Spring-heeled Jack was the Victorian London bogeyman said to leap over hedges and breathe fire. The Spooky Isles guide to Harrow notes that the researcher Mike Dash's account of the legend lists nearly every reported appearance but misses this one.
The Harrow version comes from Robert Burns, then a recently retired hatter to Harrow School, who reported in 1950 that at the height of the scare the apparition appeared infrequently at the foot of Church Hill. According to him, more than once a party of men with shotguns and other equipment gathered to deal with the white sheet movements that women and others had described in frightened accounts. He said it was attributed, but not proved, to be a youthful escapade from a nearby house for boys.
The same guide mentions another account of Jack appearing to a terrified Harrow schoolmaster on West Street, without a source. This is a recollection written down decades after the event, and Burns himself leaned towards a prank. It belongs here as a local variant of a national legend, and the pin is approximate to the foot of Church Hill.
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