A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (31 page)

When the peasants arrived on the scene with guns they found the intoxicated animal asleep on the floor in a pool of blood and votky, surrounded by its four victims. The bear was immediately shot.

The Nottingham Evening Post
, August 27, 1891

SUPERSTITION, BELIEF
and the SUPERNATURAL

Preface

Bear-Bind Cottage was a lonely spot. An isolated house on a lane that slunk away from the village of Bow to the huddle of homes at Old Ford and the marshland beyond. The sort of track you might take as a shortcut on a bitter winter’s night, then swiftly change your mind and double back.

It was here, at this solitary stretch of nothing in particular, long since swallowed by the East End of London, that eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop was disturbed by the urgent ringing of a bell at the gate on a February evening in 1838.

Outside in the gloom stood a cloaked figure who said he was a policeman and demanded she bring a light. The instant she obliged, he threw off his cape, breathed a fireball of blue and white flame and mauled her with metallic claws until her sister came to the rescue.

Her hair was torn; her dress was ripped: poor Jane had joined a small but growing band of victims of the demon who lurked in the dark corners of the Victorian imagination to the end of the century.

At first the papers had called him Steel Jack, dismissing him as nothing more than an upper-class prankster with particularly bouncy shoes and a wager to settle.

But sightings spread, rumours grew and descriptions became ever more outlandish. His eyes were balls of fire, they said. And he could leap higher than a hedgerow. No! A mail coach. By the time of the attack in Bear-Binder Lane, the press had settled on the name that parents would invoke to disobedient children for decades to come: Spring-Heeled Jack, a devilish mix of Freddy Krueger, Zebedee and Batman gone bad.

Scratch the surface of the age of science and Victorian Britain was riddled with superstition. A century that perfected the art of the ghost story saw parlours resounding with the moans of mediums and the rat-a-tat-tats of the dead. Far from the cities, a lingering belief in witchcraft saw a succession of blameless old ladies being blooded to break a spell. And every now and again there were one-off flare-ups of the heebie-jeebies. In 1842, to the withering scorn of journalists, Londoners abandoned their city in droves, fearing the onset of an earthquake prophesied by the astrologer John Dee in 1598. Almost four decades later, a girl worried herself to death at the fabricated predictions of sixteenth-century soothsayer Mother Shipton, which said the world would end in 1881.

Yet these were mere sideshows compared to the supernatural belief that dominated the Victorian era, even in the face of a rising tide of secularism. It went something like this: 1. There is a God. 2. He’s probably British. 3. On the whole, it’s not seemly to get too excitable about such matters.

Lynching a Ghost

A remarkable instance of superstition is, the St Petersburg correspondent of the
Daily Graphic
says, reported from Orenburg.

During the funeral of a wealthy peasant the lid of the coffin was seen to rise, and the corpse proceed to get out. The priest and mourners were so alarmed that they ran back to their village, and locked themselves up in their huts.

The corpse, who was feeling cold (as corpses should), ran after them, and succeeded in getting into the hut of an aged peasant woman, who had not been quite so agile as the rest in fastening the door.

The peasants, when they had recovered from their panic and learned where the corpse was, proceeded with guns and stakes of pine to ‘exorcise’ the ‘ghost,’ and killed him.

When the priest had sufficiently collected his senses to explain the phenomenon of the ghost by the hypothesis of a prolonged stated of coma, and came out of his hut to rescue him, he found that the peasants, having ‘laid’ the ghost, had thrown him into a marshy field.

The Citizen
, Gloucester, March 12, 1890

A Strange Story

A
Press Association
despatch says: Adelaide Amy Terry, servant to Dr Williams, of Brentford, was sent to a neighbour with a message on Sunday evening, and as she did not return and was known to be short-sighted, it was feared she had fallen into the canal, which was dragged, but without success.

On Tuesday an old barge-woman suggested that a loaf of bread in which some quicksilver had been placed should be floated in the water. This was done, and the loaf became stationary at a certain spot. The dragging was resumed there, and the body was discovered.

The Tamworth Herald
, October 27, 1883

A Ghost at Wrexham

For some time the inhabitants of Wrexham have been kept in a state of excitement by rumours that ‘a ghost’ was to be seen in the neighbourhood of Salisbury Park. Most determined efforts have been made to capture the nocturnal visitor, but he or she has hitherto managed to escape.

A strict watch has, however, been kept, and the assemblage of idlers and roughs congregated to wait for the ghost have of late become a serious nuisance, as, in default of having a ghost to look after, they have amused themselves by insulting casual passers by.

On Saturday night the crowd discovered a ‘something’ which they were pleased to call the ghost in Salisbury Park. A rush was made at once for the supposed apparition, stones were thrown and dogs were slipped at the unfortunate ‘ghost,’ who ultimately turned out to be an inebriated workman who had, in his drunken confusion wandered through the park.

He was handed over to the police, by whom he was brought before the magistrates yesterday, and was discharged.

The Manchester Evening News
, September 22, 1874