Mystery
Spring-heeled Jack at Bushey
Lads with sticks shouted all night for Spring-heeled Jack; he never came.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- A suburban heath; the old lane is gone
- Legend from
- 1840s
- Tone
- Curious
You're on Bushey Heath, where Victorian lads with sticks once waited all night for Spring-heeled Jack, and the Devil was said to fiddle on a stile by moonlight.
Spring-heeled Jack, the leaping, red-eyed bogeyman with metal claws who terrified London from 1837, seemed to move out into the surrounding counties in the 1840s, and Bushey took the threat especially seriously. One resident later recalled noisy crowds of youths armed with sticks, shouting for hours for Jack to show himself, sometimes in Old Bushey and sometimes on the Heath, though he never appeared. Many later sightings were surely copycat hoaxes. Bushey Heath has an older diabolical visitor too: on moonlit nights the Devil was said to sit on a stile in Bushey Heath Lane, playing his fiddle.