Ok, I just came across this and had to share.  Apparently there was some man-creature that terrified parts of England in the mid- to late-19th Century.  Here's something about him:

At first, tales of this devil-like figure who leaped from roof-top to roof-top was accepted as hysterical nonsense. But in January 1838 this strange creature received official recognition when a barmaid, Polly Adams, was attacked while walking across Blackheath in south London. Mary Stevens, a servant girl was terrified by what she saw on Barnes Common, and in Clapham churchyard a woman was assaulted!

He was descibed as wearing a cloak, dark, and he could jump high.  Also – get this – he wore a costume:

Jane Alsop described her inhuman attacker to London magistrates?”He was wearing a kind of helmet and a tight fitting white costume like an oilskin and he vomited blue and white flames!”

But of course….Batman (check out the image below)?  Nah, unless it's a Batman-Magneto cross.  One would think that the Brits might give him a cool superhero/villain name, but instead they chose “Spring-Heeled Jack” (maybe Spiderman would have been called “Red and Blue Bob” had he been around during the Victorian Era).  So anyway, it appears that despite official police attempts at catching him, they always came up empty.  What was the deal?  Who was he?  I'm guessing that “he” was a “them”, as I can't see one individual dressing up in costumes for 60 years and scaring people.  Public domain image, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Jack6.jpg.