Horror Stories(Creepypasta)

77❇Grandpa's Hand

I remember the first time I ever saw Grandpa’s hand…I was a little kid at the time, and I didn’t know the story behind it. Nobody did, as I found out. It was…just a skeleton hand he’d picked up somewhere.

When I first saw it, of course, I was frightened. I’d never seen a skeleton before, at least not in person. And this was a human hand, just sitting in a box among all of our old stuff. When I’d asked my mom about it, she told me it was Grandpa’s. I, of course, being a little kid, was horrified, assuming she meant it had actually been part of Grandpa’s body. Why would we keep part of Grandpa?

Grandpa Brown…he was on my mom’s side of the family. He died long before I was even born. I’d been told this before, so it was easy for me to think it was actually his bony old hand sitting in that box.

“No, no, honey,” my mom exclaimed, as I panicked like any ordinary child would. “It’s not actually his hand. He just found it someplace and brought it home with him.”

Naturally, I was confused. Why would anybody just…pick up an old hand and take it home? I asked this, and my mom shrugged.

“He just thought it was cool,” she replied casually. I wrinkled up my little nose, put off by the thought of somebody thinking it would be cool to keep someone else’s bones around their house.

As I grew, I stopped worrying about the hand so much. It became a distant thought in the back of my head, and as the days and months and years went by, I actually started to think it was kind of cool, too. Just something that comes with age, I guess.

After a while, we started showing it off. We kept it in a safe place, of course – it was old, and only held together by wires, and it was already missing a thumb bone. I’d always wondered why that one bone was missing, but nobody else seemed to know, either. My parents always told me it was just missing when Grandpa had found it. I would think sometimes, about what would cause someone to lose just one little bone from their hand. I eventually stopped worrying about it; it probably just got separated from the rest of the bones in the hand at some point. Washed away by water or blown off into the distance by wind, probably. Or maybe it was still buried, deep in the ground around where Grandpa had originally found the hand. In any case, it wasn’t here. It was part of what made the hand cool, though. It gave it character, and made it different and interesting.

As I began to find it cool, I started getting the same weird kick out of telling people who asked about it that it was my grandpa’s hand. I finally understood, as a teenager, why my parents and sister always said it that way when company would see it and ask about it. It was silly, but it was a fun, harmless way to mess with people the first time they’d come over and see the hand hanging up on a wall or sitting on a shelf.

“Ugh…where’d that hand come from?” They’d ask. And one of us would always grin and say…

“Oh, that? That’s our Grandpa’s hand.”

Of course, that would get weird looks, and startled “are you serious??” responses. Then the family would share a laugh and one of us would explain that it was just one he’d discovered one day and decided to keep. Everyone else started thinking it was cool, too.

There was one thing, though…I always got a weird feeling around the hand. It was kind of creepy, having a human hand around, and I’d think back to when I was a kid and I first saw it. I didn’t like that it was always out in the open, which was why I was secretly glad when my older sister decided to make a shadow box for us to keep it in. It was a nice box, too – black, velveteen fabric lining the back, clear, sturdy glass, nice, dark-stained wood, and even a little golden latch to keep it closed up so the hand wouldn’t get dusty. I especially liked the fact that it had a latch; something about being able to make sure the box stayed closed made me feel…more comfortable. My only regret, especially after what would happen down the road, is that it never had a lock on it.