The Licked Hand Scary Story: There was a night not so long ago when a young lady our age was home alone with her dog, relishing the opportunity for Privacy. She is calm and collected when she receives an alert on her phone informing her that a serial murderer has escaped from a neighboring jail. She is intelligent, practical, and self-sufficient.
She walks around the home with her dog at her heels, locking all of the doors and windows before curling up in bed with her dog, finishing her book, and drifting off to sleep. The young lady is quickly roused as she hears a distant pouring sound. As she lies in bed, half-awake, she checks the kitchen faucets, but eventually loses up and returns to bed, where she receives a comforting lick on the hand of her faithful dog. She is awakened from her slumber once again by the drip, drip, drip, and she feels the comforting lick before falling back to sleep. Folklorists have been investigating this phenomenon for a very long time.
However, after the third time, she leaps out of bed, is determined to track out the source of the continuous noise, and makes her way to the bathroom. Dr. Andrea Kitta, an associate professor and folklorist at East Carolina University, believes that two characteristics distinguish a tale from a modern legend: it’s capacity to be believed and its ability to spread. In contrast to a fairy tale, in which bears can speak and trees can dance, a modern legend must be composed of acts that are both identifiable and natural to the reality in which we live.
Plot of the Licked Hand Scary Story
Kitta explains that, in general, they are set in the recent historical past and that they are often situated in a specific location. Using a popular modern tale about a college library where the architect failed to account for the bulk of the books while designing the building’s foundation, she claims that “it’s not just any library that’s sinking beneath the weight of the books.” “It’s just across the street from your library.”
When she turns on the light, she is greeted with a horrifying scene: her beloved dog is hanging from the shower nozzle, its neck slit, and blood is pouring down the porcelain of the bathtub. Angry and distraught at the death of her closest friend, the little girl runs into a wall and falls, weeping and frightened at the unthinkable murder. She looks around the room, her eyes welling up with tears, assessing the situation. She gets to her feet and looks around to see that someone has scrawled in her dog’s blood on the bathroom wall: “Humans can lick, too.” She laughs.
It has been referred to by a variety of titles, including “The Legend of the Licked Hand,” “Humans Can Lick Too,” and “The Doggy Lick.” This story is one that I first heard when I was 12 years old during a slumber party in North Texas, but it is one that is repeated all over the globe. People from Sacramento, Albany, Detroit, South Wales, and Milan have all informed me they’d heard this tale as well, either at a sleepover or over a campfire when they were just on the cusp of puberty, and they’re not alone. A couple of crucial narrative elements were all it took for me to throw a buddy into fits of laughter as we were drinking beers.
The Licked Hand Scary Story
A large number of individuals I know, on the other hand, have informed me that they have never heard of this tale. As an adult, I’ve been perplexed as to why so many individuals I’ve encountered have been terrified by the same — or nearly similar — tale that I had heard as a kid growing up in Texas. I was resolved to learn more about the origins of the storey and how it spread across the globe, and I succeeded. In addition, I was curious as to whether or not this licked hand girl had ever actually existed.
A slumber party in North Texas in the early 2000s was the first time I heard “The Licked Hand” as a genuine story about a girl who lived in the neighborhood years ago. This could never have happened in the real world. It’s more than 20 miles distant from my hometown to prison, and the neighborhood was established in the 1980s. In theory, someone who witnessed this should be able to tell us about it, right? Then again, adults are always concealing information from children, so why should they be trusted? It seemed to be the case. Inspiring are Blank’s so-called “dark realities”.
Pre-teens can easily become engrossed in these tales around a campfire or a group of sleeping bags. Children and adolescents love legends because they “get to experience the storey; they hear the motifs, but often create their own iterations, which also helps them to kind of flex their own creative muscles and imagine a darker side of the world—the side of the world that you are running away from as a child but are constantly being pulled into as you enter adulthood, fac.” Studying over 220 contemporary legends, researchers discovered the stories referred to dangers in life significantly more frequently than they did security.
About Reception Of Story
As a result, it’s safer to focus on an imaginary threat rather than overlook a genuine one. In addition, studies have shown that people are more prone to spread stories that worry them. This has been the case for most of modern human history, if not the entirety of that history. In the ’80s and ’90s, urban legends were circulated by mail, fax, and email, and we have data to support this. Kitta says that “the circulation of stories is clearly more extensive and is not necessarily by word of mouth anymore. The emergence of the internet and social media has made it possible for a narrative that is more legend than fact to spread swiftly.
Nowadays, we are more exposed than ever before to modern urban legends, thanks to the advent of the internet. It also provides us the capacity to fact-check them instantaneously, but no one actually does so. People’s belief in them won’t shift, says Stubbersfield, despite their access to facts. According to her, “I believe that the majority of people don’t scrutinise these claims very much.” Disappointingly, there is solid data to support this conclusion. The findings of a 2014 psychology study show that information does not have enough heft to overcome repetition in the long run It doesn’t matter if a narrative is disproven or not if it seems plausible to us.
The ability to retweet or copy-and-paste text is one of the most significant effects of digital communication, according to Stubblefield. When it comes to urban legends, this could have a major impact on how they spread, as the selection of what is read becomes more significant than the pressure of having to recollect something and potentially modify it when you recount it. According to Jan Harold Brunvand’s 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, “the lack of evidence in no way decreases the attractiveness that urban legends have for us.
