, I mean usually before that he's described effectively
Speaker 4: as a ghost. And of course, you know, you don't
Speaker 4: have to know that much about English literature to know
Speaker 4: that there is a bit of a tradition of ghosts
Speaker 4: dress in armor. For example is go back to Hamlet's father.
Speaker 4: So you know, there are lots of places where people
Speaker 4: where imaginative, hard up journalists could have drawn for a
Speaker 4: bit of inspiration in an attempt to sell us a
Speaker 4: sensational story to a newspaper and themselves their supper.
Speaker 3: And so there'd also be the possibility that a lot
Speaker 3: of these stories wouldn't have been reported to I think undoubtedly.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, the penny a liners had no
Speaker 4: way of knowing which of these stories were going to
Speaker 4: be taken up. And very often they would write stories
Speaker 4: and they wouldn't appear because something would have happened in
Speaker 4: parliament That meant there was no space. So essentially they
Speaker 4: were space fillers. Unless the murder had been particularly sensational.
Speaker 5: The factory.
Speaker 4: They were just kind of the you know, we still
Speaker 4: see this in newspapers a day, don't we. That there
Speaker 4: are a certain sort of categoria story which are the
Speaker 4: sort of the gosh where factor stories that they sort
Speaker 4: of squeeze into corners to fill a bit of space
Speaker 4: in between the quote serious news.
Speaker 5: And of course, one of the interesting things about it
Speaker 5: from a.
Speaker 4: Journalists point of view I know a bit about it
Speaker 4: because I was a professional journalist for six years earlier
Speaker 4: on in my career, is that the standards that are
Speaker 4: applied to those stories are a lot lower than the
Speaker 4: standards are applied to the proper hard news you know, revolution, volcanoes,
Speaker 4: parliamentary reporting type stuff. So again, you know, one has
Speaker 4: to bear in mind how journalists think and how journalists
Speaker 4: work in assessing all of these accounts.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's wonderful we live in a time
Speaker 1: now where papers like the Daily Mail have higher standards.
Speaker 5: Reporting standards.
Speaker 2: Debate that.
Speaker 3: You've referred to the replication of the blue flames a
Speaker 3: couple of times, and I think I've heard correct me
Speaker 3: if I'm wrong, that there were some attempts to replicate
Speaker 3: the spring heels.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, I mean again, we have. We have rumors
Speaker 4: about this, but they're not very reliable rumors. But one
Speaker 4: name that I mean, I can't really go an entour
Speaker 4: podcast worn't mentioning the name Peter Hayning. He wrote the
Speaker 4: only book that was until this year that's been published
Speaker 4: on spring hill Jack.
Speaker 5: He's a British writer, a hack writer, essentially him.
Speaker 4: He's dead now, so I can probably get away with
Speaker 4: saying that who anthologized nineteenth century sensation of literature for
Speaker 4: a living, And he alleged in his book on springhil Jack,
Speaker 4: which is full of highly unverified, made up stuff, as
Speaker 4: it turns out that in the nineteen forties thirties forties,
Speaker 4: the Germans had tried experiments with paratroops equipped with spring
Speaker 4: heels and had a ninety five percent incidence of broken ankles.
Speaker 5: I've never found any really, you know, sort.
Speaker 4: Of verifiable source for that story, and I've wasted quite
Speaker 4: a large number of weeks of my life. This is
Speaker 4: why I have a bit of a down on Peter Hayning.
