The Mysterious London Attacker Who May Have Inspired Batman | Answers With Joe

on may 31st of 2014 three 12 year old girls enter the woods outside of waukesha wisconsin to play a game of hide and seek nothing unusual about that kids play hide and seek all the time what was different about this game was that it ended with two of the girls stabbing the third girl 19 times this wasn't the agreed upon punishment for losing the game now this was their attempt to appease slenderman slenderman was a creepypasta that first showed up on the website something awful that became really popular um eventually became a bit of an online urban legend there were movies and video games made about it and everything and yeah i don't know for whatever reason these two girls believe that by killing their friend they would get the approval of slenderman it sparked a whole series of debates about the internet and the dangers of giving impressionable kids access to everything on it that now has totally been resolved no it hasn't slender man of course is nowhere near the first urban legend while the internet may have made it possible for urban legends to spread a lot more quickly urban legends have been around as long as urban areas have been around but there is one that is considered the first urban legend and it was called spring-heeled jack and it was a real person supposedly but his influence can still be seen in pop culture today [Music] to understand the origin of spring hill jack we kind of have to start by talking about the victorian era specifically what was going on in giardia london i nailed it the victorian age refers to the reign of queen victoria of england which lasted from 1837 to 1901 and if there was one word that sums up the victorian era it's change it was a period of profound change and profound social repression but we'll get to that later but i've argued before that i think maybe the 1800s might have been the most transformative century in all of human history in the sense that like somebody living in 1801 was basically living the same way as their ancestors had for the last thousand years by 1901 there were cars on the road and most people lived in cities and worked in factories that's a very simplistic version of that argument but the point is that advances in technology changed communication and transportation in ways that we had never seen before and the worldwide epicenter of all that change was in london london's population rose from 1.9 million in 1801 to 6.2 million in 1897 spurred on by innovations like sewer systems and subways and electricity but victorian london was also kind of a nightmare class division was baked into the victorian society and nowhere was that more on display than london if you were one of the have-nots you stayed one of the have-nots for the entirety of your life luckily lifespans were incredibly short people lived packed into squalid tenements the streets were caked with manure and trash infectious disease rampaged the population and smoke from chimneys and coal plants was choking just read any charles dickens book he didn't make that stuff up folks plus it was the fact that there was all this new technology and a lot of it wasn't really understood lead and arsenic was used in all kinds of household products mercury poisoning was common i mean i could do a whole video about how everything in the victorian era wanted to kill you but maybe because there was so much changing so fast the victorian society became extremely socially repressive sort of as a backlash to it as a way to preserve the traditions that you know had made them who they were and of course these traditions mostly benefited the upper classes victorians were obsessed with class structures and created complicated rules around it like just interacting with anybody it was a social minefield like you could not approach somebody to speak to them in any way that was in a higher station than you like you could go to jail for that and women were particularly controlled to where you could go who you could talk to how you drank your tea pretty much every decision you made was predetermined for you but men on the other hand were literally expected to die as opposed to breaking a social norm the whole women and children on the lifeboats thing the sense of helplessness that comes with being stuck in a rigid class system that's pretty much a death sentence if you're below a certain point in a city filled with smoke and narrow alleyways riddled with crime was a recipe for some really interesting chaos to happen and in september of 1837 one particular bit of chaos sprang out of the dark streets of london quite literally a woman named polly adams was leaving a bar called the green man with some friends and as they were walking through the black heath district a black cloaked figure jumped out of the shadows and attacked them supposedly he smelled a sulfur and spit blue fire at the group he then left toward paulie and began to like tear at her clothes with these metal clawed hands and her friends ran away terrified friends and then pretty much without warning he just stopped and ran away into the night laughing leaving her laying there tattered and bloody with scratches across her abdomen just a random attack from a weird guy a month later the same person slash creature slash demon attacked another woman this one named mary stevens mary worked as a servant in lavender hill south of the thames and as she was leaving her parents house walking back to her job she passed through a park called clapham commons and as she was exiting the park this same cloaked figure jumped out of the darkness shot blue flame out of his face and began to tear at her with these metal claws but unlike paulie he sort of sexually attacked her he began kissing all over her mary screamed at the top of her lungs apparently loud enough to get the attention of other people and this guy let her go and ran off into the night again laughing but it was the next sighting that earned this mystery man his iconic name according to the story a carriage was passing through the london streets when this same dark cloaked man jumped in front of the carriage and scared the horses so bad that it tipped over the driver of the carriage chased after this man who was cackling with laughter but as he got close to him apparently this man jumped clear over a nine-foot fence and that is how this