A TikTok influencer has explained the grisly reason why there's a floating hand embedded inside the wall of the Tower of London.
Some 2.8 million tourists visit London's iconic fortress, which was once the most secure castle in the land. But with so much to take in, as hard as it is to believe, many might have missed the gruesome body part.
The creepy severed skeletal hand has a ghoulish yellow tint and is hidden behind clouded glass in a section of the wall of the north Byward Tower, that hundreds of thousands of people may walk past unknowingly every day.
And it's at, ironically, hand height, reports MyLondon.
But there's a gruesome story behind the object, as one resident of the Tower and TikTok influencer Megan Clawson recently revealed, which dates back all the way to the grisly punishments seen in medieval times.
Influencer Megan lives in the fortress where her dad is a Beefeater.
The TikTok star rose to fame for her videos sharing the various secrets of the historic fortress and shared the story behind 'The Hand In The Wall' on her page earlier this year.
Megan described how she is by now "quite used to the gallows humour of the Yeoman Warders inside the Tower of London."
"They leave little humorous Easter Eggs all around the tower that many visitors miss," added Megan, who told her 199,000 TikTok followers, "including the hand in the wall".
Walking through the tower towards the hand in the video, she then shared the grisly reason behind why it is thought to be there.
Megan told her followers: "The story goes that once upon a time you needed a password to enter. To give the password you were required to place your hand into this spice [indicates hole in the wall] beside the North Byward tower."
However, what she described next indicates there might have been a pretty awful punishment for anyone who didn't know the word.
Megan dramatically informed her followers: "If you got the password wrong, they would chop off your hand right there and then."
William the Conqueror built the stone tower in the 1070s and has been the protector of the Crown Jewels and home to Yeoman Warders, and of course, the famous ravens that, according to legend keep the Tower secure, are looked after by a Ravenmaster.