Speaker 4: Really try and track down some of his more implausible
Speaker 4: stories to some sort of contemporary source, and it's just
Speaker 4: not possible. I mean, most notoristic Peter Hayning is the
Speaker 4: source of perhaps the most sensational attack that springhild Deck
Speaker 4: is ever supposed to have committed, which is in Jacob's Island,
Speaker 4: which is in a slub in London in eighteen forty
Speaker 4: four to forty five. Springhill Deck is supposed have appeared
Speaker 4: bounding over these sort of rickardy houses and the rickety
Speaker 4: bridges connecting them, and he comes across his teenage prostitute
Speaker 4: called Maria Davis Sandy on the bridge, grabs her, holds
Speaker 4: a holds her up over his head, and throws her
Speaker 4: into the muddy ditch where she drowns. And Haining publishes
Speaker 4: the story and also an illustration that's supposed to show
Speaker 4: the recovery of the body of Maria Davis from this ditch. Now,
Speaker 4: when I first published my Spring here that research back
Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety six, in forteen studies, I managed to
Speaker 4: track down the source of the illustration to the Getty
Speaker 4: Picture Library and it was just you know, it's actually
Speaker 4: labeled when you pull it from the library, it's labeled
Speaker 4: on the back. It comes from a publication called Old
Speaker 4: London or something that I can't remember the exact title,
Speaker 4: but it's a part work.
Speaker 5: Essentially.
Speaker 4: It was published in London in the eighteen seventies, Old
Speaker 4: and New London. It was called so and it was
Speaker 4: an engraving gest of Jacob's Island then showing some poor
Speaker 4: hatless Jacob's lander getting his water from this sewage filled ditch.
Speaker 4: And what's supposed to be the body of Maria Davis
Speaker 4: is actually this person leaning over with a saucepan to
Speaker 4: scoop up water. So you know, Hayning had just found
Speaker 4: this picture and used it in a completely false way.
Speaker 4: And when you actually search the death registers in London
Speaker 4: for the name Maria Davis, nobody of that name died
Speaker 4: in London in eighteen.
Speaker 5: Forty forty five. At all.
Speaker 4: Henning has simply made this story up to make his
Speaker 4: book a bit fatter and make it a bit more sensational.
Speaker 4: And you know he's only court now that you know,
Speaker 4: it's easy to track him that his stuff down now
Speaker 4: that it was in in nineteen seventies. But he got
Speaker 4: away with this for years and years. And there are
Speaker 4: several other examples of this sort. I mean, there's a
Speaker 4: whole section in the book I'm writing about Smith or
Speaker 4: Jack on Peter Haynes's sort of fakes and frauds. And
Speaker 4: we cannot underestimate how much impact Haning in particular has
Speaker 4: had on the modern fourteen literature, because the large majority
Speaker 4: of the more sensational stories about Springing or Jack the
Speaker 4: data after the ulcub account are essentially inventions.
Speaker 5: Don't you hate, one man?
Speaker 1: Don't you hate when your research takes you do having
Speaker 1: to try to find negative evidence?
Speaker 4: Well, it's impossible, isn't it hard? Because I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: you have to look at every newspaper published in London
Speaker 4: and every death record. Even then someone could say, oh, well,
Speaker 4: you know, she's just a prostitute and the you know,
Speaker 4: and the worst slum in London.
Speaker 5: The course her death wouldn't be registered.
Speaker 4: So you know, I mean it is tremendously difficult to
Speaker 4: do this, and you know you can, you can, And
Speaker 4: I mean one of one of the more the greater
Speaker 4: triumphs I suppose that I've managed to have here is
Speaker 4: that the other thing that Hayning does, you know, he
Speaker 4: tries to pin this on the markers of Waterford, and
Speaker 4: the main bit of evidence he uses for this is
Speaker 4: he alleges that water well, this is a true story
Speaker 4: this part is true. In the earlier in the summer
Speaker 4: of eighteen thirty seven, just before the spring hil Jack
Speaker 4: story happened, Waterford gone off to Norway on a bit
Speaker 4: of a jolly with some pluggish friends of his, and
Speaker 4: they've been involved in an altercation involving a prostitute from
Speaker 4: a local whorehouse and a night watchman from the city
Speaker 4: of Bergen, and the night watchmen it hit Waterford over
Speaker 4: the head with a mace and nearly killed him. And
Speaker 4: that's I mean, that definitely did happen. And Haining sort
Speaker 4: of picks up the story and uses it. I mean,
Speaker 4: he's obviously looking for something to say, you know, he
Speaker 4: wants to be able to show Waterford could have done it,
Speaker 4: and to do that he needs to prove that Watford
Speaker 4: would have had something against the police, because his theory
Speaker 4: is that springhil Jack is the sort of taunt of
Speaker 4: the police that Watford came up with. And so he
Speaker 4: suggests that that spring Hill, that springhild Jack comes from
Speaker 4: this animus, and that Waterford was really angry about the
Speaker 4: policeman in Bergen who hit him over the head. And
Speaker 4: he does this by printing an extract from the Memoirs
Speaker 4: and Correspondence of Sir Frederick Johnson, who was one of
Speaker 4: Watford's friends at the times, and he relates how they
Speaker 4: were on this stage coach back from you know, the
Speaker 4: land in Aberdeen. They traveled down to London the stage coach, plotting,
Speaker 4: you know, some some practs. He doesn't act, I mean,
Speaker 4: he's Haining is clever enough not to literally say we're
Speaker 4: going to invent this character called Springhill Jack, but he
Speaker 4: quotes Johnson saying, you know, we're going to come up
Speaker 4: with this sort of you know, this prank for the police.
