The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality · Dominic Guilfoyle

REBELLIOUS

·32 min·2 clips

A bank robber uses a severed hand that freezes anyone who sees its light, leaving victims unaware time has passed.

This episode of The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity and Mortality continues the field mission of Team Raptor, led by Eagle, who are searching the forest on the other side of Glassway 601 for the missing museum curator. Making camp in a vast featureless forest with trees reaching the stratosphere and no water sources despite lush vegetation, Eagle and the Audio Tour Guide discuss their intelligence gap: the guide reveals that the curator was seen in this location by lockdown survivors, but also in more than a dozen other shelter locations simultaneously. This information was deliberately withheld from Eagle's mission briefing, likely to avoid the demoralizing implication that all search parties are simultaneously searching on the off-chance one is on the right trail. Eagle is not surprised; the head of retrieval had already told him privately. The guide feels embarrassed by having been manipulated into divulging. To fill the night, Eagle asks the guide to tell a museum story, and the guide narrates the exhibit of the Hand of Glory, a mummified severed hand with wicks under each fingernail, a variant of the historical magical artifact. This particular hand's abilities are twofold: when the wicks are lit, anyone who sees the light is frozen in time for exactly 5.58 minutes, unable to perceive any sensory input including the passage of time itself; and knocking three times on any lock with the hand's knuckles opens it. The story follows the hand's documented use by Sarah Lily Burnwoods, a forgettable-looking bank robber active from the 1960s through the 1970s who used it to systematically rob dozens of banks across the United States. Burnwoods would enter a bank, find a secluded spot, light the hand, and execute the robbery in the 5.58 minute window while all witnesses stood frozen, unaware that any time had passed. The practice went undetected for years because early CCTV was only watched live, and the paralysis affected the security monitors as well as in-person witnesses. The introduction of VCR technology enabled footage to be reviewed later, bypassing the hand's effect. When a newspaper published blurry CCTV footage of Burnwoods, they bought a plane ticket under the name Sarah Lily Burnwoods and hijacked the flight, demanding two hundred thousand dollars in ransom and parachutes. They escaped mid-flight at cruising altitude, with the task force commander — who understood the hand — grabbing a radio to order pilots to close their eyes before Burnwoods lit the hand and jumped. The hand was found years later in a forest below the flight path, but Burnwoods was never found, and the guide speculates the reason Burnwoods was immune to the hand and the reason they abandoned it may be the same: they were blind, and the dark glasses they wore were not protection against the light but simply eyewear for a sightless person. The episode closes with a brief but revealing behind-the-scenes scene at the museum, where the Audio Tour Guide calmly but firmly tells the head of containment that her micromanagement of the guide's communications with other departments is counterproductive, and that the guide's restraint from asserting its literal embodiment of the museum is a conscious choice the human staff should appreciate.

As heard by us

A museum guide turns a bank robbery into a deadpan catalog of the impossible.

REBELLIOUS folds a bank robbery into the Misthome Museum frame, where a robber uses a hand of glory to freeze the room long enough to reach the vault.

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Why you'd press play

You want a bank robbery told like a museum safety briefing.

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