Season 07 Episode 05: Jumpin' Jacks (Pt.2 of 2)

not heard from her since. There'd been letters from the twenty four year old William insisting that all was well. He'd even visited them occasionally to pass on Maria's best wishes, but something was off. The union had been shaky from the start, but Maria seemed smitten. William had a history of dodgy dealings and was non committal at best until Maria fell pregnant. When the baby tragically died soon after, Thomas assumed the feckless William would soon disappear. To his surprise, however,

William instead announced his intentions to marry Maria. Then one morning he arrived at the Martin's home in a flurry, bearing the troubling news that a local police officer had ordered a warrant to arrest Maria for having children out of wedlock. William had come to urge her to run away with him to nearby Ipswich so they could be married and live the rest of their lives in peace together. He told her to meet him at the Red Barn, a farm building that his family rented in the fields

about half a mile east of Maria's home. With seemingly no other choice but to go along with it, Maria left the house later that day, dressed in men's clothing as a disguise in an effort to evade capture, and cautiously made her way to the barn. As William explained it later, he said she waited there for him until nightfall, until he was able to come and pick her up. After Maria then changed into her normal clothes, the pair eloped into the night. A week later, William Carder returned

alone to the Merton's home. He explained to Maria's father, Thomas, that there'd been some complications with the marriage license and it would take a few weeks to rectify. In the meantime, Maria was being looked after some one hundred and eighty miles away in Yarmouth, on the south coast of England, by the sister of a friend of his called Miss Rowland. Once the issue was resolved, he insisted he and Maria would be married as planned. In the months that followed,

with the pair presumably then married. Although William continued to update Thomas on his daughter's whereabouts, Maria herself had not been heard from. Ten months later, Thomas's wife, Anne, Maria's stepmother, was insisting that she let him tell her just one more time about the disturbing dreams she'd been having. They'd started some time before Christmas. Each time it had been the same. Anne would find herself in the middle of a field under a starless sky, staring up at the

large double doors of the red barn. The next thing she knew, she was opening them up and entering the building. Inside, the barn was empty save for a light carpeting of straw strewn across the dirt floor. Then she would see it, the small mount of dirt that seemed glaringly out of place, and buried underneath it was Maria's body. For months, Thomas tried to ignore it, telling his wife to keep the

dreams to herself. It was nothing but superstitious nonsense, he said, until finally, having heard nothing from his daughter for the best part of a year, he agreed to take a look for himself. It was a balmy spring morning when Thomas set out, arriving after a short walk to find the place deserted. He stared up at the large double doors, then took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. Barowed its name to the small red tiled roof that lay over the front left section of it.

There were a few other sheds dotted about, and a yard out the front. A soft breeze blew through the surrounding fields of wheat, while swallows whipped about in the sky above, gorging on flies. Thomas looked back toward his home and imagined the walk his daughter had taken there all those months ago before running off with William. Then

he looked back to the barn. Though he hadn't believed a word of his wife's supposed visions, it was impossible to escape the creeping sense of dread as he unlatched the doors and pushed inside. The ground was covered with straw, but there was nothing else of note. Thomas grabbed a rake and began to steadily turn the straw over when he uncovered a mound of lea stirred that looked oddly

out of place. Prodding at it with the handle of the upturned rake, he found there was something solid underneath it. Thomas got down on his knees and scraped away the earth to reveal a black sackcloth, and inside that he found the decaying remains of a body. Wound tightly around its neck was a green striped handkerchief, which Thomas recognized instantly was his daughter, Marias Maria Martin was shot, stabbed,

and strangled to death by William Cordo. Her senseless killing, known today as the Red Barn murder, is one of the most infamous in recent British history, owing to its striking title as much as anything else. It was also the case that made Officer James Lee's name. At the time, Lee was a young police assistant who succeeded in tracking William Corder down and bringing him to justice. He was

hung for his crime in August eighteen, twenty eight. Ten years later, Lee was given the task of hunting down another violent man that was said to be terrorizing mostly women in London and the south of England. Rumours about a mysterious, cloaked and sprightly figure that would eventually become known as springheel Jack who could leap ten feet in

