Humans Can Lick Too

This burglar was hiding in the closet but passed out after losing so much blood from three fingers that were bitten off. Get ready for a campfire story. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with playful banter that'll keep you up at night. So throw some wood on the fire and put a wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight. Cacaw. I guess that's not like a wood noise. But there could be crows out here. We don't know in these woods. So we're out in the woods. The fire's crackling, that wiener's roasting, and we are ready. We are ready to tell you a campfire story. I'm gonna tell a classic, a story that takes place on a night much like this one. Edwin, you have offered to dog sit my sweet Robert. Oh, sorry, sidebar, I got his DNA back. What is he? What is he? What is he? Oh? It's horrible. He's not a pug at all. He has no pug in him. He's a poodle. He's a Chihuahua poodle. Isn't that heartbreaking? He's a cheapoo? What about his hair? His Uh, well, he's only eighteen percent poodle. Oh it is all chihuahua. Yeah, it's all all chihuahua. I've been telling everyone, everyone in America that he's a chug, and he's actually a cheap poo. It's a tragedy anyway. It was a dark and stormy night. You are babysitting my sweet angel boy, Robert. You're home alone for the night, and you curl up in bed. Everything's peaceful, Robert's settled down. You're watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory. As it glows on the TV. Suddenly a news bulletin breaks in breaking news. Be on the lookout for an escaped prisoner or lunatic. I haven't decided which word to use. He recently escaped custody. Consider armed and dangerous and kind of a pervert. Your show resumes. Thunder crashes and rain pelts against the window outside. The house is all locked up. Plus Robert's here. You're safe, so you start to drift off to sleep. About an hour later, there's a loud noise in the house. The power's out, Robert. You call. As you sleepily shift, you reach your hand out for reassurance from Robert. The dog gives you slobbery licks on your hand. Good boy, you murmur as you fall back to sleep. The next morning, you wake up and head for the back. The door is closed, which is odd since you basically we're alone all night in the house. And then you open the door and you find Robert locked in the standing shower, very unhappy he'd been there all night. Did you guys really think I was gonna kill my own dog in this story? Like I'm gonna kill Robert? He's right here. But when you look around the bathroom, you look at the mirror, and on the mirror someone has written humans can lick too. Geez, that is so disgusting. This is actually my roundabout way of asking you to dog sit Robert. So can I get your scheduled? I guess? But do you believe that someone could sneak in and lick a hand? You know, there's enough weirdos out there. Plus there's Abraham Lincoln, you know with this whole licking And then what's that show now on Netflix that's like Pretty Baby Range. I watched it yet, but yeah, I've heard of it. There's been, you know, weirdos that really stalk you, and I really bug you. I feel like they'd be capable of sneaking into your house and doing something weird like that, like licking your hand, no see like that. So it makes it out really hard because it's like you would have to wait there for the hand to droop over the side. Yeah. Well, I mean you're just hanging out on the floor anyway. I think that's the whole point, is that you're crawling around on the floor and you're trying to not get caught, and then the hand falls down and then you're like, oh, I guess I am making noise, So I guess I do have to lick this hand that just fell down, as opposed to someone who is just pretending to be the dog and waiting to kiss your hand in the middle of the night. Yeah. But it's interesting because in the nineties, Snops fanned that this motif has been around since the nineteenth century, and originally it was like first recorded in eighteen seventy one in the diary of Victorian Squia. His wife heard noises in the middle of the night, told him to go look at what was happening, urged him to go investigate. Sounded like burglars, he told his wife that it was only the dog reaching out his hand, and he felt the dog licked his hand. But in the morning all of his valuables were gone. He had clearly been robbed, which it doesn't really like spell it out. I don't think that. I mean that could have still been the dog that licked his hand. I hope so. But there's a similar theme in the short story A Diary of Mister Pointer, and this was published in nineteen nineteen. This guy falls asleep in his armchair and drops his hand, thinking he's petting his dog, and here's an excerpt of it. He felt on the back of it, just the slightest touch of a surface of hair stretching it out in that direction. He stoked and patted around something. But the feel of it, and still more, the fact that, instead of a responsive moment, absolute stillness greeted his touch made him look over the arm What he had been touching rose to meet him. It was the attitude of one that had crept along the floor on its belly, and it was so far as could be collected a human figure. After discovering the person crawling along his floor, Denton runs as fast as he can, and the person gives chase. He barely makes it to a secure room with his life intact. It doesn't seem like there's a real instance of this. It has. The story of the licked hand has appeared in movies all sorts of things, but in real life the only story that comes a little close to it would probably be Dennis Raider known as BTK. He would hide in a bedroom closet and wait patiently for hours in a bedroom closet, and then he strangled be a victim. He didn't lick a hand, So there is a missed opportunity for perverts out there. So there's a niche that could be filled. That's nasty, you know. It's a cautionary till about