Speaker 4: And this is like three or four weeks before Springhil
Speaker 4: Jack appears for the first time in the outcouts for London,
Speaker 4: So it's kind of the smoking gun effectively in Haining's account. Now,
Speaker 4: when you look into Sir Frederick Johnson, you discover a
Speaker 4: couple of interesting things about him. The first thing is
Speaker 4: that Haning depicts him writing this book in his old age,
Speaker 4: sort of looking back form on the indiscretions of his youth.
Speaker 4: In fact, Frederick Johnson died in a riding accident in
Speaker 4: eighteen forty two at the age of only thirty five,
Speaker 4: so he wasn't around right, and the memoirs and caused
Speaker 4: bonsors of Frederick Johnson, and so you know, you can
Speaker 4: point to these types of sort of huge howler that
Speaker 4: Ainy commits, not thinking that people are going to be
Speaker 4: easy to be able to check this in later years
Speaker 4: to sort of show that some of his evidence is
Speaker 4: obviously made up.
Speaker 5: But it's a lot easier had it was.
Speaker 4: And for years people just looked at Haymling's book and
Speaker 4: essentially that you would have seen this obviously in other cases,
Speaker 4: you know, and I as a child and an early
Speaker 4: teenager had this in space. If somebody's published a book
Speaker 4: on it, surely they've done the work. They must have
Speaker 4: done the serious research. They wouldn't have put it into
Speaker 4: print if they didn't believe it. Now obviously, you know,
Speaker 4: you mature eventually you realize that maybe there's another motive
Speaker 4: of publishing the sensational stuff like money. But you know,
Speaker 4: when you're a kid, you're not thinking about this sort
Speaker 4: of thing. And Haming got away with this four years
Speaker 4: because people, you know, he had a reputation of someone
Speaker 4: who'd read a lot of you know, old Victorian books,
Speaker 4: and so if he's citing that no one else has.
Speaker 5: Heard of it, probably because you know, he's read more
Speaker 5: books than anybody else.
Speaker 4: Of course, now we can use computerized catalogs to say
Speaker 4: there is no trace in any news, in any catalog,
Speaker 4: the British Museum, Library, the Library, Congress, you know, the
Speaker 4: WorldCat this book as Frederick Johnston at all, and so
Speaker 4: we can in a matter of seconds sort of expose him.
Speaker 4: But that just wasn't possible in nineteen seventies when he
Speaker 4: wrote his book, and he got away with an awful lot.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly powerful tool, this whole digital transformation. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's totally changed, uh, the way I do research, and
Speaker 1: it's made it much more pleasant because I could do
Speaker 1: a lot of it from my house.
Speaker 4: Well, it certainly doesn't give you a headache quite in
Speaker 4: the same way as pouring over those old Victorian newspapers too.
Speaker 1: Well, I would love to I would love to pour
Speaker 1: for old newspapers, but like.
Speaker 5: In short bursts, right right, right, But I mean, just
Speaker 5: so you know there's something there.
Speaker 4: Yes, when you it's what you say about the negative evidence,
Speaker 4: When you just think I've got to go to this
Speaker 4: run just in case as a store, that's.
