The Addams Family and its close competitor, The Munsters, were shows based on Horror clichés. By 1965 the idea of a vampire, a Frankenstein monster, a werewolf, were all laughable. We had become too sophisticated to take the classics of the Victorian Age (1818 to 1897 in particular) seriously. Among the Addams was the severed hand known as Thing. This “pet” of the family was usually shown coming out of a box but in the film version received a full CGI severed look. Thing, like all the characters, had a long, story-filled tradition that qualifies it for status among the world’s most famous monsters.
Handy Horrors!
Tales of evil hands begin somewhere between 1800 to 1820 with the anonymous Gothic tale, “The Spectre Hand”. The plot involves a tourist in Norway who gets lost in the wilds and meets an old comrade, Carl Holberg, one who had disappeared in disgrace. The ex-officer looks much older than he should. He tells his tale of how he came to be hiding in the Norwegian mountains: during a battle he had been struck unconscious by a bullet wound to the back of the head. While lying on the battlefield he dreamed of a beautiful woman named Thyra. Upon waking he finds he had fallen next to a crypt where a woman of that name was recently buried. Carl returns to his fiancee, a woman he has grown lukewarm about, but whenever he nears her he can feel Thyra’s phantom hand on his. He flees to the wilds to dwell in a kind of living torment. In this tale, the hand is not seen but felt like Mary Elizabeth Bradden’s haunter in “The Cold Embrace” and “Eveline’s Visitant” four decades later.
The first author to put their name on a hand tale is William Hauff’s “The Severed Hand”. It appeared in The Caravan, 1826 and was part of the influential collection Tales From the German (1844) that also included stories by E. T. A. Hoffman and Friedrich Schiller as well as others. The story is a long narrative about an Arab doctor and trader who sets up shop in Italy after several adventures. In Florence he becomes involved with a mysterious figure in a crimson robe. The narrator falls into a trap where he murders Bianca, the beauty of the city and is sentenced to have his left hand removed as punishment. He is rescued and receives a thousand gold pieces every year but can’t forget Bianca’s terror-stricken face. No severed hands are int he tale despite the title. Hauff’s tale has the feel of a legend or fairy tale and this shouldn’t be surprising as he wrote many famous marchen, securing his reputation as a writer.
Frightening Phalanges!
In Ireland, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was refining the elements of the Gothic to form what would become the standard form of the supernatural tale. One of his novels was The House by the Churchyard and within that novel “The Narrative of a Ghost Hand” (Dublin University Magazine 1861). Le Fanu’s hand is not necessarily cut off at the wrist, the rest of the ghost remains unseen except in a dreamy memory where he is described as “a vision of a certain gentleman, fat and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced clothes, and every feature and line of whose sensual, benignant, and unwholesome face, was minutely engraven upon his memory…” Le Fanu establishes many of the features of the hand story with half-glimpsed fingers and knuckled tapping at windows and pounding on doors, wanting to get in. Ultimately there is no cure for the ghostly hand outside of tearing down the house it dwells in.
The French author Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) may have come up with the idea entirely separately from Le Fanu, working in another language in another country. Still the English have their influence on him, for as a young man de Maupassant was said to have attempted to rescue a friend of the poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) from drowning. Though the man was saved by others, it endeared the Frenchman to the travelers. The Englishman showed de Maupassant a mummified hand that he remembered and immortalized in “The Hand” (1875) which is also known as “The Englishman” and again in “The Flayed Hand” (Galois, 1882).
The first story, “The Hand” concerns a judge, M. Bermutier, who is retelling an experience he had in Corsica. There he encountered an Englishman named Sir John Rowell, a world-traveled sportsman who shows the judge his guns and weapons as well as a severed hand he keeps on a chain. Sir John keeps three loaded pistols in the room with the severed appendage and swears it is evil and wants revenge. He briefly states that it came from America. Later Rowell is found dead, strangled. The hand is gone though the judge imagines he sees it lurking about his place. In the end it is found on the grave of the dead Rowell. The judge believes the death is a Corsican vendetta but leaves it to the listeners to draw their own conclusions.
