{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Loreplay","title":"Spring Heeled Jack: The Terror of London","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2127,"description":"In 1837, something started terrorizing the outskirts of London. It had eyes like red balls of fire, metallic claws, and a deeply unsettling habit of vomiting blue flame directly into women's faces. It leapt over nine-foot walls. It slapped soldiers and laughed at bullets. It turned up in Devon as a four-legged bear-thing, starred in Victorian penny dreadfuls, got adopted as a bogeyman for misbehaving children, and then — after 67 years of sightings across England and into Scotland — simply vanished into the dark.This week on Loreplay, we're covering Spring Heeled Jack: England's most chaotic urban legend and the Victorian era's most aggressively uncatchable public menace.We'll dig into the documented 1838 attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales — two women whose detailed, police-recorded accounts are the closest thing this legend has to a paper trail. We'll meet the Lord Mayor of London, who had a very bad January trying to explain all of this to a crowded public session at Mansion House. We'll examine the mountain of press coverage that turned a probable aristocratic prank into a national panic. And we'll spend some quality time with Henry de la Poer Beresford, the 3rd Marquess of Waterford — known to his contemporaries as the Mad Marquis — who is either the most compelling suspect in Victorian folklore history, or just a very convenient scapegoat.Nobody was ever convicted of being Spring Heeled Jack. This is going to bother us both.SOURCESAcademic and book sourcesBell, Karl. The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures. Boydell Press, 2012. The definitive academic study. Bell's analysis of the class-based disparity in press coverage of the Alsop and Scales cases is essential.Dash, Mike. \"Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost.\" Fortean Studies, vol. 3, 1996. The most rigorous forensic accounting of which sightings are documented vs. fabricated. The necessary corrective to Haining.Haining, Peter. The Legend...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/qrKRCVgS-SidSX8b9CGzZDHhnpF4bwxZyw2FLc5pukw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS83MTBl/MDI3MGZkZGE0M2U0/MmJlYjhmNGQ4NjAy/NmY0Ny5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}