Speaker 3: When it gets the needle in a haystyle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you know it's a historian. One has to
Speaker 4: do it. But you know it's with you, as I say,
Speaker 4: with a heavy heart. And this is why I'm happy
Speaker 4: to expose Haining now because he caused me to waste
Speaker 4: quite a few weeks of my life in the stuff
Speaker 4: that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, fish shaking is like enough sometimes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's possibly getting in the neck from me.
Speaker 1: So why has there been such an enduring interest in
Speaker 1: spring Hill Jack? In your opinion?
Speaker 5: It obviously goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 4: This is a figure who vividly captures people's imagination. He's
Speaker 4: quite unique from that perspective. I think he has a
Speaker 4: whole set of talents and powers are essentially folkloreic fairy tale.
Speaker 4: It's like the sort of you know, the guy in
Speaker 4: the Seven League boots essentially is the nearest fairy tale power. Perhaps,
Speaker 4: and this, this attracts people's imaginations in a way that
Speaker 4: you know, just doesn't. You can't underestimate, sorry, is what
Speaker 4: I'm trying to say. How much of an impact this
Speaker 4: remarkable thing has. And I mean there were two things
Speaker 4: to say. I mean, we recovered some of this already,
Speaker 4: but I'll say two more things. And firstly, you know
Speaker 4: he's apparently never caught, so that means, you know, the
Speaker 4: mystery is never sold. And secondly, he is you know,
Speaker 4: as I mentioned earlier, I think, you know, he's so ubiquitous,
Speaker 4: and he goes on and on, never apparently changing, and
Speaker 4: that has to imply until you start applying a bit
Speaker 4: of skepticism at least, that that he's not an ordinary
Speaker 4: human being. And those two things together kind of you know,
Speaker 4: form the core of the spring hil Jack and mythoss.
Speaker 4: One very interesting thing I did discover in the course
Speaker 4: of searching Google books. In fact, I think it was
Speaker 4: there was a spring Hill Jack scare in the eighteen
Speaker 4: seventies and Kensington, which is the part of London, the
Speaker 4: posh part of Western and wha I actually now work where.
Speaker 5: And it was written in the memoirs.
Speaker 4: Of this elderly actor who was looking back on his
Speaker 4: boyhood and recounted this sort of and they hadn't even
Speaker 4: apparently got into the newspapers actually, but you know in Kensington,
Speaker 4: at least amongst boys of his age, there had been
Speaker 4: this huge scare, you know, spring Hill Jack was breaking
Speaker 4: into their houses and you know, committing all sorts of mayhem,
Speaker 4: and all these tall stories arose about it. You know,
Speaker 4: he'd been seen leaping over this wall that was subsequently
Speaker 4: measured to be fifteen feet high. Now, the interesting thing
Speaker 4: about that is, in this one case, spring Hill Jack
Speaker 4: was actually caught. The police caught a burglar, and the
Speaker 4: guy says, you know, the remarkable thing was he wasn't
Speaker 4: anything like Springfield Jack. He was short and not very
Speaker 4: not very agile at all, and he hadn't been leaping
Speaker 4: over these walls. He'd been kind of laboriously scrambling over them.
Speaker 4: And so in this you suddenly get this, this is
Speaker 4: what's happening all the time, you know, except that the
Speaker 4: guy isn't being caught. You know, this is a there's
Speaker 4: a sort of elaboration element to spring heel Jack that's
Speaker 4: going on, and here, in this one instance, we finally
Speaker 4: got you know, that he's unmasked. You know, there's a
Speaker 4: real figure behind it. He's not trying to be springhil Jack.
Speaker 4: He's just an ordinary burglar. People are talking about it,
Speaker 4: they're sort of elaborating the stories, and you know, they
Speaker 4: associate springhil Jack with it because he's not being caught
Speaker 4: and he seems to be quite agile, and those are
Speaker 4: two things that spring hil Jack does. So the spring
Speaker 4: hid Jack name comes in and it's just built out
Speaker 4: of nothing, and you just look at that and you think, well,
Speaker 4: this is obviously probably what's happening in most of these
Speaker 4: other cases. I don't have this solution because the guy
Speaker 4: hasn't been caught or you know, nobody's written about it
Speaker 4: and made the connection, because nobody thought to ask these
Speaker 4: ten year old boys what they were calling this character.
