6. Spring Heeled Jack may have kept on manifesting over a seventy-year period because he spawned a series of Copy Cats.
The first explanation for the continued manifestation of Spring Heeled Jack was the alarming possibility that the original had inspired a new generation of copycats. In November 1872, Peckham was left “in a state of commotion” due to the appearance of a Spring Heeled Jack wannabe known as the “Peckham Ghost.” The News of the World described this new urban terror as “Spring Heeled Jack who terrified a past generation.” Some people may well have been taken in by this sensationalist headline and believed that Jack was back in London. However, many other people were cynical.
One of those cynics was the writer and artist Beatrix Potter. On March 1, 1877, Potter noted that: “There has been a most singular nuisance going on since Christmas around Manchester. A gang of young men calling themselves Spring-heeled Jacks have been going about in the dusk and frightening people. They wore India-rubber dresses which would puff up at will to a great size, horns, a lantern and springs in their boots.” These counterfeit Jacks terrorized both men and young women- and stole to boot- the one factor that differentiated them from their early Victorian inspiration.