Spring-Heeled Jack in the American West
Did the notorious "Terror of London" take his act on the road…?
Nestled in the lee of the beautiful Pinos Altos Mountains, not far at all from the justly famous Gila National Forest, is the quaint old mining town of Silver City, New Mexico.
Founded in 1870, amidst the discovery of a mother lode of the very precious metal for which the dusty old town was named, Silver City in its youth was just about what you’d imagine whenever you picture a rowdy, lawless Old West town. It was in Silver City, for instance, that Billy the Kid (alias Henry Antrim) had his first scrape with the law, when Grant County Sheriff Harvey Whitehill busted him for theft…not once but twice.
And word is that Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch made themselves right at home in this Southwestern den of iniquity, becoming frequent and notorious habitués of every seedy saloon, sordid fleshpot, and squalid brothel in town.
So Silver City, needless to say, has impeccable Wild West bona fides right from the get-go; its “weird” credentials, however, come a few decades later, after the settlement’s wild beginnings had quieted down just a bit. In fact, the uncanniness that so often looms over the vast mountain ranges and sandstone tablelands of the American West didn’t creep into the now-placid life of Silver City until 1938.
It was in the summer of that year, around sunset, that four children saw the strangest goddamned thing you’d ever expect to see in an old mining town—a “gray-clad man,” they said, floating in the air, right over their heads at about the level of the tops of nearby trees. According to paranormal researcher Jerome Clark, who writes of the incident, one of the young witnesses—a little girl by the name of Ann Alley—remembered that the figure “seemed to be wearing a belt which was wide and had points sticking out of it. He also seemed to be wearing a cap (à la Flash Gordon).”1
Understandably, the bizarre apparition filled the children with a great deal of wonder and maybe not a little bit of fear, as they stood stock still and watched the figure disappear off in the distance. After all, it’s not every day one sees a flying humanoid cruising overhead.
Now, the importance of this curious episode, aside from being just another incident of high strangeness in the desert southwest, is that the being in question is often likened to another strange entity that terrorized another part of the world, beginning about a century earlier.
I’m talking, of course, about the infamous London bogeyman known variously as “Spring-Heeled Jack,” “Springheel Jack,” or even, apparently, “Springald.” He, or it, seems to have been a rather more imaginative flasher or sexual assaulter than the usual kind, since he appeared to employ a series of strange mechanical contrivances to abet his crimes. That and the fact that his appearance was positively demonic.
Spring-Heeled Jack first appeared in London in the late summer of 1837, typically to frighten women, tear their dresses, and maybe slap their menfolk around a bit. But he was described as looking like a comic book villain before there were any comic books—the sort of night-prowler that would seem more at home across the pond, in a place like Gotham City a hundred years later.
Briefly, Jack was described as being very tall and thin, wearing a cape as part of his weird getup, with diabolical or demonic facial features, including glowing red eyes and even—some said—the ability from time to time to spit blue flames into his victims’ faces. He also apparently had some kind of claw-like apparatus, of iron or other metal, affixed to his hands, which he often used to rake the skin of his female victims.
But the most wonderful thing about Jack, the “Terror of London,” was the very thing that gave him his curious moniker: his penchant for making enormous, almost supernatural leaps and bounds, which some attributed to metal springs coiled in the heels of his boots, a supposition strengthened by some strange footprints supposedly left by the weird bogeyman.
That’s a likely story. The problem is—no one has been able to replicate Jack’s feats with such a primitive contrivance, and most eyewitness descriptions of his aerial antics seem more in accordance with some kind of anti-gravitational power.
Sightings of this weird apparition continued in after-decades throughout England, with an especial resurgence for some reason in the 1870s—including in such places as Sheffield, Lincolnshire, and even at the military camp of Aldershot Garrison, where some sentries took potshots at the leaping specter…though unfortunately to no apparent effect.
Meantime, Spring-Heeled Jack took on a life of his own in the popular fiction of the time, finding his way into the late Victorian “penny dreadfuls” and even metamorphosing into a kind of early superhero—no longer a criminal himself, but a caped crusader wandering the streets of London to avenge crimes and protect the innocent. In a weird way, this obscure Victorian bogeyman became the ancestor to Batman and Superman and the whole panoply of other caped, costumed superheroes we’re all quite familiar with these days.
The last sightings of Jack seem to have been concentrated in Liverpool, in the late 1880s and finally just after the turn of the century, in 1904; after that, Old Springheel’s trail goes cold…until that summer day in Silver City, New Mexico, thirty-four years later.
Because it’s the considered opinion of many who study these sorts of things that Spring-Heeled Jack—or a cognate entity—made his reappearance in the American West, half a world away from his whilom stomping-grounds in Old Blighty.
Not convinced? Well, try this on for size: thirty-seven years after the Silver City encounter,2 there comes an even more fascinating—and, frankly, more terrifying—story of an encounter with not just a single Spring-Heeled Jack, but a whole passel of ’em.
This weird story takes place on the Yakima Indian Reservation, which lies in the lee of Mt. Adams, in Washington State, on the eastern side of the mighty Cascade Mountain Range. It occurred near midnight, on the night of December 11, 1975, on Toppenish Ridge.
The experiencer—whose name is variously given as Bob or Bud LeDuc, or Jim Miller—was traveling home late at night along US 97, through Toppenish Ridge, after dropping off his girlfriend. It was a dark, remote gravel road, and LeDuc (we’ll stick with that name for the sake of convenience) didn’t expect to see much on such a lonely stretch of highway, at such a lonely time of night.