Speaker 4: And there's an element that says this is probably happening
Speaker 4: a lot, and not just in the case of spring
Speaker 4: Hill Jack. But again, you know UFOs late months is
Speaker 4: all the great fourteenth phenomena are probably to a quite
Speaker 4: significant extent. You know, this is one of the great
Speaker 4: moments in my career, actually discovery of this, because it's
Speaker 4: so applicable, you know, once you realize this is how
Speaker 4: it happens to the vast majority of what we study.
Speaker 3: Really, Yeah, and I think with Jack the Ripper, there
Speaker 3: are a number of cases of people who made false admissions.
Speaker 3: Was there anyone who did that with spring Hill Jack
Speaker 3: to say that they were spring Heel Jack?
Speaker 5: Well, they were.
Speaker 4: In the eighteen thirty seven thirty eight scare, there were
Speaker 4: four or five people who were caught pretending to be
Speaker 4: Spring hil Jack. I mentioned one of them earlier on
Speaker 4: being beaten up by vigilantes. So I don't think they
Speaker 4: were claiming to be springkingiled Jack in the sense of actually,
Speaker 4: you know, wanting people to believe they're some sort of
Speaker 4: supernatural demon. But they were imitating him. That would seem
Speaker 4: to be the more common thing. I mean again, one
Speaker 4: of the things that you have to bear in mind here,
Speaker 4: and it comes as a revelation I think to a
Speaker 4: lot of to me, I mean, because this isn't the
Speaker 4: bid of history that I normally specialize in. Actually is
Speaker 4: you know, you tend to look back on these people
Speaker 4: as they're like, you know, they're like us, only with
Speaker 4: gas light instead of electric light.
Speaker 5: But otherwise they're basically like us. That is simply not true.
Speaker 4: You have to understand how different it was then, and
Speaker 4: particularly in terms of you know, say, the entertainment factor,
Speaker 4: and I hear today we spend all one time complaining. Certainly,
Speaker 4: if you've got a daughter like me, why you're on Facebook?
Speaker 4: Why it was on that computer? You go and read
Speaker 4: a book. You know, but you people are sort of
Speaker 4: saturated with entertainment.
Speaker 5: Essentially.
Speaker 4: That was not the case in Victory in England. And
Speaker 4: as you read these old news films you realize the
Speaker 4: hell I mean there are you know a lot of
Speaker 4: people's idea of fun in the long dark winters and
Speaker 4: Victori Ingland was to go out and but tend to
Speaker 4: be a ghost and scare for you of their neighbors.
Speaker 4: That was high entertainment for a certain parts of you know,
Speaker 4: sort of Victorian working class England. And they are they're
Speaker 4: not all, not just spring Hill Jacksonville. But you know,
Speaker 4: fake ghost stories are a staple of the press in
Speaker 4: this time. There are dozens of people going out putting
Speaker 4: themselves in a sheet, you know, maybe not quite maybe
Speaker 4: not for a bid after the Hamisoneth Coast was shot,
Speaker 4: but you know when that gets you will start doing
Speaker 4: it again. They get dressed up in a sheet and
Speaker 4: they go and jump out going boo hoo, you know,
Speaker 4: from behind the wall. And a lot of these stories
Speaker 4: get confeted into spring Hill jacks stories when spring Hill
Speaker 4: Jackie is the big bogey figure. There's a case in
Speaker 4: Peckham which is a part of South London in eighteen
Speaker 4: seventy two, where you know, if you look at them
Speaker 4: in this again is a very very interesting discovery when
Speaker 4: you look at I mean, Haining mentioned the Peckham case,
Speaker 4: so I went looking for it in the News of
Speaker 4: the World, which is, you know, one of the worst
Speaker 4: style of the British tabloids. I mean you've probably heard
Speaker 4: of it even in the States because there was there
Speaker 4: was a huge scanner. It's been shut down literally in
Speaker 4: the last couple of years forgetting involved all sorts of naughties.
