Following a horrified statewide fascination with the Jersey Devil that peaked in 1909 with a week of non-stop sightings, general panic and even a statement from the Philadelphia Zoo theorizing that the devil was actually a kangaroo fitted with artificial wings, reports of the monster died down and New Jersey’s focus turned to the lawless, bandit-bred Pineys and, of course, World War I. The devil was sighted on and off throughout the 1920s and ‘30s without much regularity and certainly without the mass hysteria that had followed prior encounters.

As years passed, sightings began to dwindle; the legend itself seemed to be quietly nestling down into the annals of folklore, allowing a new generation of anthropomorphized paranoia, from biggie-sized irradiated wildlife to probe-happy telepathic saucer men, to terrify the nation. Eventually, in 1957, an unidentifiable animal carcass was discovered in a burned out section of the Pine Barrens by the Department of Conservation. The charred, mostly skeletal remains were declared to be those of the Jersey Devil, and slowly word spread that the monster was deceased.

In 1960, however, a story that had manifested out of fear, persisted out of the Piney’s cunning and quieted in the wake of modernity and the resultant demystification of America’s wilderness, was suddenly resurrected out of local pride. Recognizing that a bankable hallmark of New Jersey culture had flat-lined in the national consciousness, a group of merchants in Camden, NJ, offered a $10,000 reward for the devil’s capture and promised to construct a paddock for the creature to scream and clop and fly around in. Though the reward was never claimed, stories of the creature persisted, and by the end of 1990s, film, television, hockey and toys had all tipped their hats to the devil.

Even as the 20th century dragged its belly across New Jersey, leaving new highways and the virulent culs de sac of suburban sprawl in its wake, the Pine Barrens remained largely untouched. In 1978, they were declared the country’s first National Preserve and remain under the protection of the Federal government, as do the secrets they contain. With the forest intact and the story of the Jersey Devil laced into the byzantine braid of history, the immortality often ascribed to the creature has been made a reality, turning an agent of death into an icon of tradition through the inadvertent alchemy of fiction.

Weird Things Culture Researcher Matt Finaly takes a weekly look into the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

In 1837, something dark and quick began hunting women on the streets of London, pouncing upon them from the shadows and going to work on their clothes with razor talons and flaming breath, only to disappear seconds later, leaping silently over impossibly high hedges and rooftops, leaving behind only the shrill, hollow ghost of maniacal laughter and, of course, a panicked victim.

Descriptions of Spring Heeled Jack varied over the 65 years that he laid siege to London’s gas lit back alleys and dark urban bowers, but early witnesses (somewhat) consistently agree that he sported large pointed ears, an equally pointy nose, bulging eyes, sharp claws, the ability to breathe fire and a penchant for agile escapes via inhumanly powerful jumps (hence his media-coined moniker).

John Thomas Haines’ 1840 play, Spring-Heeled Jack, the Terror of London, marked the first official appearance of Jack in a popular entertainment (he had already become a staple of various Punch and Judy street puppet shows), which was followed by a rash of both sightings and corresponding sensationalized fictionalizations throughout the 1840s and ‘50s. In the name of both topicality and word economy, however, we aim to focus on the years prior to Jack’s assimilation into the everyday pop cultural dialogue of Victorian England.

Accepting, as many experts do, that the initial attacks between 1837 and 1838 were perpetrated by a still-anonymous (though one Henry de La Poer Beresford, dubbed “The Mad Marquess,” is a prime suspect) malicious, costumed prankster, and noting that the perpetrator’s image and misdeeds became the stuff of pop culture legend, the question must be posed: What overriding cultural factors contributed the specific physical attributes that the misogynistic hoaxer built into his monster? In short, why was a quick-footed, fire-breathing demon the obvious avatar for blind dread and mass hysteria in 19th century London?

