The Order of the Occult Hand

... was not quite as sinister as the name suggests. "Whimsical" is Wikipedia's term; personally, I find it hilarious. The Order of the Occult Hand is a "secret society of American journalists who have been able to slip the phrase 'It was as if an occult hand had...' in print as a sort of a game and inside joke." The order originated, according to Wikipedia, when 

Joseph Flanders, then a police reporter of The Charlotte News, in the fall of 1965, [...] reported on a millworker who was shot by his own family when he came back home late at night. He wrote:

It was as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard.

After the Order was discovered and its nefarious schemes made public in 2004, it was
"announced that the Order had chosen a new secret phrase at an annual editorial writers' convention and resumed a stealth operation."