But suddenly his headlights picked out a frightened cow and her two calves in the middle of the road, their strange behavior indicative of terror and flight from some unseen pursuer. LeDuc slowed so as not to hit the animals, and topping a small rise shortly after, he saw three figures beside the road—human figures, or so he thought at first.
Perplexed, and concerned that the three might be in distress—considering the remoteness of the place, the darkness of the night, and the lateness of the year—LeDuc was prepared to stop and render assistance.
And that’s when things got real weird, real fast.
Actually, I can do no better than to quote the report—compiled from information in a taped interview with the eyewitness—that was delivered by investigators David W. Akers and Willard Vogel of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) to no less a one than Dr. J. Allen Hynek himself:
“Bud LeDuc was driving home from Toppenish when his headlights fell on 3 men standing beside the road. One of these jumped in one bound to the middle of the roadway, a distance of about 15 ft; the leap appeared to be in slow motion. The man then slowly raised both arms above his head. LeDuc swerved & passed within 2 or 3 ft of him. The man was 7-8 ft tall and very thin, with long arms & matted reddish shoulder-length hair. His very long face had a long pointed nose & dead-white skin. The upper lip was pulled back to show the teeth; the lower lip was very thin. He wore a black one-piece garment with white bands at wrists & ankles and a patch of white at the neck, & black boots. The other 2 men were dressed in the same way. The man in the road held in his left hand “something red-purple with a wire on it.” LeDuc drove on past, but shortly afterward saw an elongated luminous object behind his truck, which blinked on & off several times. Soon afterward, a bright light illuminated the truck cab & its surroundings, and stayed with the truck until L. reached his home.”
UFO researcher Greg Long, in his book Examining the Earthlight Theory: The Yakima UFO Microcosm, enters into further detail about the incident. For instance, the being seems to have had a “trapezoid-like symbol” on the chest of its black garment, something like an insignia. Moreover, we learn that LeDuc, scared out of his wits, decided to hightail it out of there as fast as possible, ignoring the persistent urge to observe the strange and menacing figure in his rearview mirror.
During his mad dash home, when the cab of his truck was illuminated by the light from the apparent UFO, LeDuc claims to have seen the apparition of a close friend sitting beside him in the passenger’s seat; moreover, a woman’s voice sounded in his head, advising him to drive recklessly, since “they can’t afford for them to be the cause of you getting hurt.”
No need to wonder who they were—though why they were so solicitous of Bud LeDuc’s safety seems less clear. Eventually, the light and the apparition both disappeared, as well as the voice in his head; when LeDuc reached his home, he frantically awoke his parents and spilled out his strange story.
Oh, and the following morning LeDuc learned that his friend, whose apparition inexplicably appeared in his truck cab amidst the awful ordeal, had died violently that very same night.
There’s a little bit of everything in this story: weird, leaping, Spring-Heeled-Jack-like figures; cigar-shaped UFOs; what appears to have been an abortive attempt at a cattle mutilation; ghostly passengers; a guardian angel; and possibly even a thwarted human abduction. Moreover, it seems that the Yakima Indian Reservation tribal police received a report some months later of a sighting of identical beings, on a ranch ten miles from the first encounter, who were apparently also engaged in illicit cattle rustling.
If nothing else, the Yakima Encounter establishes one important fact: in the American West, at least, Spring-Heeled Jack is no solitary figure. He apparently belongs to a species, and now has the benefit and backup of some kind of aerial craft.
Verdict: It’s hard to know what to make of these stories.
The Spring-Heeled Jack of Victorian London was a lone, pranksterish figure, whose main pursuit seemed to be fondling and assaulting women, and frightening the occasional passerby or garrison sentry.
But what to make of the curious non sequitur of the weird, flying humanoid that appeared to those four bewildered children in Silver City, New Mexico, in 1938? That creature seemed akin to Spring-Heeled Jack, though certainly not identical.
And what of the giant humanoids in Washington State, with their slow, fifteen-foot leaps, strange technology, and weird uniforms? The description certainly seems to tally with that of old Spring-Heeled Jack; but this time he belongs to a trio of similar entities, and his designs on the poor cattle, as well as on the lone nighttime traveler, seem decidedly sinister.
In fact, there’s nothing pranksterish about those creatures at all. If anything, they seem downright terrifying, and possibly supernatural.
So who knows? It’s been nearly fifty years since Spring-Heeled Jack—or whatever these strange entities are—has been seen in the American West. Perhaps he, or it, is gone for good. For my part, I sincerely hope so.
But on the strength of that last sighting, on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington State, there’s a case to be made that Jack—or his extraterrestrial or supernatural compatriots—might be responsible, at least in part, for some of the plentiful cattle mutilations and abductions that are still ongoing in the western states.
And that makes me wonder if we’ve really seen the last of this sinister leaping horror…
Jerome Clark, Unexplained! (Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1999) pg. 503.
Maybe I’m just seeking patterns where there are none to see, but there seems to be an uptick in sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack (or his congeners) every thirty to forty years. By that reckoning, I’d say we’re long overdue for another “Jack flap,” if I can coin a phrase—he ought to have appeared again sometime in the period 2005-2015, but it seems there haven’t been any recent sightings. Maybe he—or it—has quit the business altogether?