Also known as "The Hook Man"
Example
As told by David Emery:
A teenage boy drove his date to a dark and deserted Lovers' Lane for a make-out session. He turned on the radio for mood music, leaned over to whisper in the girl's ear, and began kissing her.
A short while later, the music suddenly stopped mid-song. After a moment of silence an announcer's voice came on, warning in an ominous tone that a convicted murderer had just escaped from the state insane asylum — which happened to be located within a half-mile of Lovers' Lane — and urging that anyone who notices a man wearing a stainless steel hook in place of his missing right hand should immediately report his whereabouts to the police.
The girl became frightened and asked to be taken home. The boy, feeling bold, locked all the doors instead and, assuring his date they would be safe, attempted to kiss her again. She became frantic and pushed him away, insisting that they leave. Relenting, the boy peevishly jerked the car into gear and spun its wheels as he pulled out of the parking space.
When they arrived at the girl's house she got out of the car, and, reaching to close the door, began to scream uncontrollably. The boy ran to her side to see what was wrong and there, dangling from the door handle, was a bloody hook.
Analysis: Folks have been telling the "hook-man" story since the 1950s, and indeed the implicit moral message — "Sex is naughty, and bad boys and girls will be punished!" — seems more appropriate to that simpler, more naive era. Just as this moral has come to be parodied in horror films (where formerly it was delivered with morbid solemnity), its "bygone" relevance has taken the teeth out of the cautionary tale over time.
Remarking on the improbable tidiness of the plot, Jan Harold Brunvand has observed that "most tellers narrate the story nowadays more as a scary story than a believed legend." Small wonder. Given its exploitation by Hollywood in popular genre films like Candyman and I Know What You Did Last Summer, most people under the age of 30 probably assume the story was invented by screenwriters.
Folklorists of a Freudian bent find meaningful sexual overtones in the imagery of the tale. The boy, who wants to get his "hooks" into the girl, is not only frustrated by her unwillingness but afraid of his own lustful impulses — a fear heightened by the stern "voice of conscience" emitting from the radio — and has to "pull out fast" before a deadly sin is committed. The tearing off of the madman's hook symbolizes castration. Proponents of this type of psychological interpretation find the sexual apprehensions of both boys and girls represented in the legend.
