Following the London scares of early 1838 Spring-heeled Jack was swiftly appropriated by numerous localities beyond the metropolis. In March 1838 the Hampshire Advertiser claimed a local criminal was as hard to catch as Spring-heeled Jack. The following month the Brighton Gazette recorded that Spring-heeled Jack had ‘found his way to the Sussex coast’. By June the Bristol Mercury reported that Spring-heeled Jack was appearing ‘in most of the boroughs, villages and cities in England’. Unlike Jack the Ripper's enduring connection with Whitechapel, an association which branded his legend into the psychic geography of the district, Spring-heeled Jack's migratory nature created a more diffused legend across a broader range of specific localities. In examining this migratory impulse within Spring-heeled Jack's legend this chapter engages with the nature of cultural transferences and interactions in Victorian England.

This chapter explores the importance of differing cultural localities as sites or spatial nodes of popular cultural generation, arguing that localised spaces and places were amongst the key ‘engines’ that provided the operational dynamics for popular cultures in general and the generation and perpetuation of Spring-heeled Jack's legend in particular. It was in specific localities that incidents, influences and beliefs became connected and embodied in the identifiable ‘Spring-heeled Jack’ signifier, informing how and why his accounts were formed, operated and received in different places at different times. This chapter adopts the view of cultural spaces as an integral part of those narratives.