weird creepy dude earned the name spring-heeled jack now did this guy actually have some kind of spring device in his shoes that allowed him to jump over high walls did he have some kind of rope device were there rockets that hadn't been invented yet or was it just the world's first parkour artist hardcore parkour i mean granted the driver said that he left it in a single bound but people's memories can be sketchy in fact there's something called the yorks-dodson law of arousal that that states that at low and high anxiety levels our memories are are pretty sketchy it's kind of somewhere in the middle where we're having middle levels of anxiety that our memories lock in a lot better so you know in this case maybe he didn't actually clear it in one jump maybe the wall wasn't actually nine feet high there may have been some embellishments there not to mention it was dark and foggy but regardless of the details with this one jump an urban legend was born headlines swept the newspapers of this dark figure attacking women and causing panic in the streets of london three months after the attacks the lord mayor of london john cowan received an anonymous letter claiming that the spring healed jack attacks were actually pranks by the aristocrats of london this becomes very important later on in that same mayor in january the next year showed off a pile of letters that he had received from various people claiming to have been attacked by spring healed jack which all or most of these accounts claimed that jack had red glowing eyes clawed metal hands the ability to jump really high and always manage to get away now because most of these claims weren't verified by police or medical reports or anything like that they aren't really considered canon but the next one very much was the woman's name was jane alsop and as the story goes she was sitting at home when somebody knocked on the door so she opened the door remember how we used to open doors and outside was a man claiming that he had found spring-heeled jack and needed a candle to see so she obliged but as she approached to give him a candle the man apparently pulled up his cloak and shot again blue flame at her face she described him as wearing a large helmet a white oil skin clothing and red eyes that glowed with fire which i have to say is really handy when you need to light a candle after he stunned her with the blue flame he leaped on top of her began scratching at her with the metal claws and then pulled her out onto the stoop unfortunately for jane this attack seems to have been a lot more vicious than the other ones he did manage to scratch her pretty deeply on the abdomen and on the neck and she lost large patches of hair as well luckily her dad rushed to the scene and scared the guy away now what was unique about this attack outside of it being especially vicious is that jane was a member of the upper class and because this was victorian london and class means everything now it was something to take seriously the duke of wellington the iron duke who defeated napoleon at the battle of waterloo in 1815 went out into the london night stating that he would track down spring hill jack after hearing about jane's attack this 70 year old man patrolled the streets at night with a rifle in hand for weeks but was never able to catch the fiend shortly after the jane alsop attack probably while the iron duke was off somewhere else in the city a woman named lucy scales and her sister were passing through the green dragon alley when a man dressed as a policeman approached them with a lantern in hand and just as jane began to speak to him he shot the famous blue flame into her face but this freaked her out so much that she had a seizure and maybe because he was satisfied with what he had done or maybe because he was freaked out by the seizure the man just kind of ran away newspapers were filled with reports of his attacks and lurid tales of his exploits filled the penny dreadfuls which were kind of like pulp fiction magazines of their day and there were theater performances punch and judy puppet shows and preachers declaring that spring-hailed jack was a demon punishing london for its wicked ways and then jack went silent for a while maybe that thing just got a little too hot for him maybe he had achieved his goals of panic in the streets you know agent of chaos as it were or maybe he stopped leaving his victims alive jack's bringing up again in 1843 in northamptonshire earning him a new nickname traveling jack actually that's not true but that would have been awesome the reports at the time claimed to see him jumping from rooftop to rooftop quote looking like the devil himself in 1847 he popped up in tanemuth devon which was also related to the phenomenon of the devil's footprints that showed up in devon in 1855. some interesting jack-related action occurred in lincolnshire where he was apparently shot at while jumping across rooftops and apparently the bullets just kind of ricocheted off of him with a metallic sound he even attacked a military base in aldershot in surry county where he would apparently sneak up on soldiers and slap them when they weren't looking apparently he did it one time with a fish later stories would be attributed to him like a report in the news of the world in november of 1872 of the peckham ghost claiming it was none other than spring hill jack who terrified a past generation similar stories published in the illustrated police news in april and may of 1873 reported sightings in sheffield of the park ghost which locals attributed to spring hill jack the last reported jack sighting occurred in liverpool in 1904 witnesses reported seeing a guy bounding down the street before jumping up onto the rooftops and leaping away forever and with that spring healed jack's reign of terror was over now outside of a supernatural explanation demons aliens and the like uh it's probably unlikely that springhill jack was one guy doing all those things i mean that would have been a pretty spry 80 year old in 1904 the most accepted theory is that everything following the original london attacks in the 1830s were just copycats and urban legends uh victorian creepypasta if you will but there were several real people that were really attacked and injured by someone and after 150 years that someone remains a mystery but there are some theories and clues that lead to some interesting