I came across these photos a few weeks ago and had to laugh. I'd forgotten all about this Halloween prank.
When I was a manuscripts archivist, I was put in charge of my institution's artifacts collection. For a history geek like me, it was terribly fun. We had some bizarre artifacts. In the early years of the pre-Civil War organization, it tended to collect anything old or interesting rather than sticking to a scholarly or topic-based collection plan. Some old gent would find a weird object while traveling the world and soon donate it.
Trying to sort out the records for over a century and a half of artifacts was dizzying. There were many times that I found records for the organization acquiring something a century before but then not being able to find the object in question. One such artifact was a mummy's hand. There was no record of it being sold or donated elsewhere, yet it hadn't been seen in decades. Everybody on staff was intrigued and periodically it would come up in conversations, folks wondering what became of it. Hmmm.
It was too good to resist. One October I tracked down a library book with life size images of the bones in the human hand. I cut wooden dowels to fit the finger bones and then screwed them together using small hardware loops/eyes. I screwed the wrist portion of the hand to a small board and glued it into the bottom of a shallow cardboard box. I ran fishing line up the "bones" and then out the corner of the box. Next, I covered the bones with brown Fimo clay. I used cream and brown acrylic paint to make some Lee Press On fake fingernails look creepy and then pressed them into the Fimo. For a last step, I dyed some cheesecloth with tea to make it look old and also splashed some tea stains on cream-colored tissue paper to nestle around the hand. It looked pretty good, if I say so myself -- dessicated, wrinkly, and gaunt. But my favorite part was that I could pull on the transparent strings coming out the bottom of the box to suddenly make the hand move and draw up.
On Halloween, I sneaked the box into work, waited about an hour, and then excitedly "found" the missing mummy's hand in the artifacts storage area. I took it around the building to show folks and would wait until they were quietly leaning over for close scrutiny before pulling on strings to make the mummy hand move. The shrieks were worth all the work.
All good fun comes to an end. Time moved on and everybody had seen my creation. What to do with it? When I left the organization for another job, I quietly stashed the box in a storage area. To this day, I have no idea if anybody else found it or not. I can only imagine somebody years later pulling out the unmarked box and finding the creepy thing inside. I hope it earned a few more shrieks.
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