The local Guardian newspaper is asking: ‘Is it the return of Spring-Heeled Jack?’ They do admit way down the story, though, that SHJ never actually bothered Ewell before. It’s quite interesting, actually, that not only had the newspaper reporters heard of Spring-Heeled Jack, they confidently assumed their readers would, too. It seems he’s never quite left the public consciousness.
But what is all the fuss about? Well, the Martin family were driving in a Taxi down the Ewell bypass (Surrey) on the night of February 14 when something weird leapt into the road in front of them. Dad Scott Martin told the Guardian: “We saw a man on the other side of the road. We didn’t pay much attention until he started crossing over to our side of the road. The next thing he jumped over the centre fencing in the road and ran across our two lanes. On the side of our road is a bank easily 15ft in height and this figure crossed our road, climbed this bank and was gone from sight all in about two seconds.
‘All four of us were baffled and voiced our sighting straight away with the same detail. A dark figure with no real features, but fast in movement with an ease of hurdling obstacles I’ve never seen. My last image was of him going through the bushes at the top of the bank.’
Mr Martin admits that he and his family were ‘freaked’ by the sighting and that the cab driver was ‘petrified’. Mrs Martin tried to rationalise it all by stating it was the fact that anyone would try to cross the multilane bypass just there that made it so ‘weird’.
To my mind this could be categorised as a Black Dog-type phenomenon. OK, it was human-shaped and on two legs but here we have the same characteristics of a dark shape crossing a road, disappearing into shrubbery as these phantoms so often do (for an example of a two-legged example of the breed see http://www.uncannyuk.com/80/the-beast-of-brymbo/)
The more I study old folkloric, rural ghost stories the more convinced I am that our byways and even our busy highways have been patrolled by peculiar dark shapes of various kinds that occasionally still manifest. As well as their habitat, typically dark or shadowy appearance and general weirdness, they have one other thing in common: seeing one freaks people out. What the Martins saw may just have been some foolhardy idiot and a trick of the light suggested his fast movement up the embankment – perhaps it was his shadow that was cast up the bank. Or perhaps the reason they and their cab driver were so ‘freaked’ and ‘petrified’ was that their sighting was of something undeniably supernatural, something that effected them in that chilling, disturbing way peculiar to the paranormal. Any thoughts?
Read the full report here: http://is.gd/VKcZCN
(For information on my iPhone application, Ghost Finder London, which has 300+ haunted sites accurately plotted on Google maps throughout Central and Greater London (with info on each researched and written by me), please visit the app store: http://is.gd/sKQ8TJ)
Could be something as simple as a freerunner. The skills of some of those guys appear almost superhuman when in full daylight. Running up a 15ft bank is a matter of a couple of well practised hops and they can move at a hell of a pace.