“The Flayed Hand”, the second story shows de Maupassant’s growth as a writer, filling in more details and taking his time with the tale. This time it is a group of young college friends who are drinking. One of their number (which includes one Englishman), Pierre shows the rest a severed hand which he ties to his doorbell rope as a joke. When the landlord complains he moves it to the bell-pull inside his flat. The next day he is found near to death, strangled so badly that the fingers left marks like bullet holes. His servant recounts how his bell had rung loudly in the night, before the servant and two policemen break in and find Pierre though no sign of the severed hand. Later when Pierre regains consciousness he is taken to an asylum for his reason is gone. He believes a ghost is stalking him. After he dies, his body is taken home to Normandy where he is to be buried. While the men are digging his grave they discover another coffin, inside which is a very large corpse missing one hand. The severed limb is also found. Pierre is buried elsewhere and the narrator pays the local curate to recite prayers over the mysterious coffin.
Less well known was “The Skeleton Hand” by Agnes Macleod, who published her story in Blackwood’s Magazine, a publication that used many horror tales to drive up its subscription list. The story has two beautiful sisters named Rutson in the fishing village of Jodziel. Captain Sinclair, a villain of the pressgang, wants Anne, the younger sister as his bride. Anne clearly refuses. Sinclair declares that no one will marry her if he doesn’t.
Anne, seeking refuge stays with an aunt in London and falling under the attention of her cousin, the soldier, Maurice Travers. The two fall for each other and are to be married. No one worries about Sinclair since he has sailed for the West Indies. The day of the wedding, Anne is kidnapped from the garden. Her body is not found, only her roses. The elder sister and her maid set a bed for Anne and wait thirty years for her to return. One night some phantom comes to the bed and the older sister dies. A collapsing cliff reveals Anne’s skeleton, and the two women are buried together.
Anne’s skeletal hand is not included in the coffin. The maid, Patty, has it placed in a glass case in the Blue Dragon pub. The night Sinclair returns to Jodziel he imagines the hand attacking him. He dies. The skeleton fingers in the case are covered in blood.
Fake Fists
Better known than Macleod was Arthur Conan Doyle who penned several horror tales besides Sherlock Holmes stories. One of these was “The Brown Hand” (The Strand, May 1899) about a Dr. Hardacre who lays a ghost with a missing hand. In America, Edith Wharton wrote “The House of the Dead Hand” (The Atlantic, August 1, 1904). The title refers to a marble hand over the doorway. It doesn’t kill anyone or anything cool. Sigh. Another dud is Australian Bernard Capes’ tale “The Marble Hands” from The Fabulists, 1915. Suggestive titles aren’t enough. Dracula‘s author, Bram Stoker wrote a tale of hands in “A Dream of Red Hands” which Stoker’s widow published in his posthumous Dracula’s Guest, 1914. This story doesn’t feature an actual severed limb, but a psychic vision of the hands of a strangler. These stories are not-quite severed hand stories.
Another fake of another sort was “The Widow’s Hand” (The Popular Magazine, August 1920) by Edison Marshall. This tale is that species of ghost story that M. R. James disliked, an explained Horror. Homer Gatlin has returned from the jungles of Burma with a treasure. The other members of The Wanderer’s Club all gather around to see the man uncover his prize. It is the severed hand of a woman that clutches a knife. Gatlin has the lights turned off, having been told by the evil little man who sold him the thing, that is when it does something interesting. There is the sound of dry fingers moving then a metallic dragging noise and then a gasp. When the lights are turned back on, Gatlin is found stabbed and the hand gone.
The initial reaction is to assume the hand is a du Maupassant-like killer. Sir Howard Fells, Gatlin’s greatest rival, takes command. He has two members who are doctors look at the fallen man. An ambulance is summoned for Gatlin still lives. Then Sir Howard has everyone tell where they were and what they did. Only two suspects remain, for Fells believes this is murder not magic. The first suspect is a visitor who did not know Gatlin. The other is Sir Howard himself.
