The Licked Hand is an extremely popular urban legend. While it has many variations, the Licked Hand legend is considered to be one of the most popular stories told among teenagers all over the United States.
The legend centers on a teenage girl who was home alone with the family dog, which liked to sleep under her bed each night. Whenever the girl felt scared she would reach her hand under the bed to feel for the dog. The dog would comfort her by licking her hand. In the story, the teenage girl awoke in a fright and on instinct, reached for the dog. When she felt her hand get licked she felt reassured. She soon fell back to sleep.
Later, she was awakened by a dripping sound coming from her bathroom. She assumed it was a leaky faucet but reached down anyway. Her hand was licked. She fell back asleep, and did not wake up until the morning.
In the morning, there was still a dripping sound, but not as constant as it was earlier in the night. The teenage girl went into her bathroom and let out a gut-wrenching scream. In the shower the family dog was hanging by a rope from the shower nozzle. The sound she had heard was the blood dripping from a wound. A knife lay in the bathroom sink. The girl screamed even louder when she read the words, written in the dog’s blood: “Humans can lick, too.”
Like many urban legends, the licked hand has numerous variations. In one version, the protagonist is an older lady who was blind or had bad eyesight and the dog is a seeing-eye dog. In another version, the main character, getting hungry in the night, found the dog in the refrigerator with a note attached stating, “Humans can lick, too.” Alternatively, it may be her feet rather than her hand that the dog licks. A college version of this legend adds a mixture of “The Roommate’s Death” into the story.
Kevin Hawk
See also Killer in the Backseat; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. New York: W. W. Norton.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1999. Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends. New York: W. W. Norton.
Craughwell, Thomas J. 1999. Urban Legends: 666 Absolutely True Stories That Happened to a Friend … of a Friend. New York: Barnes and Noble.
UrbanLegendsOnline. http://urbanlegendsonline.com. Accessed September 9, 2015.