Scary alien hand in real estate listing photo?

What kind of thing is holding the door open in this photo of a residence for sale in Finland? (Via Lovely Listing)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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davearter

I used to live on the next road over, I did always wonder what the strange creatures I saw after dark were…
ndollak

E.T. sell home.
Anonymous

The hand probably belongs to the lovely old lady who is subletting the room in her apartment, just like #63 pointed out. That means you would bump into your creepily discolored landlady every single day.
Anonymous

#61… that would actually be the correct spelling. In Finnish, the possessive of “Sibelius” is “Sibeliuksen”, and “katu” means street. So it’s Sibelius’ street.
Bloodboiler

The first commenter is right.
Nothing to see here.
All Finns have hands like that.
Anonymous

I think its a fake. Someone trying to make fool

Rahul, India
Anonymous

um… somebody (a human) with their hand around a doorknob?

Thumb at the bottom, index in the middle and the rest of the fingers curled around the top of the knob?

Am I alone in not seeing anything at all unusual here?
Anonymous

E.T.!!!
Anonymous

Oxymoronatron will save us with their robots.
alowishus

Kuato!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_6r3mWIfJw
Anonymous

i think this is just what the people of finland look like :)
Maurice Reeves

“So why are you selling?”

“Well, living on Earth’s been fun, but it’s about to implode on itself soon enough, I better sell my place and get the hell out of here.”
coop

Humm, maybe one of the members of Lordi?

Eurovision winners 2006

http://lordi.fi/
Anonymous

#54 Well, apart from the fact that you’re supposed to buy your own damn curtains and wall decorations, it’s true that apartments here in Finland are pretty much like this: very white. It’s really freakin’ boring.

#57 Did you notice that this is an ad for someone subletting _a room_ in their apartment.
Anonymous

dude with a deformed hand, duh
dculberson

Anon1, I thought the same thing. Just an odd position to the person’s hand. The human hand is very flexible and can look really weird if the photo is taken at an inopportune time.

(One more reason to keep body parts out of photos of house listings!!)
Anonymous

Doesn’t look human to me.

And if you look closely at the tree leaves outside, there are two faces.

eek!!
Fenchurch

Django Reinhardt!?
Anonymous

That’s Sven the concierge, who blew off some of his fingers while dynamite fishing one drunken New Year’s Eve.
Anonymous

That’s a hoof.
Anonymous

The Brazilian creature perhaps? Oh, and how about this: my captcha for this post is”urethras 45-year-old”
sgs

Thing?
Mark Frauenfelder

#1 and #5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ-uV72pQKI
zanbowser

MANBEARPIG
MomentEye

forced perspective…
http://digital-photography-school.com/forced-perspective

I reckon it’s a gecko on the wall much closer to the camera than expected
Ratdog

One of the advantages/disadvantages to this house is the never-ending X-Files soundtrack in the background.
Anonymous

Joshua?

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=c9V&resnum=0&q=understanding+joshua&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=Je-3St_FLoX0Mfza3doO&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4
beboman

Huuh????
gATO

Not only the alien hand, but did you see that glowing orb by the window?!? OMG, there’s all kinds of weird going on there!!!
Anonymous

That’s my uncle
Anonymous

Definately Nosferatu.
mr_josh

Way to ruin it, first poster (and good eye…)
Antinous / Moderator

Torgo: There is nothing to fear, madam. The Master likes you. Nothing will happen to you. He likes you.

Margaret: Likes me? I thought you said he was dead.

