“Humans Can Lick Too” Story

Nationality: African American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student at the University of Southern California, majoring in Computer Science: Games
Residence: Brentwood, CA
Performance Date: April 21, 2018
Primary Language: English

Collected privately in an empty hallway while his friends played a horror game in the other room, which he returned to after the interview. I asked them if they knew, “the scary story where a girl gets her hand licked,” or, “the hand lick dog story.”

The informant first heard this story around the age of 11 in a drama class during a “ghost stories session.”
“Okay, I’ll probably get some of the details wrong, but, um… There’s this woman who lives alone… Well not alone, she has a dog. And every time she goes to bed, she gets into bed and hangs her hand over the bed because the dog licks it and it gives her comfort and all that. Um… she does that, dog licks her hand and she goes to sleep. Um… I, I’m missing a lot of details, but it’s like, that regularly happens. Until one day, she goes to bed, and of course the dog’s there, it’s under her bed, licks her hand. But one day she wakes up, goes to the bathroom, her dog is, like, bloodied, beaten, torn up in the bathroom and on the mirror it says, ‘Humans can lick too’ [laughs nervously]. And that’s how I remember that one [laughs].”
This version includes the dog being dead in the bathroom, but does not specify that the dog is under the bed. It also does not specify the dripping noise that wakes up the protagonist that appears in many versions.

An analysis of several versions of this story, as well as some folkloric history, can be read here: https://www.thoughtco.com/humans-can-lick-too-3299487. Additionally, a video portrayal of the same story can be seen here at http://urbanlegendsonline.com/humans-can-lick-too/, in which the girl actively sees her hand being licked by an intruder, and does not see her missing (presumably dead) dog.