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.
[1][2]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.
"[7] The occult-hand phrase did not stop in the Charlotte News and Observer, but has crept onto other media.
[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.