Speaker 4: But you know it existed in the eighteen hundreds as well.
Speaker 4: Refer to this case in Peckham and called it called
Speaker 4: the ghost there spring heel Jack. When I went to
Speaker 4: the local newspapers from Peckham in that period, they were
Speaker 4: full of stories of a ghost, but none of them
Speaker 4: mentioned springhil Jack at all. But what they all all
Speaker 4: made it pretty clear was it was some local guy
Speaker 4: quite literally with a sheet over his head. Now again,
Speaker 4: if you read Peter Hayning, well, if you are reasonably
Speaker 4: conscientious and go and look at the News of the
Speaker 4: World for the eighteen seventy two, you think this is
Speaker 4: a spring hill Jack story. It must be linked to
Speaker 4: the eighteen thirty seventy thirty eight they're calling in spring
Speaker 4: hill Jack, you know, therefore it must be linked.
Speaker 5: In fact, they're not linked at all.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just a name, it's a label and
Speaker 4: it's only being applied by some lazy journalists in the
Speaker 4: News of the World office in London, and the locals
Speaker 4: see it completely differently.
Speaker 5: They don't see it as a spring hil Jack type
Speaker 5: case at all.
Speaker 4: It's a bloke in a sheet who's pretending to be
Speaker 4: a ghost and they call it the Peckham Ghost and
Speaker 4: there is no connection whatsoever to springhil Jack. So again,
Speaker 4: you know, this is this is another element of how
Speaker 4: the newspapers and lazy labeling particularly work, and the word
Speaker 4: spring hill Jack, the phrase it's applied throughout this period.
Speaker 4: If you read the secondary sources, you invode, you get
Speaker 4: the information from them. This is springhiel Jack appeared in
Speaker 4: London in nineteen thirty seven, then in all the Shots
Speaker 4: in nineteen seventy seven, and in Everton in nineteen eight four.
Speaker 4: And it's by just saying it's spring heel Jack singular,
Speaker 4: it's the same figure. And this is one of the
Speaker 4: scary things about it. If your ten year old boy,
Speaker 4: you know, somebody's identified this is the same figure. When
Speaker 4: you go back and look at it, this isn't the
Speaker 4: case at all. Spring hil Jack is a word, a
Speaker 4: phrase which is applied to any burglar who can't be caught.
Speaker 4: Any agile criminal gets called a spring heel jack. You
Speaker 4: go back to the newspapers at the time and they're
Speaker 4: full of phrases like there are a lot of these
Speaker 4: spring heel Jacks about.
Speaker 1: So when studying spring hill Jack, before attributing him to
Speaker 1: all these cases, be careful to not leap to conclusions.
Speaker 4: I've got a word to say off of that appalling
Speaker 4: pan out you lost me?
Speaker 3: How will you? Mike? You mentioned that you're working on
Speaker 3: a book about spring heel Jack, So can you tell
Speaker 3: us about some of the projects that you're working on
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm rather guilty about this because I promised. I've promised
Speaker 4: this for quite a few years, and it's kind of
Speaker 4: my life's work and I don't want it to come
Speaker 4: out prematurely. And it's one of those sort of never
Speaker 4: ending projects where there's always some other thing that you
Speaker 4: could potentially do to link it together. But I really
Speaker 4: need to draw a line under this, because I think,
Speaker 4: as I say that with the digitalization, I can now
Speaker 4: at least be reasonably sure that all undoubtedly missing a
Speaker 4: ton of stuff. It's probably not vastly going to change
Speaker 4: my conclusions. So I'm going to make an attempt to
Speaker 4: try and get it out. What I've done here, I've
Speaker 4: basically brought in a bunch of friends and colleagues who
Speaker 4: know a lot more about some of these elements than
Speaker 4: I do, and I've used them to help me investigate
Speaker 4: some of the elements I had not previously been able
Speaker 4: to comprehend. So I've got a friend of mine called
Speaker 4: John Adcock, who's a Canadian specialist in penny dreadfuls and
Speaker 4: sensation literally in the nineteenth century, who understands the way
Speaker 4: in which the Victorian journalism worked far better than I do.