the air, had been steadily growing throughout the eighteen thirties. Then, on the night of February eighteen thirty eight, he was said to have attacked eighteen year old Jane Olsop on her front doorstep in old Ford, just east of London. Alsop claimed the man or whatever he was, had clawed at her with sharp metal talons and spat blue flames into her face before her sister was able to pull

her back inside their house. Though many questioned Orsop's account, Officer Lee was inclined to believe it, perhaps not the more fantastical elements, but certainly that a man would be more than capable of carrying out such an attack. When a large dark coat was found just outside the Orsops front gate, along with a single candle the one Jane said she'd brought out to the attacker on the night in question, there was little doubting that something had genuinely

taken place. Officer Lee began his investigation as soon as Jane reported the crime to the local police. Working through the night, he issued his report the very next morning, stating that he was in no doubt that the person who'd committed the outrage had been hanging round the neighborhood for the past month. A tall, thin man wrapped in a large Spanish cloak had been seen frequently wandering the local lanes, sometimes carrying a small lantern, frightening passers by.

On one occasion, after partially revealing a bazaar and grotesque costume under his coat, the mysterious figure escaped pursuit by what witnesses described as extraordinary feats of agility. One theory was that Henry Beresford, Marquess of Waterford, was the culprit as it transpired. Although he may well have carried out his own spree of late night attacks on women, the so called mad Marquess supposedly had a solid alibi for the night that Jane Alsop was assaulted, so Officer Lee

turned his attentions elsewhere. Alongside a mister Young, another London based police superintendent, the relentless Officer Lee interviewed several witnesses who'd been in bare Bind Lane at the time of the assault. The street on which the Orsop family lived. Two suspects quickly emerged, a local bricklayer named Paine and

a carpenter named Millbank. One witness testified to seeing Pain and Millbank walking along bear Bindlane away from the Orsop's cottage, as the family's cries for help rang out behind them. Millbank was also said to have been wearing a white shooting jacket under a large coat at the time. To Officer Lee, it sounded a lot like the tightly fitting white oil skin outfit that the attacker had worn under

his coat, as Jane Orsop described it. Shortly after the attack, Pain and Millbank were then spotted in a dark lane outside a nearby pub, quietly discussing some kind of rascally act. The pair were then said to have stopped talking when they spotted someone in earshot. Under questioning, Pain and Millbank denied carrying out the assault, although Millbank also admitted to being so drunk that evening that he had little recollection

of anything. Another witness then emerged, stating that he had also seen Pain and Millbank near the Allsops that night, but also to other possible suspects, a boy and a young man in a large cloak who he overheard talking about spring heeled jack. The two witness testimonies could not be reconciled by magistrates of the two Millbank was formally arrested and tried for the crime. Sadly, for Officer Lee,

he was a quitted of all charges. Further inquiries into the incident were called for, but all appeared to have come to nothing. All the while, the so called spring heeled jack seemed to be cropping up in evermore places. In eighteen forty, in Camden, North London, a tall man said to be wearing a large blue cloak and dark colored glasses, hiding in doorways at night, was reported to leap out at women with outstretched arms. As he did so, he unfurled a pair of huge dark wings, enveloping his

victims inside his cloak and then sexually assaulting them. For the next thirty years, more spring heeled jack like figures was spotted throughout all corners of England, stretching from Sheffield in the north to Yarmouth in the south. All the key elements were present, a darkly clad figure springing on unwary passers by usually women on unlit lanes after dark, with blazing red eyes. He was said to make giant leaps, clearing hedges and gaits, and even male coaches in a

single bound. There's no doubt that real individuals attacked people throughout the decades in which Springheeled Jack is said to have been active in ways that seemed to fit his profile. However, it's impossible to know what of the stories is true

and what is hyperbole or exaggeration. What is clear is that somewhere between the truth and the swirling maelstrom of terrified rumor and supposition, a bizarre, maniacal and almost cartoonish figure was in many ways conjured into existence by the British public imagination, which took the form of what we think of today as Springheeled Jack, a character as fantastical and darkly curious as any dreamt up by a graphic novelist.