While some details remain fuzzy (one witness reported that Jack actually had pointy ears while another insisted that he wore a large helmet with two points on it), it’s a given that, with the claws and the various points and the long black cloak, Jack’s intention was to appear as much like the devil (or some other lesser, equally stereotypical demon) as possible. With the post-enlightenment era in full swing and the upper-class spiritualist revival still pending, it’s easy to imagine Jack’s rationale: the upper class is retreating into academies and coffee houses to argue over the need for faith and spirituality in a supposedly enlightened society, while the lower class, fearing both the moral and technical ambiguities of science, keeps a firm (but, suddenly, somewhat unsure) hold on not only religion, but also folklore, both of which are rife with demonic and satanic imagery. Imagine being relieved of the possibility of eternal damnation by an academically driven cultural reformation centered on reason and the explicability of the natural world, only to be attacked by a fire-breathing monster. Invoke the devil at a time when society is certain of his existence, and it only serves as terrifying confirmation – invoke the devil at a time when his existence is in question, and chaos ensues.

Moreover, Jack targeted women. Barring all discussion of spiritual terror or academic ennui, the largest threat to women in 19th century England was the prevailing social hierarchy. Women were often married off to distant relations, to the highest bidder or to the highest social advantage, meaning, in many cases, to strangers or casual acquaintances. Innate to English womanhood was the knowledge that, someday, you will leave your home and move in with a husband you don’t know outside of carefully regulated social gatherings and courtship rituals (if even those) – a man whose true personality and domestic demeanor are a complete mystery. You know, and fear, that your husband could turn out to be a slovenly boor, an inattentive malcontent or, worse, a temperamental, abusive monster. There’s something, then, of the hidden evil in men, worn outwardly by Jack, that would seem particularly frightening to the young women he victimized. Admittedly, it’s ridiculous to suggest that Jack’s victims, or Jack himself, consciously contemplated this dimension of Spring Heeled Jack’s imposingness, but the obvious sex profiling that was paramount to Jack’s victim selection justifies the point, and it’s worth considering the perpetual state of psychological duress that the patriarchy held women in, even before someone donned finger blades and started leaping out of darkened alleys.

And what of the spring heels? By 1837, the industrial revolution was enjoying its heyday in London, including the mass production of all nature of machine components, like coiled springs, which began being manufactured in bulk during the 1780s. The wide availability of mechanical sundries, combined with an alleged spate of urban legends involving the devil pursuing a man over the rooftops of the city, could have easily led Jack to the idea of constructing some kind of springed footwear (the first patent for spring shoes wasn’t filed until 1889, but the materials required to build them existed for decades prior) as a means of further solidifying his demonic persona by increasing his jumping ability. Though the construction of a viable pair of such shoes, equipped for both running and jumping, would require certain metallurgic skills and resources, it seems that he did have metal claws constructed for his fingertips. At the same time, Jack’s agility could have just as easily been an inadvertent concoction of hysterical witnesses – an attempt to rationalize the sheer suddenness of the assaults – that was then co-opted and reiterated by policemen who now had an excuse for their inability to apprehend jumping Jack. And though it was two 1837 assaults involving clawing and leaping that earned Spring Heeled Jack his name, it was two 1838 attacks involving fire breathing that transformed the public’s general wariness into bona fide panic.

Most theories of Jack’s true identity cite that he probably came from an upper class, if not aristocratic, background, and his tendency toward flame exhalation only reinforces this notion. The 17th and 18th centuries had seen two prominent British fire eaters gain notoriety among the aristocracy, and, during the 1820s, fire eating and breathing became a common popular upper-class entertainment. A growing fascination with the strange and seemingly mystic cultures of Britain’s Eastern colonies was mounting, and, with the Mughal Empire defeated and India under complete company control, more and more British noblemen were travelling throughout India, where they were captivated by the wondrous and unfamiliar practices of the Hindus, including fire eating and fire breathing, which some Hindu sects utilized in performances demonstrating spiritual attainment rites. It was the perfect time for an aspiring prankster to see and learn the art of fire-breathing, which the returning young aristocrats had re-purposed from a religious ritual into a cheap parlor trick.