Speaker 4: And he's written an essay which explains how Victorian journalists
Speaker 4: got their story. And I've just summarized before you earlier,
Speaker 4: and you were very excited by this. The discovery it's
Speaker 4: really John's and not mine. I should give him full
Speaker 4: credit for it. I've worked with Dave Clark, who's well
Speaker 4: known as a UFO writer sort of respectable one. He
Speaker 4: works with the British National Archives and putting out their
Speaker 4: UFO farts for example, and he's written as a folk lows.
Speaker 4: He has a PhD in folklore and he's written the
Speaker 4: Folklore at Background. And I've written also with a couple
Speaker 4: of guys, Paul Chambers and his colleague Mike Davis, and
Speaker 4: they've done some genealogical research actually, which is actually also
Speaker 4: getting quite fascinating because you know, and he's an experienced genealogist,
Speaker 4: Paul Chambers is. And he took all of the names
Speaker 4: I discovered in the eighteen thirty seven, thirty eight newspapers
Speaker 4: and trapped them down in the birth, marriage and death records.
Speaker 4: And this was very interesting indeed, because what he was
Speaker 4: able to do was show that the the ones who
Speaker 4: are typically associated with the more sensational stories didn't exist.
Speaker 4: You know, all these names come out. He's saw spring
Speaker 4: heel Jack where he his daughter was attacked by spring
Speaker 4: heel Jack, and these are the people don't exist, and
Speaker 4: hence they must be inventions of the local newspaper newspaper man.
Speaker 4: So there are all sorts of elements in here. I
Speaker 4: tried to make it a multifaceted book which I couldn't
Speaker 4: have done by myself, and which sort of I hope,
Speaker 4: give the picture of the whole case in the round.
Speaker 5: So I hope it's going to be.
Speaker 4: A fairly worthwhile book, and certainly I think I can
Speaker 4: safely sathing it's going to be well over seven hundred
Speaker 4: pages long. They've probably never been such an intensive study
Speaker 4: of one smallish fourteenth phenomenon, you know, which is going
Speaker 4: to We're going to republish all of the original sources,
Speaker 4: fully footnoted, and it's going to be kind of the Bible,
Speaker 4: I hope, and I will continue to update it because
Speaker 4: I mean, with modern print on demand technology, I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm publishing this myself, I can just go on producing
Speaker 4: new editions as I find new material and updating it.
Speaker 5: And that's the plan essentially as long as I last,
Speaker 5: so that it.
Speaker 4: Will become a sort of resource that, you know, I
Speaker 4: mean again, I'm hoping it will become a resource that
Speaker 4: won't just be of interest people who wented in spring
Speaker 4: Hill Jack, but also might teach a few possible answers
Speaker 4: to people who are interested in other strange phenomena and
Speaker 4: have looked into him in quite the same way as
Speaker 4: we've done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great, exciting. Yeah, the historical context would be there,
Speaker 1: and I'm doing that, giving it a much more full
Speaker 1: picture than any of the literature so far. That's fantastic. Plus,
Speaker 1: you know it does, really it should. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it will, but it should tie into that whole
Speaker 1: steampunk aesthetic that's going around these days. This whole spring
Speaker 1: Hill Jack character fits right into that, you know.
Speaker 5: So it does.
Speaker 4: I mean Parak the spring Man of Prague is another example.
Speaker 4: I mean there are a lot of check steampunky tyb
Speaker 4: of interpretations of him, actually, and we've got a guy
Speaker 4: called Patriyannachak who's a check folk lord who's written two
Speaker 4: very very good papers on spring Man the Prague is
Speaker 4: a very little understood character. So there's lots of good stuff.