This character was so ready made for fiction it can't have been to anyone's surprise to see it actually appear in fiction, cropping up in books as early as eighteen sixty four. Then he was portrayed as a suitably demonic figure by eighteen seventy eight. However, in a turn of events that seems particularly fitting for our times. He was being entirely reimagined as someone who was in fact the good guy, who was merely flouting the law to defend

the weak and punish the wicked. Certainly, it's doubtful whether the mostly women who were attacked by him, or others presumed to be him in whatever guys that took would have recognized this portrayal. By the eighteen seventies, talk of the spring heeled Menace eventually died down, but soon re emerged midway through that decade with one of the more bizarre incidents in the figure's history. It came too as if lifted straight from the pages of a superhero comic.

It began just after midnight on a chilly, moonless mid March night in eighteen seventy five, at the perimeter of a giant army barracks in Aldershot, in the countryside just southwest of London. The barracks housed the headquarters of the British Army, with around ten thousand troops billeted there at any given time, and was guarded night and day by armed sentries. That night, the guard stationed at the sentry box on the north side of the camp was busy

trying to keep warm. He stamped his feet and slapped his arms across his body as he kept watch over the silence road and fields before him. There was a boring shift. Rarely did anyone arrive to be challenged or checked into camp that late in the night. At least, with only two hours to go, he'd be in a warmish bed soon enough. After another sweep of the empty fields in front of him, the guard turned to head back to the sentry box. When he stopped and shivered.

It was as if something cool and damp had just passed in front of him. Thinking he was just being stupid, he shook out the adrenaline and was about to carry on his way when it happened again. This time it was as if a deathly cold and clammy hand had brushed across his face. Who goes there? Shouted the startled guard. There was the slightest hint of movement in the shadows

above the sentry box. As the guard's eyes adjusted, he was just quick enough to see a figure leap down to the ground from the box and land silently as a cat, before disappearing into the darkness behind. The guard rushed to the box and picked up his rifle. Hearing the faintest scratch of footfall on gravel off to his right, he swung the rifle around and let off a shot.

But the man, if it were indeed a man, was moving at such astonishing speed that no sooner had the rifle blast finished echoing into the night, than the shadowy figure emerged again, way over to the guard's left. There he saw the figure briefly once more in the middle distance, before it ran off again into the dark with what the guard could have sworn was a faint, gleeful laugh.

Around a month later, at the sentry box on the southern side of the barracks, another guard was keeping watch late one night when they were stunned to find a man hanging over the roof of their sentry box. Before the guard could respond, he was slapped in the face several times by a cold, damp hand. On this occasion, another sentry who had been coming to take over the watch, witnessed the attack and managed to catch hold of the

assailant as he fled. The two men wrestled with each other, both falling to the ground as they rained punches on one another, but the prankster prevailed, managing to rise to his feet, then he bounded away in a series of astonishingly large leaps. The attacks continued for months. Often the mysterious black clad figure would wait until the guard pacing his beat was walking away from him, then he would bring on to the man's shoulders, grabbing the guard's rifle

and making off with it. Despite regularly being shot at, the culprit somehow managed to evade capture. Newspapers were quick to report the attacks. To haunt a place so dangerous as Britain's largest army base seemed confirmation, if any were needed, that this was no ordinary man. Though it was never confirmed who was responsible, many speculated it was in fact a soldier stationed at the barracks, a Lieutenant Alfrey, who was described as being big, powerful and extraordinarily active, was

cited by numerous people as the most likely culprit. However, Alfrey was never charged and nor did he ever confess to being involved. Sightings at Spring Heeled Jack's continued to

be reported across Britain well into the eighteen eighties. Jack's litany of crimes were often vicious, abusive, and criminal, but never had they resulted in the death of their victim, or that seemed to change when, on the thirty first of August eighteen eighty eight, the mutilated body of Mary Anne Nichols was found in Whitechapel in East London, murdered in an especially brutal fashion by numerous severe knife wounds.