speculation for example many people claim that he smelled like sulfur now to the people at the time that was just proof that he was the devil or a demon from hell but interesting thing about sulfur it burns blue and blue flame was one of jack's calling cards it could be possible he was blowing sulfur dust out of his hand or through some kind of device in his mouth that ignited it so some speculate that he might have been an educated man or had some kind of advanced knowledge of chemistry of course back in those days only the upper classes had access to advanced education and spring hill jack was known to wear fine clothes and if you remember the mayor did get that anonymous letter claiming that springhill jack was just a prank by the elite aristocrats of london given the severity of the attacks one would assume that this was a particularly sadistic aristocrat and there was one guy that kind of fit that bill he was the marquess of waterford yeah this guy was a real piece of work he kind of lucked into his position due to some deaths in his family if you want to call that luck but maybe because of the childhood trauma that was associated with that he kind of became a cruel and sadistic monster he was known to just kind of turn over apple carts as he was walking through town and he would start fights just to start fights and would sometimes even get into the fights with the officers that came to break up the fights he was a drunker that would just walk around in a drunken state trying to pick fights with people everywhere he went he would even pay people to fight him there was a story about how one time he abused a bunch of glee singers while naked which if you've seen the show glee i mean it's kind of understandable and i think he's actually where the term paint the town red came from because there was an incident where he and some fellow douchebag lords got super drunk started a little mini riot in town and went through breaking windows and stealing door knockers off of doors and whatnot and stole some red paint and just painted a bunch of stuff and because they were so respectful of the legal system there when they showed up for court they were wearing bear skins he was in the upper class of victorian london which meant he was pretty much untouchable and he loved to spread chaos wherever he went and had no qualms about hurting people there is one small problem with this theory though he only had one leg apparently one time he commissioned a new yacht and when he received it he and his buds were having some fun and celebrating and you know blowing off cannons like you do and one of those cannons blew off his leg seriously no matter how rich you are you can still be a redneck anyway kind of hard to leap tall fences in a single bound when you only have one leg although it could have been one of those douchebag friends that was doing it long story short he's been speculated as a culprit for spring-heeled jack for a long time but there's never really been any proof of it there was however one person that was convicted of a couple of spring hill jack attacks in july 1847 an investigation into the attacks in team devon that i was talking about earlier led to a guy getting convicted of two charges of assault against women be this man a copycat or not he did fit the bill he had a skin coat that quote had the appearance of a bullock's hide along with a skull cap and a mask with horns the name of the man was captain finch and he was described as quote a man of alleged ill health and apparently 60 years of age about the last person that could have been suspected despite that and despite the fact that the judge had reservations about accusing an old soldier of assaulting women he was found guilty on two counts but he was charged 17 shillings each which was a total slap on the wrist regardless if anything he was one of the copycats the original spring heel jack has never been found the spring heel jack frenzy is mostly forgotten these days he was considered more of a prankster than a monster like the serial killers that would follow like jack the ripper he's been so mythologized through the penny dreadfuls over the years that it's it's kind of difficult to separate myth from reality and in fact paradoxically he kind of became a bit of a superhero over time one popular penny dreadful author named alfred barrage who wrote under the name am barrage kind of leaned into the whole idea of springhill jack is an aristocrat who did this stuff at night but he put a little bit of a twist on it and instead of making him somebody that was out terrorizing the good people of london he was out terrorizing the criminals and the evil-doers he became a dark vigilante avenger of the knight who used his vast well to construct an underground lair where he used his technological skills to create weapons that he would use to defeat the bad guys sound familiar at all now there have been a lot of characters that fit into the trope of the wealthy guy who uses his resources to help out the little man but very few of them were illustrated dressed like a bat now there's no way to know exactly how much spring-heeled jack may have influenced bob kane when he created batman but it's an interesting thought that you could tie all of the iterations of batman through the years all the way back through these pulpy penny dreadfuls to this one weird victorian guy that had a thing for sulfur and i know i for one can't wait for christopher nolan's dark jack trilogy it's easy to see why spring hill jack made such an impression of people back in the victorian age i mean if somebody left out of the darkness and spit blue flame into my face i'd probably soil my underwear but that's okay i just replaced them with some mac weldons so let's talk about mac weld and shall we mack weldon makes the most comfortable underwear you're ever going to wear in your life and they make sure they're the most comfortable underwear because they make their own fabric they created a few different types of fabric actually you've got dry net air knit warm net they even have one called the silver series which is actually treated with silver so 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 362,055

Rating: 4.9535618 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, Urban legend, London, Victorian age, Spring-heeled jack

Id: tEBYm3HKUW4

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021