The Licked Hand

The Licked Hand, known sometimes as The Doggy Lick, is an urban legend popular among teenagers. Like many urban legends, it has several versions, most prominently a story told in Indiana.

Plot

A girl is home alone with only her dog for company. Listening to the radio she hears of a serial killer on the loose, so she locks all the doors and windows and goes to bed, taking her dog to her room with her and letting it sleep under her bed. She wakes in the night and can hear a dripping sound in her room, the bedside lamp won't work and she is too scared to get out of bed to turn on the main light. She hides under the covers but to reassure herself that the dog is still under the bed she puts her hand down and feels the dog lick her. She lays awake for some time listening to the dripping sound and periodically puts her hand down to where she can hear the dog breathing and each time it gently licks her fingers. Eventually she falls back asleep. She wakes in the morning, lifts the covers and to her horror she sees her dog hanging by its collar from the ceiling light, its stomach slit open and its intestines hanging down still dripping blood onto the floor, on the wall smeared in the dog's blood is the phrase, "HUMANS CAN LICK TOO"

Variations

A version with an extra ending also has her parents dead in her closet. She then attempts to call the police but is unable to (sometimes because of the phone line being dead). She then looks downstairs and sees the killer. This leads to a chase around the house while the killer attempts to kill her. The police later come and find her dead and her body mangled.

In another version of the story, there is a man and his dog who go hiking. Soon it is nighttime and the man goes to sleep. He wakes up and the dog is agitated. The dog licks his hand. Then the man falls asleep. The dog licks his hand again, but the man's eyes are closed. He feels something warm next to him and thinks it is the body warmers, then he falls asleep. The dog keeps licking the man's hand. When the man wakes up his dog is gone and in the snow, it says: "People can lick too".

Another version has the main character an older, blind woman. On the radio she hears that an escaped creature is on the loose. As before she goes into the house and locks all the doors. When the tap is dripping, she goes around the house, checking all the taps. As she tries each tap to find them not the source of the dripping sound, the dog licks her hand to tell her everything is all right. Eventually she goes into the living room to find her dog nailed to the ceiling and blood dripping onto the floor. The ending line is "so what was licking her hand?"

In one other version, which the main person is a teenage girl, goes to check downstairs in the kitchen, no dripping taps. She goes back upstairs and still hears the dripping noise. After checking every tap in the house, she decides to check the bathroom again. Once there, she realises the shower curtain is drawn, pulling back the curtain she finds her dog hung by its neck, with a message on the shower tiles written in her dog's blood, reading "Humans can lick too."

Popular culture

• This legend was featured in the film Campfire Tales.
• In an episode of Showtime's series The L Word, Alice tells a version of the story with her friends as they sit around a campfire.
• The episode "Bedsit" from A Scare at Bedtime.
• A variation of the story is featured in the film Urban Legends: Final Cut.
• A version of the story is featured in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
• The episode "Family Remains" of Supernatural features an alteration on this story in which a feral child licks the hand of a teenage girl who panics when she realizes that her dog is in the hallway. In this version she sees the dog alive and realizes it's not the pet licking her, although the dog is mutilated when the show's heroes attempt to help the family escape.
• The legend is also used by Bloody Mary in the follow-up to Urban Legends Final Cut, entitled Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, as a way to murder one of the high school boys that she sees as guilty for her death.
• The legend is referenced in John Dies at the End, where the main character goes to bed (intending to lure out a ghost) and wakes up to find his dog still licking his hand, until he realizes he can hear his dog lapping water from the toilet next door.

References

Sources

• Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Choking Doberman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984.

Further reading

• "Humans Can Lick Too" Scaryforkids.com