Stupid Question ™
By John Ruch
© 2004
Q: In
100 words or less, what’s the difference between Spring-Heeled Jack and the
—anonymous, from the
Internet
A: A hundred words or less?! Everybody’s an editor!
These two 1800s bogeymen, both of whom existed mostly in the fevered brains of sensationalist newspaper writers, certainly have a lot in common. Winged, horned, semi-dangerous, thoroughly silly…the list goes on.
The basic
difference is that Spring-Heeled Jack was a figment of the English imagination,
while the Jersey Devil was dreamt up in
Also, Spring-Heeled Jack is the more likely to have some basis in reality. He may also have inspired the Jersey Devil mania.
Typically for such urban (or rural, as the case may be) legends, the histories of these fantastical fiends are hazy and vary from source to source.
Spring-Heeled
Jack may date to early-1800s legendry about a high-jumping, quasi-supernatural
man. In any case, the
In one case, he was reported to be wearing some type of helmet and a white oilskin jumpsuit. As the stories grew more outlandish, he supposed was also seen dressed as a white bull, clad in a suit of armor, and so on.
In any case, he supposedly appeared suddenly and then sprang away to escape. The idea that he jumped superhumanly high to do so—going over walls or even rooftops—appears to be a later invention not found in the original reports from the women.
In the
1840s, a high-jumping, fiendish man was reported in other parts of
Another fad
of sightings arose in the 1870s, and Spring-Heeled Jack then sprung his last
(aside from some more self-conscious modern “reports”) in
That Jack was mostly B.S. is patently obvious. He was instantly the subject of lurid adventure magazines and cheap theatrical plays, so it didn’t take long for “sightings” to spread.
However, there does seem to be some credibility to the early stories of women being attacked, exaggerated as they may have been. A truly weird sex maniac is certainly a possibility.
Most modern accounts of Spring-Heeled Jack actually assume it was all a “prank,” albeit one both especially deranged and technologically enhanced in a Jules Verne way. One bizarre story, for which I could not immediately find any primary source, is that an anonymous nobleman actually informed the authorities that he had accepted a bet that he could scare people to death, and Spring-Heeled Jack was the result.
Also regularly repeated now, for absolutely no good reason that I have found, is that Jack was Henry de la Poer Beresford, the 3rd Marquis of Waterford, an Irish peer who died in 1859 when he fell off his horse. Supposedly, he was an inveterate and cruel prankster. ’Twas tempting to investigate this slur upon his memory further, but that wasn’t really your question—and I’m already well over my hundred words.
As for the Jersey Devil, it is so varied it has two basic forms. One is a sort of diabolicized human with horns and a tail. The other is a kind of flying dragon with parts of various other animals. It is known primarily for screaming, and secondarily for flying.
You can
take your pick of origin stories. The classic version is that it was spawned as
a deformed or otherwise unwanted child of a Mother Leeds in
The legend
does indeed appear to have arisen in the
However, it
was actually
It may be significant that these stories popped up around the same time as the last Spring-Heeled Jack stories were hitting the English papers.
The last big hurrah for the Devil was in the 1950s, again affecting a much larger area than the Pine Barrens, and this time resulting in more Bigfoot-like descriptions of the beast.
The New
Jersey Pinelands Commission perpetuates the Jersey Devil myth as a reality in
its literature to this day, spinning him as a sort of nature spirit who only
attacks people who don’t want to save the