Phosphorus Jack, New Zealand, 1905: A Rumor With a Glowing Coat

In late July 1905, a story came out of Christchurch about a man in a mask whose coat glowed in the dark. The Christchurch Times had the details, and the Press Association wire sent them around the country within days. We read the reports through OCR text, so everything below is paraphrased.

The Christchurch scare

The wire version, printed in the Wanganui Chronicle on 5 August, places the figure in the suburbs of Woolston, Sydenham and St Albans. It describes a design on his coat lit by phosphorus or perhaps electricity, and a woman who fainted after an encounter. The papers called him “Phosphorus Jack.” The Manawatu Times version adds a cooler note: police thought the stories came from imaginative minds.

That’s the important part. The stories were about a man frightening women at night. Whether or not there was ever a prankster, women in those suburbs were afraid to walk home. No arrest was reported in the papers we found.

The cow at Korokoro

By September and October the name had travelled north, and “Phosphorus Jack” sightings were reported around the Hutt and Petone. The Hutt and Petone Chronicle did something most papers in a scare don’t: it went and looked. Its report, reprinted in the Nelson Evening Mail on 9 October as “His Appearance at the Hutt a Hoax,” found that one Korokoro sighting was an old white cow standing in the moonlight. It blamed the rest on people repeating rumors and on credulous dailies.

On 14 October the New Zealand Free Lance ran a cartoon, “The Ghost Scare,” which by its catalogue description shows a cyclist mistaken for the figure. By the end of the month, “Phosphorus Jack” had become a joke name for anything spooky in politics.

Ledger status

Marked folklore. A wire story turned into a regional scare, and the one sighting a newspaper actually investigated turned out to be a cow. A real prankster can’t be ruled out, but none was ever identified.

Image held: Papers Past marks the Free Lance cartoon “No known copyright restrictions,” but we haven’t been able to view the image to confirm and crop it, so we don’t host it here. We also don’t claim any link to the British “Spring-heeled Jack” stories, which this resembles.

Part of the Antipodes Desk and From the Archive, October 2026.

Sources

All via Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand (OCR text, paraphrased):

• Wanganui Chronicle, 5 Aug 1905, “The ‘Phosphorus Jack’” (Press Association, Christchurch, 4 Aug) — paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
• Manawatu Times, 4 Aug 1905 — paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
• Nelson Evening Mail, 9 Oct 1905, “Phosphorus Jack. His Appearance at the Hutt a Hoax” — paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
• New Zealand Free Lance, 14 Oct 1905, cartoon “The Ghost Scare” — paperspast.natlib.govt.nz