Informant: This one legitimately scared me because I always associate it too heavily with, also, also the other thing that’s scary is that you have to tell it from the second person perspective. So…

Collector: Wait, what?

ML: You have to tell it from the “you” perspective. So, in this case, you are in your house where you see that a maniac has escaped, and you obviously find this alarming, but it’s from pretty far away, so you fall asleep. You always fall asleep to your dog licking your hand. So that night you go to sleep and your dog comes to sit next to you, and your dog starts licking your hand, and you fall asleep. Part way through the night you wake up, and your dog is still licking your hand. And then he stops. You think you see something, so you get up and you go towards the kitchen where you see your roommate’s head in the refrigerator. Because it just escalates like that. Anyway, obviously you’re freaked out, but you see a trail of blood leading to the other room, and because you’re an idiot in a horror story, you follow it, and you see a ceiling fan, and from the ceiling fan is a rope with your dog’s head tied around it. And it just say on the wall in blood, “Maniacs can lick hands, too.”

Informant is a freshman at the University of Southern California. She is studying animation in the film school here. She is from New Orleans, Louisiana. I spoke to her while we were eating breakfast in EVK one morning. We were sitting together with her two other friends, Ashley and Madeleine. Much of what she told me was learned from her sister or her own experiences.

This is an interesting ghost story because I have heard the exact same one before. I think this can’t have much variation because it’s so straightforward and short. The variation I could guess would be within the animal and how you find the head. I do recall perhaps the story ending with “you” only finding the head of the dog, and having to figure out that it was the maniac that was licking your hand. There wasn’t any blood on the wall. Many ghost stories like this seem to be short and not very in depth because they’re made for little kids. It also seems that these are passed through either friends or older siblings.