Who was Spring-heeled Jack? The mysterious Victorian phantom assailant may not have generated as much speculation as his more infamous namesake Jack the Ripper, but theories about him have been a good deal more varied. A ghost, a bear, a devil, a wayward aristocrat and a stranded alien from a high-gravity planet have all been proposed as the ‘solution’ to the mystery of the fabled 19th-century leaping entity. 1 With the possible exception of the bear, the underlying assumption has always been that Spring-heeled Jack was male.

Undoubtedly, from his extensive study of the contemporary press reports, Dr Mike Dash has put up the best case for Spring-heeled Jack as an example of an urban ghost or bogey, a supernatural rumour run riot.