Jack the Ripper Walks

You should do it. It might help you some with your forums, after all. Good luck with it and all.

There's a tour in Augustine, Florida. Augustine is the oldest city, possibly in the world as far as I know, but the oldest city most definitely in the US itself. It has a lot of history, and even a tour for ghost-seeing. I wanted to try it but it was kind of expensive.

Wish i could do that, it would be vey interesting. You are pretty lucky in the UK, they have alot of stuff like that! I hear there are quite a few good stay overs available in haunted houses. I would be in for one of those!

this will be cool and staying in the haunted house would be a freakout!

Its up to you really, but i would go on the tour! In GCSE history we are doing Crime and Punishment for our coursework and i cant wait to get onto Jack the ripper i find it very interesting! I think that people now think someone in the royal family was the ripper? Something along the lines of that lol.

Wow - really? I guess I just take it for granted that everyone knows who he is... Maybe it's just well-known in certain parts of the world?

Anyway, here's some info that I stole from Wikipedia

Jack the Ripper, alias given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of London, England in the autumn of 1888. The name is taken from a letter sent to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer.

The victims were women allegedly earning income as prostitutes. The murders were perpetrated in public or semi-public places at night or towards the early morning. The victim's throat was cut, after which the body was mutilated. Theories suggest the victims were first strangled in order to silence them, which also explained the reported lack of blood at the crime scenes. The removal of internal organs from three of the victims led some officials at the time of the murders to propose that the killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge.

Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer owing to the savagery of the attacks and the failure of the police in their attempts to capture the murderer, sometimes missing him at the crime scenes by mere minutes.

Due to the lack of a confirmed identity for the killer, the legends surrounding the murders have become a combination of genuine historical research, folklore and exploitation. Over the years, many authors, historians, and amateur detectives have proposed theories regarding the identity (or identities) of the killer and his victims.

During the mid-1800s, England experienced a rapid influx of primarily Irish immigrants, swelling the populations of both the largely poor English countryside and England's major cities. From 1882 onwards, Jewish refugees escaping the pogroms in tsarist Russia and eastern Europe added to the overcrowding and the already worsening work and housing conditions.[5] London, and in particular the East End and the civil parish of Whitechapel, became increasingly overcrowded resulting in the development of a massive economic underclass. This endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution. And in October 1888 the London Metropolitan Police estimated that there were 1,200 prostitutes "of very low class" resident in Whitechapel and about sixty-two brothels.[7] The economic problems were accompanied by a steady rise in social tensions. Between 1886 and 1889 demonstrations by the hungry and unemployed were a permanent feature of London policing.[5]

The majority of murders, and those most often attributed to "Jack the Ripper", all occurred in the latter half of 1888, though the series of brutal killings in Whitechapel persisted at least until 1891. A number of the murders entailed extremely gruesome acts, such as mutilation and evisceration, which were widely reported in the media. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October, when a series of extremely disturbing letters were received by various media outlets and Scotland Yard, purporting to take responsibility for some or all of the murders. One letter, received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, included a preserved human kidney. Due in large part to the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and to media treatment of the events, the public increasingly came to believe in a single serial killer and rapist terrorizing the residents of Whitechapel, nicknamed "Jack the Ripper" after the signature on a postcard received by the Central News Agency. Although the investigation was unable to conclusively connect the later killings to the murders of 1888, the legend of Jack the Ripper solidified.

The files kept by the Metropolitan police show that the investigation begun in 1888 eventually came to encompass eleven separate murders stretching from April 3, 1888, until February 13, 1891, known in the police docket as "the Whitechapel Murders." [8] In addition, at least seven other murders and violent attacks have been connected with Jack the Ripper by various authors and historians. Among the eleven murders actively investigated by the police, five are almost universally agreed upon as having been the work of a single serial killer. These are known collectively as the canonical five victims:

• Mary Ann Nichols (maiden name Mary Ann Walker, nicknamed "Polly"), born c. August 26, 1845, and killed on Friday, August 31, 1888. She was 43 at the time of her death. Nichols' body was discovered at about 3:40 in the morning on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck's Row (since renamed Durward Street), a back street in Whitechapel two hundred yards from the London Hospital.
  
