Hand of Glory

Have you read the Harry Potter series? If so, you might remember this magical device - a Hand of Glory-  purchased by Drako Malfoy, Harry's nemesis, at Borgin and Burkes. Drako used it to escape from the Room of Requirement after using Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder to make it impossible for anyone to see him leave the room.

Impressive? Well, there is more to it. The various powers ascribed to a Hand Of Glory include the ability to immobilize anyone who looks at it, or unlock any door it comes across. It was traditionally used by thieves, since it allowed them to see in otherwise total darkness, open locked doors, and immobilize guards. In some dark magical ceremonies, Hands of Glory were reputed to have been used as the source of illumination. Imagine my joy when I saw this artifact featured on one of my favourtie blogs,TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")  . I simply had to steal it:

Excerpts from a paragraph in "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" -

"The most notorious charm, the "thief's candle," found ready acceptance in most parts of Europe. The candle was fashioned from either an amputated finger or the fat of a human corpse, leading to the frequent mutilation of executed criminals. Favored, too, were fingers severed from the remains of stillborn infants - because they had not been baptized, their magical properties were considered more powerful. To enhance the candle's potency, the hands of dead criminals, known as Hands of Glory, were sometimes employed as candlesticks.
Not unknown were savage attacks on pregnant women whose wombs were cut open to extract their young. In 1574, Nicklauss Stuller of Aydtsfeld was convicted of this on three occasioins, for which he was "torn thrice with red-hot tongs" and executed upon the wheel... Burglars used these gruesome amulets to make certain that families remained asleep while homes were plundered... Before entering a home in 1586, a German vagabond ignited the entire hand of a dead infant, believing that the unburned fingers signified the number of persons still awake. Even in the late eighteenth century, four men were charged with unearthing the recently interred corpse of a woman and removing her fat for a thief's candle. Her husband had grown suspicious after fishermen, looking for bait, found an amputated hand along the seashore."

And this interesting bit of postulated etymology, from Wikipedia:

Etymologist W.W. Skeat reports that, while folklore has long attributed mystical powers to a dead man's hand, the specific phrase "hand of glory" is in fact a folk etymology: it derives from the French "main de gloire", a corruption of mandragore, which is to say mandrake. Skeat writes: "The identification of the hand of glory with the mandrake is clinched by the statement in Cockayne's Leechdoms, i. 245, that the mandrake 'shineth by night altogether like a lamp.'" (Cockayne in turn is quoting Pseudo-Apuleius, in a translation of a Saxon manuscript of his Herbarium.) The photo shows a specimen in the Whitby Museum.

The mummified severed human hand in Whitby Museum was discovered in the early twentieth century hidden on the wall of a thatched cottage in Castleton by a stonemason and local historian, Joseph Ford. He immediately identified it from popular stories of such objects as a "Hand of Glory". It was given to Whitby Museum in 1935 and is the only alleged Hand known to survive. 

A Hand of Glory was supposedly the carefully prepared and "pickled" right hand of a felon, cut off while the body still hung from the gallows and used by burglars to send sleepers in a house into a coma from which they were unable to wake. In one version the clenched hand is used as a candleholder for a candle incorporating human fat, but in another (consistent with the Whitby hand) the outstretched hand has its own fingers lit. In this case should one of the fingers refuse to light it is a sign that someone in the household remains awake. In either case the light cannot be extinguished by water or pinching but only by blood or "blue" (skimmed) milk - the usual method in the tales.

Stories of the use of such hands became common across Europe, from Finland to Italy and Western Ireland to Russia in the last four hundred years. At least two were current in North Yorkshire, one relating to the Spital Inn on Stainmore in 1797 and the other to the Oak Tree Inn, Leeming, supposedly in 1824. The following shorter, but typical, version comes from Northumberland:


"One dark night, when all was shut up, there came a tap at the door of a lone inn in the middle of a barren moor. The door was opened, and there stood without, shivering and shaking, a poor beggar, his rags soaked with rain, and his hands white with cold. He asked piteously for a lodging, and it was cheerfully granted him; there was not a spare bed in the house, but he could lie on the mat before the kitchen fire, and welcome.


So this was settled, and every one in the house went to bed except the cook, who from the back kitchen could see into the large room through a pane of glass let into the door. She watched the beggar, and saw him, as soon as he was left alone, draw himself up from the floor, seat himself at the table, extract from his pocket a brown withered human hand, and set it upright in the candlestick. He then anointed the fingers, and applying a match to them, they began to flame. Filled with horror, the cook rushed up the back stairs, and endeavoured to arouse her master and the men of the house. But all was in vain - they slept a charmed sleep; so in despair she hastened down again, and placed herself at her post of observation.


She saw the fingers of the hand flaming, but the thumb remained unlighted, because one inmate of the house was awake. The beggar was busy collecting the valuables around him into a large sack, and having taken all he cared for in the large room, he entered another. On this the woman ran in, and, seizing the light, tried to extinguish the flames. But this was not so easy. She poured the dregs of a beer jug over them, but they blazed up the brighter. As a last resource, she caught up a jug of milk, and dashed it over the four lambent flames, and they died out at once. Uttering a loud cry, she rushed to the door of the apartment the beggar had entered, and locked it. The whole family was aroused, and the thief easily secured and hanged."

