The Jack the Ripper killings were not funny, nor will they ever be

Time doesn’t make murder funny, yet a number of upcoming Halloween events seem to disagree...

'Jack the Ripper' is generally believed to have been active in the Whitechapel district of London, committing five brutal murders between August and November 1888 (Getty)

Comedy is tragedy plus time, so they say. On the other hand, surely, some events will never be funny. There are not many jokes cracked about the Holocaust, for instance. How about the victims of Jack the Ripper, then? Are those women now ripe for a laugh?

Apparently so, according to The Blackpool Tower Dungeon and a small “museum” in London. Both are staging Ripper-themed Halloween events based on the Whitechapel murders, and very hilarious they find them, too. The London exhibit already caused faint disgust when it opened this summer, after submitting a planning application for a museum of women’s history and then opening instead as a “Jack the Ripper Museum”. Its own designers called it “salacious, misogynist rubbish”. At the time, its owner told the Evening Standard: “It is absolutely not celebrating the crimes of Jack the Ripper.” Last week, however, it issued a press release that asked, “how about a picture with Jack in Mitre Square together with the body of Catherine Eddowes?”

Blackpool, meanwhile, offers “a unique over-18s experience definitely not for the faint-hearted”. “If you’re looking for something fun,” it goes on, “take a journey into the mortuary to learn all about the grisly details of the Jack the Ripper Murders, before running for your life… as The Ripper attempts to claim his next victim.” One line says: “But watch your back… The Ripper might not be far behind you.” Thanks, but most women watch their backs every time they walk home alone after dark, and we don’t need a £19.95 show to remind us.

The Blackpool Tower told me their show is “not intended to be offensive and is presented very much in a historical context in The Dungeons ‘scary fun’ style”. The museum in London did not reply before going to press, which is a shame because there is so much I would like to ask. For instance, how best to pose for a selfie with the body of Catherine Eddowes, 46, a mother of three who was found with her throat cut, her face badly mutilated and “the clothes drawn up above the abdomen”, according to the police surgeon, “the intestines drawn out …”? But mostly I’d like to know if not a single person stopped to think about this at all?

I would compare the crassness of these events to the idea of launching a “Halloween Holocaust Experience”, except that even speculating about such a thing seems a step too far. So what makes this tragedy fair game? That it was more than 125 years ago? The relatively small number of victims? The fact they were all women?

Nonetheless, the Ripper and his victims were real people, and the murder of vulnerable women is not a Victorian quirk: 150 women in the UK were killed by men in 2014, according to the Femicide Census compiled by Women’s Aid. Nothing, including time, can make any of that seem like fun.

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