"And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door" - Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven
OK, the introduction has a very tenuous connection to this item, but still I thought it ws appropriate. Take a look at this item from artist Nik Ramage. This disembodied hand seems to just be biding it's time.. tapping away.
While we might not have much use for such a prop, I still found it fascinating, if only for the mechanism itself. It is a classic example of using cams to translate rotational movement into linear movement.
If you wanted to use this mechanism in a haunt, you might use it with a grim reaper... biding his time until his next deadly appointment. You might use it to animate the legs of a spider. Or heck, just recreate the same hand as part of a mad-scientist's laboratory scene.