While many working class Londoners would have been altogether ignorant of the practice, even those who had seen a fire breathing performance in a theatrical context would be wholly unprepared to see the art used randomly (and threateningly) on the streets of London, and (even if the person performing wasn’t dressed as a demon) would find it frightening. Take the analog of today’s guerilla magic fad – guerilla magic works precisely because, by removing the traditional physical environs of a performance, the intangible barrier between performer and audience is shattered, creating extremes of both surprise and veracity that don’t exist naturally within the confines of traditional spectatorship. Jack exploited this fact to add the last (and most convincing) attribute to his marauding devil – hellfire.

As if all of the physical trappings of a demon weren’t enough to send the women of London into a collective fit, Jack added one more thing: self-awareness. On February 19th, Jane Alsop heard at knock at the door of her father’s house. Upon opening it, a man concealed by shadows told her he was a police officer and asked her to fetch a light. “We have caught Spring Heeled Jack here in the lane” he said. Upon handing him a candle, the man threw off his cloak, revealing pointed ears and bulging eyes. He spewed flame towards the girl and then began to tear at her clothes and her skin with his claws until, finally, her sister came to her rescue, and the assailant fled.

To think of a monster that haunts the dark streets and stalks prey out of an unquenchable, instinctual thirst for blood or violence is scary, but the idea of a creature calling out its own name, a name assigned to it by its victims, as a means of exploiting that fear, is something all together more terrifying. As much as you can blame popular culture for later propagating the legend of Spring Heeled Jack through Penny Dreadfuls and stage plays, leading to further sightings and, supposedly, copy cats, it was only weeks after appearing in the news that the man who was Jack began propagating his own legend, breathing the three chilling syllables – Spring Heeled Jack – into the air of a warm London home, before spitting fire and baring his claws and insisting with every pouncing, cackling ounce of his being that this monster was real.

In retrospect, though, away from the fog-shrouded gas lights and the sharp echo of boots on cobbled streets sounding out into the wind-haunted spaces between buildings, it’s this self-awareness (self-centeredness, really) that most belies the true mortal nature of Spring Heeled Jack. After all, Bigfoot isn’t known for pyrotechnic displays and sponsorship deals, and Nessie has yet to strike poses mid back flip. Jack may as well have said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the cloak.”

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Tear Up The Town is a weekly column investigating the social, political and cultural climates of a populace at the time it was affected by a legendary paranormal, extraterrestrial or cryptid phenomenon. It appears on Tuesdays…

On September 12th, 1952, brothers Edward and Fred May, along with their friend Tommy Hyer, watched a flaming spacecraft streak across the West Virginia sky and crash into the nearby hills.

After running home to tell their mother what they had seen, the boys, along with Ms. May and three other local children, rushed out into the darkness to find the wreckage. After arriving at the top of a hill, the group saw a pulsating red light and, nearby, illuminated by a flashlight they’d brought, a 10-foot tall creature with two bright glowing eyes and a head (or, possibly, cowl) shaped like the ace of spades. The creature made a hissing sound, hovered toward them, and then turned and fled. The group ran screaming from the site and back down the hill into their small town of Flatwoods.

The Flatwoods Monster has gone on to be featured in books, television shows and video games. The creature has been identified as everything from an extra-terrestrial visitor to a cousin of fellow WV-based cyptid, The Mothman, to a startled barn owl. The story has been thoroughly debunked by skeptics, who, along with the barn owl explanation, cite that residents across three states (West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland) reported meteor sightings that night, and say that the red light was almost certainly one of the many aircraft hazard beacons that dot the West Virginia countryside.

What the debunkers fail to address is why a group of seven people would mistake three separate common objects and occurrences for a spaceship crash and an enormous hissing monster. Could Hollywood’s commie-as-martian mania, a 19th century Thunderbird encounter, and the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane have something to do with it? Tear Up the Town says, “yeah, you know…it’s possible.”

