Who’s scared of Black Annis, the gnarly, child-flaying crone? Or Black Shuck, the Devil’s flaming-eyed dog? Not David Clarke. But, as a boy, one figure was guaranteed to keep him trembling beneath the bed sheets: an infamous Victorian villain known to all as Spring-heel’d Jack.
And little wonder. Nicknamed the Terror of London, this ghoulish, claw-fingered fiend – who was said to breathe blue fire and dress like a deranged Batman – would comb the night streets in search of innocent victims for his blood-curdling pranks.
“He was supposed to be an aristocrat in London who had taken a wager to scare a certain number of people to death,” Clarke explains. “Then, in the 1830s and 40s, Spring-heel’d Jacks started appearing in different towns, like Newcastle and Sheffield.”
