Theresa Lewis

There was a story that my mother told us. It was supposed to be a spooky story with a shock ending. Mother turned off the lights in the dining room so that the only illumination in the room was from a hallway light that filtered into the dining room. We sat tensely as our mother told the story of two men who had decided on a duel with swords to settle their long on-going dispute, as was often done in the old days. During the duel, one man had his hand severed, just before losing his life. His duelling partner had survived and had kept the severed hand as a trophy in a box on the mantel of his fireplace.

One night as the man slept, he was awakened by an eerie voice from the dark ethers that cried out in a low voice, “Give me my hand.” The man was alarmed and thought he had imagined the disembodied voice. He pulled the covers up closer to his chin. Listening for a while, but hearing nothing more, he soon fell back to sleep.

Moments later, he was once again awakened by the same eerie disembodied voice that called out in the darkness. This time, the voice was louder and sounded more menacing. The man jumped out of bed and searched the darkness for the origin of the bone-chilling voice.

He lit a candle and hurried into the parlor. He wondered if the voice had come from in there, but there was no one in the parlor, but himself. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He stood by the fireplace and quickly glanced at the box that contained the severed hand. Just as he did that, the eerie voice bellowed again, “Give me my hand!”

The man grabbed the box and tossed it forward and said, “Take it!”

At that moment, my mother would jump up and thrust her hands forward and scare the wits out of everyone. It was very effective.

Years prior to mother telling us that story, someone had given my father a silver hand ashtray. The hand with its fingers spread, projected upwards from the bowl. The spread fingers were designed to hold cigarettes, if a person wanted to rest his cigarette momentarily to do something else.

One evening, when some of our friends were over, one of them spied the silver hand ashtray sitting on a window sill in the kitchen. Somehow, in our cleaning up, it had been overlooked so it was full of cigarette butts. He seemed amused by the uniqueness of the ashtray. We told our guests that there was a story behind that ashtray. Of course, everyone wanted to know what the story was.

We set the stage by darkening the room with nothing but the hall light filtering into the kitchen. As we were telling the story, our guests were wide-eyed with anticipation. Just as we got to the end where the man says, “Take it!” before the words were spoken, the silver hand ashtray shot off the window sill, flew across the kitchen and smashed into the cupboards then fell to the floor. Everyone, including us, sat riveted to the spot in absolute terror.

No one had even touched the ashtray. We could not account for that happening at precisely that moment. Perhaps it was a poltergeist that threw it, but the timing was impeccable. We turned the kitchen light back on and cleaned up the mess. The ashtray had been ejected with such a force that the bowl of it was badly bent out of shape.

Needless to say, that story was never told again in our house. Dad kept his favourite ashtray until he died. Every time I looked at it, or cleaned it, the dents reminded me of that night so many years ago. After my father’s passing, I threw that ashtray in the garbage.

The End