Subject: Myth, Childhood Scary Story

Informant: Lily Fitzpatrick

Background Information/Context: I was remembering a story that my friends and I used to tell each other at night to scare our friends. My friends and I used to tell these kinds of stories all the time, but this one was the one that came to mind when I tried to remember any of them. For whatever reason, none of these stories used to scare me very much, except for this one. Because I was having trouble remembering it entirely, I asked Lily to share how she remembered the story:

“This dog used to lick his owner’s hand every morning to wake him up for school. He was a young schoolboy [laughs], and then one morning he, like, got his hand licked, as one does in the morning, and he was like, ‘Oh time to wake up for school,’ and he walked into the bathroom, and the dog’s head was cut off, and the—wait I have to think to remember this—it said, like, I think, like, written in the dog’s blood on the mirror, it said, ‘dogs aren’t the only ones who lick hands.’”