The 1950s marked a strange era in America’s history. General social conservatism and a newly vigilant focus on family values existed alongside new and revolutionary cultural institutions, such as Playboy magazine, the Kinsey reports and the Beat Generation. At the same time, with tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets growing, pop culture was occupied in constructing sensationalist cold war narratives and allegories. And what better way to fictionalize one of America’s largest cultural concerns than by combining it with another? 1951 saw the theatrical release of The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World, which both delivered 90 minutes of cold war paranoia in the form of vintage 1947 Roswell hysteria. Additionally, as Hollywood released film after film in which Mars, the red planet, stood in for the Soviet red menace, Entertaining Comics (previously Educational Comics) was busy taking advantage of the fact that the comic industry, unlike Hollywood, had yet to come under any industry content regulations, allowing EC to produce a plethora of kid-targeted grotesque, gratuitously violent and overtly sexual horror and sci-fi comic books (including Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, Two-Fisted Tales and Shock SuspenStories) without official recourse.

Six of the seven witnesses to the Flatwoods Monster were under the age of 18, and, as a result, were inundated not only with news stories about very real Earthly terrors, but also with sensationalist movies and extreme comics that placed monsters and aliens alongside Soviet nukes and communist infiltration of the government in the cultural rogues gallery. Meanwhile, Ms. May, the one adult witness, was at once aware of the broader socio-political fears that were sweeping the nation, in an understandably heightened state of anxiety, and in the position of sole responsibility for not just her two children, but also four others. These elements alone show how easily a meteor could become a plummeting saucer and how an aircraft hazard beacon might appear as an extra-terrestrial road flare, but a barn owl as an unearthly creature?

The 50s were also a transformative time for West Virginia. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, miners and their families had been flocking to the region’s prosperous coal mines, pushing the state’s annual population growth well above the national average. Unfortunately, with the standardization of mechanical mining equipment, fewer human workers were needed (remember, John Henry was supposedly a West Virginia native) and, after peaking at just over 2 million residents in 1950, West Virginia’s population began to steadily decline.

The same boom that had vastly increased West Virginia’s general population over the prior half-century had concordantly introduced a growing population of the mentally ill, many of whom were housed in the Trans-Allegheny Asylum for the Insane (later re-named Weston State Hospital). Opened in 1864 with the capacity to house 250 patients, the asylum underwent massive growth over an 80 year period and, by the 1950s, housed more than 2,400 epileptics, drug addicts and myriad other so-called “uneducable mental defectives.” The asylum is also just over 30 miles from Flatwoods. After a revealing piece in the Charleston Gazette in 1949, which portrayed the hospital as a nightmarish, unsanitary, over-crowded hell, already rampant rumors about the asylum’s conditions, treatments and patients were embraced as facts. These confirmations added to the discomfort of families in the area who already couldn’t help but construct dread speculations about deranged escapees. Living in Flatwoods in the early ‘50s, it would be difficult to venture out into the darkened forests and hills without some underlying sense of dread at the knowledge that just a bit farther out into the woods, in an isolated, ever-expanding compound packed to overflowing with mistreated mental patients, experimental surgeries, some using ice picks and electricity, were being performed in dirty operating rooms.

Even more to the point, in the same way that stories and rumors spread about the asylum, Appalachian folktales and legends dispersed and persisted throughout the state. West Virginia, like all of Appalachia, has always occupied a certain cultural niche because, while it’s geographically poised to adopt social and cultural trends along with the rest of the country, its population remains somewhat insular. In part, this insularity is a result of the mountainous terrain, which makes travel outside of major thoroughfares difficult, but, mostly, it’s a result of the state’s lack of industrial diversity. With coal as the area’s only major viable resource, the pre-‘90s population primarily consisted of semi-migrant blue-collar communities whose search for local identity led them to retain, and revel in, the rich cultural history of the mountaineers who first traversed West Virginia’s rocky terrain and discovered the valuable coal reserves beneath it. While much of the extant Appalachian lore is based around stories of these pioneer characters, herbal remedies and general folk wisdom, a proliferation of Cherokee Indian mythology, including thunderbird legends, is vital to the tradition’s underlying framework.