Torgo: Dead? No, madam. Not dead the way you know it. He is with us always. Not dead the way you know it. He is with us always.
Anonymous

burn victim/real estate agent
GuabaMan

Looks like a human hand only index an thumb showing, the rest is something flesh coloured behind the hand, an ocarina maybe, the doornob is not round is more like a lever (as seen in the other photo)
Anonymous

In the white room,
with no curtains,
at the station

weird pink hand-thing
reaching back in
to frighten Boingers
Nelson.C

I’d've said LIONBEARPIG, myself. There’s more than a hint of Parsley the Lion gone bad, now I look.
Anonymous

Someone who has lost a finger?
Nelson.C

The hand on the door handle looks okay to me, but now I look at the window, the vegetation on the right looks like an illustration from Where the Wild Things Are, with its green arms reaching out.
Anonymous

not only that, but look at the drawers in that drawer thing. There’s something going on.
IronEdithKidd

Perhaps sork can answer the following:
Do you not have pigments of any sort in Finland with which to decorate, say, a room?

No paint color, no window coverings, no wall decoration, no damned color at all.

In short, the photo looks too much like a room with recently removed wall padding.
grimshaw

It’s a happy mutant…
Antinous / Moderator

â™« Realtors have only three big thumbs â™«
wellsoliver

That’s what the Finnish people look like.
Hirsty

If they shot it, they gotta eat it.
muteboy

Pareidolia?
Godfree

Who cares about the human hand? Swamp Thing is trying to get in the window!
Anonymous

Firstly, it just looks like a hand at a strange angle.

Secondly, the only other option is that it’s a person with some kind of deformity in their hand. I’m sure they’d just *love* to read this blog entry, beginning “What kind of _thing_ is holding the door open…” if that’s the case.
Anonymous

Hand with pink rubber gloves used for cleaning.
Raj

It’s clearly the hand of The Count from Sesame Street.
CLAVDIVS

#30: It’s concealing the back leg of the dresser. It’s a door next to a wall corner.
Anonymous

I think the best thing to do is panic, yep, lets all panic. Ready steady, 1, 2, 3, go. rah! help, its a hand or is it?
Phikus

NOT the weirdest thing I have seen in a real-estate listing.

Also, the “thumb” points to “five o’clock” in the lyrics, which is another clue that Paul is dead… somehow.
GauchoAmigo

It’s a streetlight.
arkizzle / Moderator

Anonymous1

You have met humans, right?
Anonymous

It does look like a human hand… though the colour makes me think WTF…
Xenu

It’s a weather balloon.
Dragonflye

It’s probably some crap from Ikea.
Anonymous

I think you may note, this is a wall corner, not a door.

Fail.

~D. Walker
neurolux

You know what’s even creepier? That depressing little bed.
das memsen

The bigger question is how is it that a random Finnish real estate listing can find it’s way out of the quagmire into boing boing stardom, while my own creative work attracts 3 hits a year?

Don’t answer that.
Alex_M

That IS weird. They misspelled “Sibeliuksenkatu”. As in their most famous composer? Oh well.

Huh. rents in Helsinki are lower than I’d have thought. That’s pretty central. (Also, I just discovered that the parliament building is confused with the cathedral on Google Maps)

THIS Finnish apartment is worse though:
http://i33.tinypic.com/2edo2ee.jpg
Anonymous

If you enlarge the photo from the original web site, you can fairly easily see that the bottom two fingers are the thumb and index finger curled and shot at an odd angle, while the top “finger” is really the other three fingers held parallel to one another and resting on a lever-style door handle.
Anonymous

It’s obviously the antler of a mÃ¸Ã¸se.
Kleinzeit

momenteye: Yes, the gecko is of course indigenous to Finland, in all of its varied forms.
Adam’s Navel

It’s signaling to the light coming out of the forest that’s responsible for all the crop circles! OMG
Anonymous

clearly a muppet . . .
eustace

a mÃ¸Ã¸se once bit my sister…
Anonymous

It’s just a bannister rail leading upstairs. The problem with the photo is the way the camera flash (reflected in the window) has ‘flattened’ the perspective of the wall/corner making it look like a door :)
Sork

In Scandinavia we don’t have door knobs but door handles. The hand is resting on the handle which you can see the tip of at the wrist. The keyhole is by the thumb.