The Order of the Occult Hand is a secret society of American journalists who slip the meaningless and telltale phrase "It was as if some occult hand had…" in print as an inside joke.
The phrase was introduced by Joseph Flanders, then a police reporter of The Charlotte News, in the summer of 1965, when he reported on a millworker named Freddie Lee Harr, who was shot by his uncle when he unexpectedly returned home in the middle of the night after a bomb-threat interrupted his night-shift work. He wrote:
It was as if some occult hand had moved pawn after pawn until they were in the right place and then - tragedy.[1][2]
— Joseph Flanders, The Charlotte News
Amused by this purple passage, in a local bar, his colleagues decided to commemorate Flanders's achievement by forming the Order of the Occult Hand.[3][4] They even showed Flanders a banner made of a bed sheet depicting a bloody hand reaching out of a purple cloud. Among the original members were: R.C. Smith, an associate editor; Stewart Spencer, then an editorial writer; John Gin, the city editor; and several others, who vowed to get the words into print as soon as possible.[3] The editors were not happy about this mischief at all and ordered copy editors to be extremely vigilant, yet the phrase kept slipping into the paper and was even smuggled into Down Beat, a jazz magazine, by Smith.[3] The News revealed this tradition of high spirits, how it started, in 1985, when it went out of circulation.[3]
Alternatively, Paul Greenberg, the Pulitzer prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, claimed that Reese Cleghorn, then an editorial writer of The Charlotte Observer, was the one who originated the Order.[5] Cleghorn denied this claim.[6] The Boston Globe once reported that the Occult Hand Club was a replacement for the Defective Busbar Club, which was open to any journalist who used the word, such as in "the cause of the fire was attributed to a defective busbar, officials said."[7]
The occult-hand phrase did not stop in the Charlotte News and Observer, but has crept onto other media.[3] The use of the phrase has spread to newspaper media around the world like "a cough in a classroom" and "a pox".[8] The Order was occasionally endangered by reckless and artless users of the phrase,[5] but it retained overall secrecy until 2004, when James Janega of the Chicago Tribune published a thorough investigation about the Order.[8] Upon exposure to the public, Greenberg made a full confession.[5]
In 2006, Greenberg announced that the Order had chosen a new secret phrase at an annual editorial writers' convention and resumed a stealth operation.[9]
Perhaps it was because Mercury is in retrograde, but it was as if an occult hand had scrambled all the communication in Rochester town offices on the very day that official business was to begin for the year.
Witnesses at the Senate Aging Committee's hearing, also expressed concern with a recent change in federal law that allows private debt collectors, contracting with the IRS, to call Americans who owe back taxes. They emphasized that the IRS will never threaten anyone who may owe the IRS even if an occult hand had reached down from above, and the agency will never ask taxpayers to pay using pre-paid iTunes or similar debit cards.