We Have Been Watching,

a number of dramas set in the Victorian period,

 but here is one drama I had never heard of till now, the terror of London, Spring Heeled Jack, he first started to appear in 1837, as described in historian Mike Dash’s exhaustive history of the figure’s reported appearances, residents of a London neighbourhood began to report bizarre attacks,

the descriptions were all over the place, and so outlandish that when these tales hit the pages of the major London papers, Dash notes that most of the press was rightfully sceptical, the Lord Mayor of London, John Cowan, even came out in January of 1838 to address the growing number of stories, bringing up the theory that the attacks were perpetrated by a gang of wealthy pranksters, eye-witness reports of Spring-Heeled Jack continued popping up all over the country, if less frequently and from much less substantial sources as the spate of occurrences in 1837-38, copycat attackers were captured here and there, trying to take advantage of the legend, the mischievous devil made a series of appearances at the Aldershot military base, where he harassed and terrified sentry guards in 1877, then in 1904, Jack made what is considered his last confirmed appearance in Liverpool, where he was witnessed leaping up and down the street before jumping onto the rooftops and bounding away forever, how strange that until now I had never heard of Spring-Heeled Jack, if you want to know more and have a coffee or two at hand here is the link to the incredibly detailed report of the antics of  Spring-Heeled Jack by Mike Dash, and a good read it is too.