The room is searched for the hand but not found. At this time Wung Tu, the club’s servant, finds the hand on the fire escape, where no one thought to look. Examining the hand, all becomes clear. The hand is clutching a metal tube. The thing had been a spring-loaded killing trap that Gatlin accidentally sprang on himself. The owner is expected to survive his stabbing and the hand will join the other hideous relics at the Wanderer’s Club.
“The Hand” by Theodore Dreiser appeared in Munsey’s, May 1919 but was reprinted in Ghost Stories, June 1929. It has two gold miners striking it rich before on of them dies. Davidson finds his partner Mersereau a liability so he clubs him over the head. Before Mersereau dies, he reaches a desperate, hateful hand at Davidson. this impression haunts the killer. Davidson buries the body well and returns to civilization.
After a trip South, Davidson becomes sure he is being haunted by Mersereau. A water stain on the ceiling of a shack is an accusing portent. A spiritualist tells Davidson how ghostly spirits surround the weak, urging them to do evil. After this the man believes he can hear Mersereau’s voice taunting him. Loud bangs and crazy talk make Davidson place himself in an asylum. The doctors believe he suffers from tuberculosis of the throat. Davidson says the spirits make his food taste terrible. He finally dies, claiming that each night the spirits grow stronger and stronger, trying to choke him. The doctors looking at his dead body disregard all his claims.
The effect Dreiser is going for is something akin to Poe’s “The Telltale Heart”. Is it real? You decide. The author never tips his hand either way. Either Davidson died of disease or spirits choked him with a ghostly hand.
Classic Killer!
Perhaps the most important tale to mention is “The Beast With Five Fingers” by W. F. Harvey (1928) which was made into a film in 1948. It is this movie that directly inspired Thing’s inclusion in The Addams Family. The story begins with Adrian Borlsover and his nephew, Eustace. While at rest, the dying uncle’s right hand seems to take on a life of its own, writing automatic notes while Adrian sleeps. The hand promises Eustace they will be together once the uncle has died.
Eustace lives the life of a pleasure-seeking bachelor. His companion is Saunders, a reprobate of some reputation. When his inheritance comes after Adrian’s death, Eustace inherits all of the Borlsolver library and a box containing some kind of animal. This proves to be a severed human hand. Adrian’s will had been suddenly changed near the end, saying that his body was to be embalmed and the hand sent to Eustace.
About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor , was a man’s hand. Eustace stared at it in utter amazement. It was moving quickly in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crablike motion to the whole.
The fluttering thing gets loose. Adrian traps it between some books. He places it in the box then in a desk. He goes on holiday with Saunders, only to find his cook is quitting. Once home he finds out that the butler opened the desk, breaking the lock, as instructed by a note he found on the floor. The hand has been terrorizing the staff, unnerving the cook. Eustace realizes the hand wrote the note.
The hand plagues him over and over. The hand attacks and kills Peter the parrot, a pet who like the hand gets loose for periods at a time. One time Eustace locks the limb in the safe for six months, but burglars break in and free it. Eustace and Saunders go on holiday only to find the hand hiding in a glove.
As the limb ages, it changes:
Then he went with the hand to the fire. There was a ragged gash across the back, where the bird’s beak had torn it, but no blood oozed from the wound. He noted with disgust that the nails had grown long and discolored.
In the end, Eustace barricades himself in a room, with windows shut all through the hottest of summer days. The hand is getting weaker and weaker. It must attack soon or wither away. On the morrow, the two men plan to leave without notice, without luggage and be free of the hand. But they have forgotten one point of access: the chimney in Saunders’ room.
When they remember they hurry to start a fire in the grate. Eustace stuffs a sheet up the flue which in turns sets the room on fire. Saunders runs for help but… Harvey doesn’t describe the actual death scene but we can imagine the severed hand strangling Borlsover to death. Instead, he cuts to the future, Saunders fallen on hard times, meeting up with the old butler, a man of down-to-earth beliefs. The man searches for a natural animal with a hand-like shape. He will never find it.
