Spring Heeled Jack was a hopping and hopping superman with sightings recorded as early as 1837 in South West London. It has been described to him with a species of helmet and a white suit fitted like an oilcloth. It is said that it can breathe blue and white flames and that it has hands like large claws. His hands are said to be “as cold as a corpse”. Confirmed sightings of him occurred in 1838 by a young woman named Jane Alsop on a London side street and persisted for over 60 years in the London area until around 1904.
Jack has been reported to be able to jump from cobblestones to rooftop and vice versa with ease. In 1877, angry townspeople shot him without apparent affectation. Spring Heeled Jack’s description rarely changed over the years until his last official recorded sighting. Other views of Jack appeared in Liverpool, Sheffield, throughout England to the Midlands and Scotland. There are recently recorded sightings of him from 1953 in Houston, Texas to 1986 on the Welch border.
With Jack clear on your mind, it’s time to slightly change the modern perception of what a vampire is and what it should look like. The FVZA website gives us details on the vampires that most closely resemble the being from the movie. Nosferatu than recent modern interpretations. The FVZA, or Federal Vampires and Zombies Agency (1868-1975), was “responsible for controlling the nation’s vampire and zombie populations while overseeing the investigation of the undead.” Officially created in 1838 by President Ulysses S. Grant, it went undercover soon after, but was eventually disbanded due to a controlled population of vampires and zombies. They studied the virus that makes one become a vampire and how it affects a human being. What is interesting is not only what is the same in our modern tradition, but also what is different.
The FVZA informs us that vampires have pale yellow skin, eventually showing veins. Your ligaments and tendons thicken to support stronger bone structure, as well as providing extraordinary strength and speed. Blood is also pumped through your skeletal system instead of your blood veins, causing your heart to deteriorate from lack of use. They can handle trauma that can kill a normal human and their strength increases to approximately three times the strength of the originally converted human. Their DNA is also altered to combat the wear and tear that generally affects human DNA, giving them a longer life expectancy.
So is Spring Heeled Jack a vampire?
It has some of the characteristics known to vampires. Increased strength may explain his ability to jump large hurdles and climb to the top of buildings effortlessly. Her tight suit may, in fact, be fading her skin from becoming a vampire. Some nocturnal sightings could also lead to some confusion if he was wearing some kind of suit or if the skin color was mistaken for something that was worn over him. Jack’s resistance to being shot also supports the reworking of the vampires’ nervous system to survive and not be affected by things conventionally deadly to humans. The cold touch of Jack’s hand is easily inferred from a vampire’s lower body temperature (60 degrees).
The stories of him breathing flames are unparalleled by any known paranormal entity and sources never cite that vampires have that ability, however if Jack were a vampire, the use of some tricks would not be unknown to him having been a human before . He is not known to have killed, but it is likely that police forces during this time period did not know what to do with the Spring Heeled Jack crime scene if they found one. The best examples of what a modern-day vampire slaughter would look like appear in the Jack the Ripper cases in London just one year after the last accepted sighting of him in London. Their sightings and accounts overlap in interesting areas as they occur in the same place, although apparently in different parts of the city.
The modern vampire lore may need to be modified as our understanding of DNA and viruses increases. With a more open-minded society, the Spring Heeled Jack incidents may have been open and closed in nature, although no one managed to capture it.