When the Lord Mayor of the City of London was informed of Spring-heeled Jack's appearances around the metropolis in January 1838 his characteristically detached response was that such a figure ‘was not calculated for the meridian of London’. A few days later a magistrate and barrister echoed this sentiment when he declared that ‘this visitation in the nineteenth century, so near the metropolis … [is] too absurd for belief’. Whilst such bizarre and superstitious accounts may have been expected to find fertile soil in rural communities, they seemingly had no place in London, at least as it was perceived by the metropolitan elite. Yet it was Spring-heeled Jack's initial terrorising of the metropolitan region that granted him such notoriety, publicity and lasting potency in the popular imagination. In part that power derived from the sustained anxiety Spring-heeled Jack supposedly generated in the capital in 1838. In 1863 George Augustus Sala claimed London had been ‘thrown into periodic spasms of terror’ by Springheeled Jack's activities, whilst a later article claimed ‘the inhabitants of London and its suburbs [had been] kept in a constant state of terror’ by his antics.

Looking in from the safety of the provinces the threat appeared exaggerated. Whilst the metropolitan press alluded to widespread fear and apprehension, the Ipswich Journal merely recorded that London's magistrates had heard ‘a great many complaints … respecting a “Ghost” or monster, who has for some time past been annoying the inhabitants of the suburbs’.