A monster of Glamis?

I found this short entry on one of my favourite blogs so far, "Tai-wiki-widbee" - I encourage you to visit it!

I couldn't help being fascinated by this story and I  admit I shamelessly stole it to re-publish .

Excerpts from a story at the Smithsonian:

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.”.

The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret itself was lost. One version of the story holds that it was so terrible that the 13th Earl’s heir flatly refused to have it revealed to him. Yet the mystery of Glamis (pronounced “Glarms”) remains, kept alive by its association with royalty (the heir was grandfather to Elizabeth II) and by the fact that at least some members of the Bowes-Lyon family insisted it was real.


Glamis Castle is mentioned by Shakespeare—Macbeth, that most cursed of characters, was Thane of Glamis—and in 1034 the Scottish King Malcolm II died there,perhaps murdered. But the present castle was constructed only in the 15th century, around a central tower whose walls are, in places, 16 feet thick. Glamis has been the family seat of the Strathmore Earls since then, but by the late 18th century it lay largely empty, its owners preferring to live somewhere less cold and drafty, less isolated and less melancholy. I can understand why.


In their absence, Glamis was left in the care of a factor, or estate manager, and it was to this factor that a youngWalter Scott applied in 1790 to spend a night in one of its rooms. Scott became the first of several writers to note the castle’s oppressive atmosphere. “I must own,” he wrote in an account published in 1830, “as I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living and somewhat too near to the dead.” What was more, the great novelist added, Glamis was said to hide a secret room—a useful addition to any residence in 15th-century Scotland, where violence was seldom far away. Its location was known only to the Earl, his factor and his heir.

In one sense, however, the most interesting thing about Scott’s account is what it doesn’t say. The novelist wrote nothing to suggest that the castle’s hidden chamber had an occupant. Yet, within half a century of his visit, it had begun to be rumored that the room concealed an unknown captive—a prisoner who had been held there all his life.The first reports of Glamis’ unknown prisoner appear to date to the 1840s. According to a correspondent to the journal Notes & Queries, writing in 1908,

The mystery was told to the present writer some 60 years ago, when he was a boy, and it made a great impression on him. The story was, and is, that in the Castle of Glamis is a secret chamber. In this chamber is confined a monster, who is the rightful heir to the title and property, but who is so unpresentable that it is necessary to keep him out of sight and out of possession.This may sound like the plot of some Gothic novel, but believers in the theory point out that the family has dealt with some of its members in ways that outsiders might consider harsh. After the First World War, Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, both cousins of the present queen, were born mentally disabled. Both spent their lives locked away in homes and hospitals, ignored by their family...

The only detailed description emerged early in the 1960s, when the writer James Wentworth-Day spent time at Glamis while writing a history of the Bowes-Lyon family. From the then-Earl and his relatives, Wentworth-Day heard the legend that “a monster was born into the family. He was the heir—a creature fearful to behold. It was impossible to allow this deformed caricature of humanity to be seen—even by their friends.… His chest [was] an enormous barrel, hairy as a doormat, his head ran straight into his shoulders and his arms and legs were toylike.” But “however warped and twisted his body, the child had to be reared to manhood,” kept safe and occasionally exercised. That job was given to the factor (and I do wonder how they persuade him to take on this job).

More at the Smithsonian link, and at the Charles Fort Institute blog:

Yet another visitor to Glamis was Virginia Gabriel, a singer who, according to her niece, returned from a long stay in 1870 “full of the mysteries, which she said had greatly increased since the death of the previous owner.” It is to this visit that we owe a strange reminiscence of the Glamis factor, Andrew Ralston—a dour, hard-headed man who, Gabriel reported, refused ever to spend a night in the castle. During her stay, a sudden snowstorm one evening blanketed the estate with drifts several feet deep. The Earl begged Ralston to take a spare room, but the factor refused, instead rousing every servant in the house to have them dig a path to his home a mile away. Gabriel also recorded an ominous conversation that she had with the Earl’s wife:

Lady Strathmore once confessed to Mr Ralston her great anxiety to unravel the mystery. He looked earnestly at her and said very gravely: ‘Lady Strathmore, it is fortunate that you do not know it, and can never know it, for if you did, you would not be a happy woman.’ Such a speech from such a man is certainly uncanny.

The mystery that was spoken of in hushed terms during the nineteenth century was generally a different one, for though the existence of a hidden room with the castle walls was widely rumoured, even then, it was then believed to conceal not a living creature, but rather the grisly evidence of an ancient crime. According to this now mostly forgotten portion of the legend, a large party of Ogilvies, members of a rival clan, once sought sanctuary from their enemies at Glamis, only to be betrayed and murdered there. In this version of the castle’s story, the fugitive Ogilvies were shown into the hidden chamber, then barricaded in and left to starve. Their skeletons, still scattered on the floor, were the secret that the Lyons family was so anxious to conceal...

Tell me, what version of events seems to be more persuading to you? Have you heard about this "monster" before? Did it really exist in your opinion? Was it a source of "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale? 

Image: Glamis Castle in Scotland from Morris's Country Seats (1880).