[Major rewrite coming though]
About
Hide The Pain Harold, and sometimes just “Harold”, is the name given to an old man from stock photos, whose face appears to indicate a certain amount of pain and/or uncomfortableness.
Origin
The earliest known archived thread, where Harold first got attention, can be found on Facepunch, dating back to 2011. On September 13th, a user Greenen72, posted stock photos with the old man[1], originally from the site DreamsTime due to pictures having the site’s watermark on them.
Spread
However he began to shine again when a memecenter user in 2012 called craftypasta began to use his face as a caption meme and being used mostly for sex/rape jokes, he began to spread out the site to hugelol, redit and more sites when finally turned a religion in memecenter and hugelol.
http://www.memecenter.com/craftypasta
http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1124864
External References
[1]Facepunch – original post