Order of the Occult Hand
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. == History == 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.