To the Cherokee (and many other tribal nations), the thunderbird has rich, nuanced religious and cultural implications. To the colonists, and in prevailing Appalachian lore, they’re really just regarded as giant flesh-eating birds of varying species, including owls (often dubbed “Bighoot”). They are, in fact, such a prevalent part of Appalachian lore, that beginning in the 1800s, a rash of Thunderbird sightings were reported around the United States, including a series of incidents in 1895 involving a giant avian creature consuming both livestock and humans over a weeklong period in Addison, West Virginia, less than 30 miles from Flatwoods. Flatwoods residents, then, would not only be pre-disposed to hearing legends about fearsome, man-eating birds simply through the extensive oral tradition of the Appalachian region, but would also be doubly aware, and perhaps subconsciously wary, of the creatures, given the existence of an exceedingly horrific local account dating back less than 60 years before the encounter with the alleged Flatwoods Monster.

Given all of this dissonant input, from Hollywood’s equation of the red scare with an alien menace to local fears of escaped mental patients and giant birds, it makes sense that a child of Appalachia who sees what he interprets as a spaceship could then read a nearby barn owl (the shape of the Flatwoods Monster’s head, the sound the creature made and its erratic towards-then-away movement are all consistent with this species), which already bears a sinister connotation, and it’s elongated shadow as the creature from the ship.
A final note: I understand that it might read as contradictory that this piece suggests that these children are both at the forefront of American pop culture, enabling them to see a meteor as a space ship, but also shut-in, out-of-touch hillbillies who rely on folk legends to interpret the world around them, so an owl becomes a monster. Really, it’s the co-existence of these two factors, which is the result of the gradual culture and population shift that began mid-century in West Virginia, that allows the Flatwoods Monster to exist.

These children, due to equal parts chronology and geography, belonged to one of the only generations given the opportunity to subconsciously fuse, in a manner both thematic and terrifyingly physical, rarified traditional American folklore with the all-consuming technocentric xenophobia of the atom age.

Matt Finley is a regular contributor to Weird Things and is currently based in Cleveland. His works can be found at Finfizzler.wordpress.com.

Previously, this week, on Weird Things.

• A few tips for the novice Bigfoot hunter.

• Could the Son of Sam, a UFO investigating Air Force base and the birth of popular science fiction have helped create the Dover Demon?

• Michael Jackson may be dead, but his ghost is on a world tour.

• What happens, when myriad ghosts, have chosen to haunt a house, stop beings polite and start getting real? They say some really kooky stuff, that’s what.

• Rhode Island has never had a Bigfoot sighting, but that might be about to change.

Enjoy the weekend, as always, send weird photos, stories, sounds and happenings to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail.

Super-heavy element 112 is now on the scene, more than ten years since it’s creation at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany. And it needs a name. Internet sensation Professor Richard Wiseman believes it should be called Kryptonite, and has started a campaign on his blog to make it so.

If you ask us, it’s about damn time someone put kryptonite on the periodic table. To get on board with the campaign please post your support on his site, and together we can make our universe a little more like the Superman universe.

Note: This won’t change much for the majority of the population, who always thought that kryptonite was an element anyway.

Jennifer Madrigal in Ogden, Utah filed a complaint to local police claiming another woman had cursed her. Allegedly during a dispute about food stamps, the offending party cursed the Utah woman that she would be hit by a car. According to Madrigal, this forced her to seek out a witch doctor, who charged $800 to remove the curse with an egg ritual. But hey, it probably would have cost more to hire a lawyer to file a court order to get the curse lifted.

Exactly whose dream is Nara Dreamland in Japan? The now closed park has its own princess castle, Matterhorn ride, Jungle Cruise and many other eerily similar versions of famous Disney attractions. It’s also got a building covered in swastikas.
Two intrepid tourists visit it before it closed (or was it already closed!).
A brochure for the park (in Japanese).
Google maps satellite view.