SPRING ON THE COMMON

I came across this item while browsing through a collection of local history clippings from the Barnes Mortlake and Sheen Times. This one appeared in the edition of 25 July 1964. To save your eyes having to squint through it, I transcribe it below:

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JACK SPRINGS UP IN WARRINGTON

In my review of Karl Bell’s Spring Heeled Jack book I noted that the main thread of SHJ reports seem to have died out at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Everton, Liverpool stories of 1905 were generally viewed as more or less signalling the end of the era. But as Karl Bell, Mike Dash and David Clarke have recorded, the story has reappeared in different forms on many occasions and in many places since then. 🔻 

THE MAGICAL IMAGINATION

Karl Bell. The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England 1780-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2012

Folklore, particularly supernatural lore, has tended to be associated with the countryside, and to be thought of in terms of peasant survivals, the domain of country yokels, disdained by street-wise city folks. In this book, Karl Bell, a lecturer at Portsmouth University, challenges that preconception.

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MAKING MYTHS: SPRING HEEL JACK, RENDLESHAM AND THE ABDUCTIONISTS

Mike Dash’s talk on Spring Heel Jack to the Barnes and Mortlake History Society on 5th February last, raised yet again a topic which is of importance to all students of anomalies: the role of the media in shaping our perception of such phenomena. Of course now we are used to the Internet, television and daily tabloid media and the way they spread and manipulate rumour, but we are perhaps less informed about the historical role of the media in reporting anomalies in the past. 

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