The butchery of more women would follow in what would come to be considered a series of at least five murders committed by the same man. The attacks elicited a profusion of letter writing to the police and newspapers. Some purported to have information about the killer, others claimed to

come from the kills miller himself. One of the earliest letters sent to the Metropolitan Police was signed Springheel Jack the Whitechapel murderer, but soon another anonymous letter was received, written by a different individual, also claiming to be the killer. This letter was signed simply Jack. A letter sent to the head of a London news agency shortly after, again written by someone claiming responsibility for the crime, was signed

Jack the Ripper, and the name stuck. Before long, any associations between these murders and Jack's older and tamer namesake were soon forgotten, perhaps not to be entirely outdone, while Londoners endured the terror of a serial killer on the loose. Springheel Jack was apparently capering around the streets of n Everton, just north of Liverpool in the northwest of England in

the autumn of eighteen eighty eight. He was alleged to have been seen there springing from the top of a reservoir in high Park Street, jumping over high garden walls in the neighborhood of Saint Michael's in the hamlet, and dancing across the rooftops of Shore Street. During this period, spring hill Jack was even seen in Scotland in cities

including Aberdeen and Dundee. Like some of the reports from south of the border, on more than one occasion, events were clearly stirred up by rumor along with a healthy dose of massesteria. In Galas Shields in August eighteen ninety one, a crowd gathered in the market square to listen to the town band spotted what was described as a peculiarly dressed female entering the square, whereupon it was reported that part of the crowd set upon this person, who, for

reasons not explained, they decided was spring heeled Jack. The unfortunate woman was taken to the local police station for her own protection. By the time of Jack's last appearances, his jumping abilities had reached new heights, with him often

portrayed as being able to leap over entire buildings. Back in Liverpool, in September nineteen o four, a report in the sensational Illustrated Police News stated that hundreds of locals watched in awe as Jack leapt up and down a street, bounding up onto roofs and then down into the street again in a manner it was alleged that would have embarrassed an Olympic pole vaulter. He was also reputed to have jumped clean over the houses from one street to

the next one day. At the end of September, Jack was again said to have appeared, this time in broad daylight, clad as usual in a mask, black cloak and long tight boots, springing from side to side along a road before hopping a full twenty five feet onto the rooftops, turning one last time to utter a mocking laugh before vanishing for good. But when the journalists of the day attempted to track down victims and eyewitnesses, they found no

one to interview. Then in nineteen sixty seven an intriguing interview was published in the Liverpool Daily Post with a Missus Pierpoint, an Everton pensioner who'd lived in the district all her life. She'd been a schoolgirl in nineteen o four and recounted how that year there had been a scare among the locals due to a supposed poltergeist, so much so that people would congregate on the street to

catch sight of the scary phantom. Missus Pierpoint had a distinct recollection that the source of the rumors of Liverpool Jack, as she called him, was a local man with psychiatric problems, including a kind of religious mania. From time to time, she said, when this mania was at its peak, he would climb up onto the roofs of houses, and when the police arrived to get him down, he would simply run away, leaping from one roof to the next, crying,

my wife is the devil. With the sighting of spring Hill Jack vanishing over the Liverpool rooftops in nineteen o four, reports of his activities largely came to an end, but Victorian Britain was not the only home of stories of leaping and jumping men. During World War II, an elusive figure known as Perak, Man of Prague, was said to prow the blacked out streets of that city, possessing all

the supernatural leaping abilities of spring heeled Jack. No written records of his activities have ever been found, but like his British predecessor, Perak went on to become a fictional folklore hero, in his case fighting the German Army and several animated superhero cartoons. So who, if anyone was springhield Jack?

Were the people ascribed to that moniker throughout the Victorian era highly athletic individuals whose ability to vault over hedges and walls were simply exaggerated in the public imagination, or were spring assisted boots ever part of their disguise. There are reports that the German Army experimented with this exact idea with its paratroopers during the Second World War. However, tests were supposedly halted after an eighty five percent incidence

of broken ankles. Our boots equipped with iron springs would have performed on the rough terrain of early Victorian country lanes, or while crossing the rough common land around Aldershot is anyone's guess. What is very likely is that the combined elements of a vengeful anti hero, perhaps a wronged aristocrat wearing a costume with apparently bat like wings and the ability to leap to great heights, was a direct precursor

of comic book superheroes like Batman. Was the Marquess of Waterford, despite his apparent alibi, the real instigator of the attacks in the late eighteen thirties all along and were the other errant and youthful members of the Victorian aristocracy also up to no good? Or was it all just the product of the highly amaged British public of Victorian Britain. These and many other questions that swirl around the strange

and unusual story of Spring Heeled Jack remain unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and Richard McClain Smith Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard mclin Smith, Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from

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