Editing Spring-heeled Jack (section)

=== Official recognition ===
[[File:Mansion House-Public Session.jpg|thumb|A public session at the Mansion House, London (c. 1840).]] A few months after these first sightings, on 9 January 1838, the [[Lord Mayor of London]], [[John Cowan (sheriff)|Sir John Cowan]], revealed at a public session held in the [[Mansion House, London|Mansion House]] an anonymous complaint that he had received several days earlier, which he had withheld in the hope of obtaining further information. The correspondent, who signed the letter "a resident of [[Peckham]]", wrote:

{{quote|It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises—a ghost, a bear, and a [[devil]]; and moreover, that he will not enter a gentleman's gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house. The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover, but to become burdens to their families.

At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses.

The affair has now been going on for some time, and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject. The writer has reason to believe that they have the whole history at their finger-ends but, through interested motives, are induced to remain silent.<ref>As quoted by Jacqueline Simpson, ''Spring-Heeled Jack'' (2001).</ref>}}

Though the Lord Mayor seemed fairly sceptical, a member of the audience confirmed that "servant girls about [[Kensington]], Hammersmith and [[Ealing]], tell dreadful stories of this ghost or devil". The matter was reported in ''[[The Times]]'' on 9 January, other national papers on 10 January and, on the day after that, the Lord Mayor showed a crowded gathering a pile of letters from various places in and around London complaining of similar "wicked pranks". The quantity of letters that poured into the Mansion House suggests that the stories were widespread in suburban London. One writer said several young women in Hammersmith had been frightened into "dangerous fits" and some "severely wounded by a sort of claws the miscreant wore on his hands". Another correspondent claimed that in [[Stockwell]], [[Brixton]], [[Camberwell]] and [[Vauxhall]] several people had died of fright and others had had fits; meanwhile, another reported that the trickster had been repeatedly seen in [[Lewisham]] and [[Blackheath, London|Blackheath]].{{citation needed|date=June 2017}}

The Lord Mayor himself was in two minds about the affair: he thought "the greatest exaggerations" had been made, and that it was quite impossible "that the ghost performs the feats of a devil upon earth", but on the other hand someone he trusted had told him of a servant girl at [[Forest Hill, London|Forest Hill]] who had been scared into fits by a figure in a bear's skin; he was confident the person or persons involved in this "[[pantomime]] display" would be caught and punished.<ref>Peter Haining, ''The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack'', based on reports from ''[[The Times]]'' of 10 and 12 January 1838.</ref> The police were instructed to search for the individual responsible, and rewards were offered.{{citation needed|date=June 2017}}

A peculiar report from ''The Brighton Gazette'', which appeared in the 14 April 1838 edition of ''The Times'', related how a gardener in Rosehill, Sussex, had been terrified by a creature of unknown nature. ''The Times'' wrote that "Spring-heeled Jack has, it seems, found his way to the Sussex coast", even though the report bore little resemblance to other accounts of Jack. The incident occurred on 13 April, when it appeared to a gardener "in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal". Having attracted the gardener's attention by a growl, it then climbed the garden wall and ran along it on all fours, before jumping down and chasing the gardener for some time. After terrifying the gardener, the apparition scaled the wall and made its exit.<ref>{{cite news|newspaper=[[The Times]] |title=The Whitechapel murder |page=7 |date=14 April 1838 |url=http://archive.timesonline.co.uk |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081006085903/http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/ |archive-date=6 October 2008 }}</ref>