Speaker 4: I mean, it is worth waiting for one. I'm going
Speaker 4: to try and keep the price down as low as
Speaker 4: I can as well. But I've just got everyone else
Speaker 4: has finished their stuff except for me. But my my
Speaker 4: material is about seventy eighty thousand words long, which is
Speaker 4: kind of a small book in itself, and I'm only
Speaker 4: about halfway through writing it, so I need a few
Speaker 4: more weeks three time, which doesn't really exist for me
Speaker 4: at the moment.
Speaker 1: Now I get the same problem. So we've on Monster Talk.
Speaker 1: We try to finish our interviews by asking guests to
Speaker 1: name their favorite monster. So, Mike Dash, what's your favorite monster?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm not allowed to name spring hiel Jack? Sure?
Speaker 1: Why not?
Speaker 5: Essentially?
Speaker 4: What I mean, I have to wade it half of
Speaker 4: my life to it now. I mean the other one
Speaker 4: I guess would be Morag, the monster of Lochmore. I mean,
Speaker 4: one of the things that characterizes me as a historian
Speaker 4: and as a Fortean is that I shy away from
Speaker 4: the mainstream as far as I possibly can. And as
Speaker 4: a historian, the thing that would bore me almost to
Speaker 4: tears would be the idea of spending three years in
Speaker 4: my life writing a biography of Henry the Eighth or Hitler,
Speaker 4: because everyone does it. So my career has been blighted
Speaker 4: by this in the sense, although there are lots of
Speaker 4: very interesting stories, they're not really sort of best seller
Speaker 4: type things because they're so obscure. And similarly, Morag, who's
Speaker 4: the monster Lochmoer, is a very interesting lake monster because
Speaker 4: it's the one lake essentially where there is a monster
Speaker 4: tradition that goes back well before the tradition of the
Speaker 4: Locknest monster, which it interrupts in nineteen thirty three and
Speaker 4: perverts the whole course of lake monster studies because all
Speaker 4: monsters there after are interpreted in the sense of being
Speaker 4: versions of the Locknest monster Maag. There are reports from
Speaker 4: Lockmore which date back to the late nineteenth century. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm not suggesting, necessarily for a second that there's a genuine,
Speaker 4: living and breathing monster there, but there's a tradition of
Speaker 4: monster reports from Lockmore that is completely independent from Lockness
Speaker 4: and which I've spent a long time studying because of that,
Speaker 4: and again I'm hoping to eventually publish something on this.
Speaker 4: But I mean, I also recommend to anybody who is
Speaker 4: touring the Highlands of Scotland that Lockomar is considerably more
Speaker 4: beautiful than Lockness. It's a much more remote place, it's
Speaker 4: only got a few people living on it, It's got
Speaker 4: sort of wonderful, beautiful softer hills, and the water itself
Speaker 4: is very clear, unlike Lockness. And some of the interesting
Speaker 4: things that come out of Lockmore are reports or sort
Speaker 4: of things seen on the bottom of the lake, which
Speaker 4: you can't do in lockness where you can't see your
Speaker 4: hand in front of your face two foot depth because
Speaker 4: of so much pete in the water there. So Locke
Speaker 4: Moore is a is a very interesting and beautiful place
Speaker 4: and well worth a visit and well worth studying.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, it sounds like a great overview more
Speaker 1: and s Yeah.
Speaker 5: I.
Speaker 3: Think we're gonna have to have Mike back to talk
Speaker 3: about that too.
Speaker 1: That's sounded great. Yeah, So thank you for coming here
Speaker 1: today and talking with us. Mike. This was a great
Speaker 1: episode of I'm super excited about.
Speaker 3: Putting this very fascinating Thank you.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed it more obstrut, thanks for listening to another
Speaker 1: episode of Monster Talk today. You heard Karen Stalls knowing
Speaker 1: Blake Smith interview Mike Dash about the Victorian figure known
Speaker 1: as spring Hill Jack. Be sure and check the show
Speaker 1: notes for links that will give you even more info
Speaker 1: about Mike Dash and this fascinating topic. Monster Talks produced
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Speaker 3: Are you gonna do the scary voice wah,