SOURCES:
"The Flayed Hand" by Guy de Maupassant
"The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant
 

DESCRIPTION: "But in the middle of the widest panel a strange thing attracted my attention. A black object stood out against a square of red velvet. I went up to it; it was a hand, a human hand. Not the clean white hand of a skeleton, but a dried black hand, with yellow nails, the muscles exposed and traces of old blood on the bones, which were cut off as clean as though it had been chopped off with an axe, near the middle of the forearm. Around the wrist, an enormous iron chain, riveted and soldered to this unclean member, fastened it to the wall by a ring, strong enough to hold an elephant in leash...." ("The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant)

NOTES: The severed hand, whether real or a ghostly thing, always tries to avenge the one who created it or find its way back to the rest of the corpse.

HISTORY: De Maupassant wrote two stories with basically the same idea. The second of the two is sometimes called "The Englishman". Seabury Quinn and Arthur Conan Doyle also used it. The theme has been filmed as The Hand (1981) starring Michael Caine, as well as that famous character "Thing' from The Addams Family. Theodore Dreiser, Eugene M. Gagliano, Anthony Lewing and Larry Marcus all wrote stories called "The Hand".

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