Spring-heeled Jack - recent activity in East London?

I know Spring-heeled Jack is supposedly a Victorian legend, but I've had three separate reports from East London residents in the past fortnight about a tall, impossibly thin figure that appears and vanishes between buildings. The descriptions are weirdly consistent - described as having a metallic quality to their movements, appearing around 11pm, and seemingly able to clear significant distances in single bounds.

One witness (an elderly woman in Whitechapel) claimed the figure had glowing red eyes and metal gloves. Another (younger bloke in Shadwell) said it just looked like someone moving at inhuman speed. I'm not suggesting it's literally the Victorian legend, but the geographic cluster and temporal pattern is interesting.

Has anyone got recent reports from that area? I'm trying to establish if this is genuine paranormal activity, mass hysteria, or someone performing parkour dressed up as a cryptid enthusiast.

Spring-heeled Jack has reappeared sporadically for nearly 200 years - there were authenticated sightings in the 1980s around Peckham and the 2000s had reports from South London. The East London cluster you're describing fits the pattern. Some paranormal researchers theorise it's the same entity manifesting periodically, others think it's a copycat phenomenon or tulpa effect.

If it's three separate witnesses from different areas all describing similar things without knowing about each other's accounts, that's actually fairly compelling. Did you cross-check whether they knew each other or had seen social media posts about it first?

glowing red eyes and metal gloves

The Victorian Spring-heeled Jack was definitely paranormal rather than a person - some of those leaps were physically impossible (30+ feet) and there's no obvious motive for a living person to terrorise East London for a fortnight. But the modern copycat theory's plausible too. Best approach is to do night observations in the area and try to capture actual evidence rather than relying on witness reports.

I'm in Hackney and haven't seen anything, but I'll keep an eye out. If you're doing observations, reach out - worth having multiple people watching different locations. The more data points the better.

Report it to the police as well, even if they won't take the paranormal angle seriously. If there's someone actually jumping between buildings at height, that's a genuine safety hazard regardless of whether it's supernatural or just a mad parkour lad.