The Uncanny Valley: Jumpin’ Black Flash, A Cape Cod Boogeyman

Spring-Heeled Jack, in addition to being the best-named apparition since the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, was a frequent haunter of Victorian London and, eventually, other parts of Great Britain. He was known and feared for his habits of sudden attack via tearing with metal claws and breathing blue fire, and the black-caped scoundrel often left the scene of a crime via inhuman leaps.

There’s an odd echo of Spring-Heeled Jack in the pantheon of Massachusetts anomalies. The Bay State has hosted a surprising number of monsters, ghosts, and entities. The catalogue starts early in the state’s history — mysterious visitors with unusual, futuristic technology and abilities supposedly visited colonial Gloucester. More recent times have seen such inexplicable occurrences as the so-called “Dover Demon” of Dover, Mass., a diminutive, big-headed creature spotted by more than one observer in 1977, and a miscellany of anomalies (even Bigfoot) around the “Bridgewater Triangle” in southeastern Mass. The list of hauntings here is, of course, substantial. But a particularly villainous Provincetown specter ought to give potential Cape Cod vacationers pause.

Chances are high he’d go unnoticed in contemporary P-town, overshadowed by folks like the omnipresent bicycler of recent years who’s dressed like, well, a pastel chess piece, maybe? But the Black Flash, says many an online source, spent a few years scaring the wits out of P-town folks, from 1938 through the end of World War II. He shared Spring-Heeled Jack’s penchant for a black cape. At least one observer reported the breathing of blue fire, and another claimed that the Black Flash got away courtesy of leaping a 10-foot hedge. It’s hard to avoid the question of whether Spring-Heeled Jack hopped aboard a transatlantic clipper.

Source: The Valley Advocate

Image: The Shroud