  
• Annie Chapman (maiden name Eliza Ann Smith, nicknamed "Dark Annie"), born c. September 1841 and killed on Saturday, September 8, 1888. Chapman's body was discovered about 6:00 in the morning lying on the ground near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. She was forty-seven years old, in poor health and destitute at the time of her death.
  
  
• Elizabeth Stride (maiden name Elisabeth Gustafsdotter, nicknamed "Long Liz"), born c. November 27, 1843 in Sweden, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888. Stride's body was discovered close to 1:00 in the morning, lying on the ground in Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street (since renamed Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. She was forty-four years old when she died.
  
  
• Catherine Eddowes (used the aliases "Kate Conway" and "Mary Ann Kelly," from the surnames of her two common-law husbands Thomas Conway and John Kelly), born c. April 14, 1842, and killed on Sunday, September 30, 1888, on the same day as the previous victim, Elizabeth Stride. She was forty-six years old when she died. Ripperologists refer to this circumstance as the "double event." Her body was found in Mitre Square, in the City of London. Mutilation of Eddowes' body and the abstraction of her left kidney and part of her womb by her murderer bore the signature of a 'Jack the Ripper' killing.
  
  
• Mary Jane Kelly (called herself "Marie Jeanette Kelly" after a trip to Paris, nicknamed "Ginger"), reportedly born c. 1863 either the city of Limerick or County Limerick, Munster, Ireland and killed on Friday, November 9, 1888. She was about twenty-five years old when she was killed. Kelly's gruesomely mutilated body was discovered shortly after 10:45 a.m. lying on the bed in the single room where she lived at 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields. This location is now a service road for offices and an NCP car park.
  

The authority of this list rests on a number of authors' opinions but, historically, these have mainly been based on the report from Dr.Thomas Bond to Assistant Commissioner Sir Dr. Robert Anderson, and the private notes from 1894, of Sir Melville Macnaghten, Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service Criminal Investigation Department.[5] Macnaghten did not join the force until the year after the murders, and his memorandum, that came to light in 1959, has been found to contain serious errors of fact about possible suspects. There is considerable disagreement as to the value of Bond's and Macnaghten's assessment of the number of victims. Some researchers have even posited that the series may not have been the work of a single murderer, but of an unknown number of killers acting independently. Authors Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow argue that the 'canonical five' is a "Ripper myth" and that the probable number of victims could range between three (Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes) and six (the previous three plus Stride, Kelly and Tabram) or even more. Bond's and Macnaghten's view of the case was not necessarily shared by the investigating officers (such as Inspector Frederick Abberline).[10]

Except for Stride (whose attack may have been interrupted), mutilations of the canonical five victims became continuously more severe as the series of murders proceeded. Nichols and Stride were not missing any organs, but Chapman's uterus was taken, and Eddowes had her uterus and a kidney carried away and her face mutilated. While only Kelly's heart was missing from her crime scene, many of her internal organs were removed and left in her room.

The 'canonical five' murders were generally perpetrated in the dark of night, on or close to a weekend, in a secluded site to which the public could gain access, and on a pattern of dates either at the end of a month or a week or so after. Yet every case differed from this pattern in some manner. Besides the differences already mentioned, Eddowes was the only victim killed within the City of London, though close to the boundary between the City and the metropolis. Nichols was the only victim to be found on an open street, albeit a dark and deserted one. Many sources state that Chapman was killed after the sun had started to rise, though that was not the opinion of the police or the doctors who examined the body.[11] Kelly's murder ended a six-week period of inactivity for the murderer. (A week elapsed between the Nichols and Chapman murders, and three between Chapman and the "double event.")

The large number of horrific attacks against women during this era adds some uncertainty as to exactly how many victims were killed by the same man. Most experts point to deep throat slashes, mutilations to the victim's abdomen and genital area, removal of internal organs and progressive facial mutilations as the distinctive features of Jack the Ripper's modus operandi.

More info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_ripper

Jack the Ripper was also the inspiration for the film "From Hell" which starred Johnny Depp.

Not yet - but I'm still planning to.... and I'm planning to wear my top hat while I'm there! haha