Paper 2

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i. Teen Horrors

My friend, ****, who is a student at ********* Community College told me this story,

which they said they heard in high school (****** ***** High School) from their English

teacher, who told them it had happened to his cousin’s friend when she (the cousin’s friend) was

in highschool herself. **** did not seem to necessarily believe the story, but they thought it was

“creepy and interesting.”

According to the story, there was a teenage girl whose parents were out of town for the

weekend, and she was home alone with just her dog. She hears some strange sounds outside of

her house, and she feels creeped out by it, so she locks the doors and brings her dog into her

bedroom with her and has him sleep under the bed--but she forgets to lock the windows. She

wakes suddenly in the middle of the night; she’s not sure what woke her up, but she’s just

overcome with fear. There’s a strange dripping sound coming from her bathroom, but she’s too

afraid to get up and go see what it is. She can hear her dog panting under her bed, so she reaches

down and pets his head and he licks her hand, and she feels reassured and falls back to sleep. In

the morning, she goes to use the bathroom and discovers her dead dog, hung over the shower

curtain rod and bleeding out (the source of the dripping sound). She realizes that what was under

her bed the previous night when she heard the dripping was not her dog; it couldn’t have been an

animal, either, because it had been able to open the window to get in, and had slit her dog’s

throat with a knife and hung it over the shower rail; she screams and runs to her neighbor’s

house, and when she tells her neighbor what happened, the neighbor says it must have been “the

Dog-Headed Man” who has already killed several other young girls, and says that she is lucky to

be alive.

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“The Dog-Headed Man” would be classified as an urban legend. I was talking about this

story with my father, and he told me he’d heard it as well, only in the version he had heard it was

a blind old lady and a werewolf (in this version the elderly woman had not locked her door,

because she had been expecting a caretaker or one of her children, my dad couldn’t remember

which, to come over in the morning and had wanted to make sure they could get in; he grew up

in Santa Ana, so it was also localized to the Black Star Canyon), and the story was also listed in

Too Good to Be True as “The Licked Hand” (61-62), and on Wikipedia as “Humans Lick Too,”

with the Dog-Headed Man/werewolf in both of these versions as a human serial killer (this

version omits the part where the female character pets the man’s head, and focuses on the licked

hand), and in these versions the killer scrawls on the mirror in blood some variation of “Humans

Can Lick, Too” on the mirror. The story seems to date back to at least the 80s, although Snopes

cites the licked hand motif as showing up as early as 1871, in a diary written by Dearman

Birchall who tells the story of a clergyman who was woken in the night by his wife who insisted

there was a robber on the bed; the man tells his wife that the noise is just their dog, as it had

licked his hand, and the couple goes back to sleep and wakes in the morning to find all their

valuables have been stolen.

The story does not generally seem to be believed (except perhaps by children at slumber

parties), so what may be keeping it around is that it does seem to create a lot of emotion--in this

case feeling “creeped out”/afraid, which follows from Stubberfield, Tehrani, and Flynn’s claim

that emotional affect is what causes urban legends to be passed on (the authors focus on the

emotion of disgust, but assert that other emotions work in this way as well) (23). That being

said, what may still seem believable about it is not only the underlying societal fears it speaks to,

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but because it echoes the concern (in the versions where the “licker” is human) that we may not

know what other people will do, or what they are capable of.

The urban legend seems to speak primarily to fears about teenage (and especially female)

autonomy and vulnerability. This is abundantly clear in the version I collected from ****, where

a young girl is left without parental protection and isn’t careful enough about her safety, but fears

about female vulnerability are also still present in the versions where the protagonist is elderly,

although this version also emphasizes the specific vulnerabilities of age/disability, and

potentially offers more of a sense of the failure of her caretaker/children for not being there for

her, or alternatively a sense of the old lady’s naivete in leaving the door unlocked for them

(perhaps centered in a sense of fear over changing times and a “new” lack of safety), rather than

the carelessness of the protagonist. The “Dog-Headed Man” also seems to fit the general

dynamics of other teenage legends such as The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs (Brunvand 230),

which reflects fear surrounding, again, feminine teenaged vulnerability and a lack of awareness

of how immediate a threat may be, and especially The Roommate's Death/Aren’t You Glad You

Didn’t Turn on the Light (Brunvand 468), which not only has those same themes of

vulnerability/unawareness, but also additional narrative similarities such as the message scrawled

in blood, and the sense of uncertainty--that what we think we know as safe or familiar may

actually be highly dangerous. It is interesting to note that Snopes even lists the Licked Hand

version of the story under “Aren’t You Glad You Didn’t Turn on the Light” because of those

parallels in narrative and underlying fears. In terms of behavior modification, this story can

serve to limit/control young women; it generally calls for an increase in caution/vigilance, and

the emphasis on the house as a place which can be made secure, but which has been foolishly left

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vulnerable serves to remind teens not only that they need to stay at home when their parents are

out, but also to take responsibility and be very careful about maintaining the safety of the home.