Harvey’s tale was filmed in black and white in 1946, starring Peter Lorre. (Oliver Stone remade it in 1981as The Hand, starring Michael Caine.) Lorre’s film most likely did not inspire Charles Addams to create “The Thing” for his ghoulish cartoons but when they were turned into the 1964-1966 television show Thing became a disembodied appendage in the tradition of the Peter Lorre film. The show was remade several times both in film and on television and included the popular severed hand.
Pulp Pugilists
The Pulps had their share of severed limbs with “The Hand” (Weird Tales, May-June-July 1924) by H. Francis Caskey in which a man observe a weird experiment with surgery and a hand, only to learn he has fallen prey to fakirs.
“The Avenging Hand” (Weird Tales, February 1926) by Roy Wallace Davis has a man encounter a race of hairy brutes on the island of Corda. He kills all but one of the creatures but escapes only to be mysteriously strangled in his bed by a hairy hand. Classic end scene with a guy strangled in his bed.
“The Dead Hand” by Seabury Quinn (Weird Tales, May 1926). This tale has a woman scared to death by an ambulatory hand. The severed limb also steals her jewels. Later the hand steals an expensive cup. The ridiculous French detective with his silly outbursts finds the hand and has the men who were robbed identify it.
The hand belongs to a dead thief by the name of Katherine O’Brien. She had been the assistant of a hypnotist by the name of Dr. Mysterio, who recently moved to Harrisonville. De Grandin and his Lestrade, Costello, go to the man’s house and find the stolen property. While in jail, Mysterio tells the hand to “Kill the Frenchman!” De Grandin has a desperate fight with the killer hand but destroys it with a scalpel. Quinn has added little to the already established canon with the exception of having someone command the phantom limb.
“The Parasitic Hand” by R. Anthony (Antony Rud) from Weird Tales, November 1926 has a different sort of severed hand. It is attached. But not where you’d think. Like all severed hands, this one has only one objective: to kill. In the finale they find Pendleton dead with grooves in his chest. These fit the fingers of the parasitic hand to a glove!
Robert E. Howard had a killer skeleton in the Solomon Kane story “Rattle of Bones” (Weird Tales, June 1929) but did the hand thing in “The Right Hand of Doom” (written 1926-28 but not published until decades later). When John Redly betrays a sorcerer to the soldiers, his fate is sealed:
On the sill squatted what looked like a huge spider, and as Kane watched, it dropped to the floor and began to crawl toward the bed. The thing was broad and hairy and dark, and Kane noted that it had left a stain on the window sill. It moved on five thick and curiously jointed legs and altogether had such an eery appearance about it, that Kane was spellbound for the moment. Now it had reached Redly’s bed and clambered up the bedstead in a strange clumsy sort of manner.
“The Return of the Sorcerer” by Clark Ashton Smith (Strange Tales, September 1931) goes a little further than most. A rival kills the Mythos sorcerer, Helman Carnaby, and cuts his body into pieces. The pieces, including the hands come back for vengeance.
“The Crawling Corpse” by Eli Colter (Strange Stories, December 1939) was written by a very popular writer of Westerns. Colter would pen a Horror every so often. This one features a mad doctor on a remote island who likes to do surgical experiments on his guests. Unlike most of these tales, the hands move with Science not sorcery (despite what that cover say!)
“The Gipsy’s Hand” by Alonzo Deen Cole (Weird Tales, May 1942) was based on a script from the Radio show, Witch’s Tale. (The show used the idea more than once with “Four Fingers and a Thumb” being another one.) A doctor operates on a famous pianist named Gagino. This results in the man’s death. His mother, a gipsy witch, sends the severed hand to the doctor and his wife on holiday. You know what happens next….
Conclusion
Modern writers haven’t given up on the killer hand, despite its becoming a horror cliche. Clive Barker outdoes everybody in 1985 with “The Body Politic” from The Books of Blood 4, where everybody’s hands disconnect and revolt. The ultimate statement on animated hands…