living away from home. We fear being vulnerable in an unsafe world, and the more unsafe we perceive the world to be around us, the more these tales will probably get told. And frankly, there could always be a man under your bed waiting to lick your hand. So I used to have this book on urban legends, and your story right now reminds me a lot of the one I'm about to tell you. Let me know if this rings a bell. You're out with your friends. One night, Michelle. Everything is going well. It's a healthy going out, right. You go to the bowling alley and you go get to my ice cream. Everyone starts going home. Eventually it's late. It's nine o'clock. I would have never left the house, and we didn't leave before like six, So it's fine. Nine o'clock. I'm ready to go home. You pull up to your driveway, right, but something feels you can't really put your finger on it. Something's just a little bit different. You're not quite sure what it is. You shrug it off and you instead just keep going well. To the front door. You open it, and then you notice your dog, Robbie. He's trying to breathe. You freak out. You carry him to your car. Something's up right, You can't breathe. So you get on the phone with the emergency VET and you're still driving. You're like, oh my god, like something's happening. Your dog is basically choking. You can't figure it out. Fortunately, do you make it. Carry him inside. The VET takes a look at him and says, okay, look, he'll be all right, but why don't you go home right now. I'll call you as soon as I have news. Right, so you agree and you go home. I'd never agree to that, but okay, for the story's sake. Sure, Just as you get home, your phone rings right as you're pulling up right, it's the Vet and you're like, oh, you have news. Okay, like what happened? And then the Vet tells you that you need to leave the house right now. Startled, you're like, wait, wait, what are you talking about? And then she begins to tell you to shut up and leave that She'll tell you as soon as you're out of the house. You just somebody your way out. You're back in the car, you close the door, locking the doors, and that's when she's like, are you safe now? It's like, yeah, what turns out Robbie had been choking on three human fingers. You hang up the phone, you call the police and they come to your place right away. You give them permission to search. They search the house, and eventually they find that this burglar was hiding in the closet but passed out after losing so much blood from three fingers that were bitten off. Oh my god, Robert the hero, my little cheepoo. But of course there are a ton of variations. This is actually one of these really famous urban legends when we talk about like the vanishing hitchhiker or the babysitter or all these other urban legends. This one is popping up. Including there's some versions of this that are of course racist because they talk about the fingers being black or Mexican fingers, which I mean, how do you know they're Mexican? I learned about this show, Canadian show called Freaky Stories. Awesome name by the way, Yeah, that when they told this story, they used the poodle instead of this doberman, which is how the original legend goes. It's a doberman. Eventually in the nineties it's changed to like a pitbull. In another version that it thinks makes more sense of this legend, the burglar escapes, but he starts bleeding out, so he's forced to go to the hospital, where they end up matching the missing fingers to the ones in the dog's throat, which, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But let's hear some arguments here. Here's how the story could not be true. Right, first off, you said it. The vet usually doesn't ask you to go home, no, and they'd be like, this was five thousand dollars you're just bringing just worse. They'd ask you for your insurance. But this urban legend is actually called the choking Doberman, which later turned into choking Pitbull, then too the you know a dog choking dog. And I also went on Snopes because I found that they looked into it to see how what the earliest record of it could be. It looks to be this article written by Phoenix New Times on June twenty fourth, nineteen eighty one. Oh really, the article is called gagging dog story baffles police. This is from the article that I found. Snopes had it, so I guess they had a source for it. According to the story, police arrived at her house and found an unconscious intruder without fingers, lying in a closet. New Times learned of the story from an employee of a large industrial plant in the valley. He said he had gotten the story third hand from an employee who in turn had heard it from a woman whose relatives Las Vegas you the dog's owner as a Friday. New Times was not able to nail down the identity of the doberman's mistress. According to a spokeswoman at Las Vegas Sun, that paper, too, was very interested in breaking the story. Unfortunately, even though the story was all over Vegas last Thursday, the paper and police weren't able to dig up one shred of evidence to prove the incident ever occurred. The police are baffled. The Sun spokesman said, that's hilarious. The fact that that made a newspaper is the funniest thing. It doesn't take a lot, I guess, to end up on the news local newspapers, but like an internet article, sure, but a newspaper article on like the eighties. Really it's funny because I feel like they spent resources trying to dig it up that they just couldn't find one. So they're just like, I guess our story is just trying to find it and we couldn't, so that's our story. And then they wrote that article. Also, the freaky thing here isn't the miss right, Like really, it's that someone was at your house. We had a prowler on my property and my neighbor's car got rifled through. Nothing was taken. Someone was wandering the property in the middle of the night, so it's a little unnerving to know. And I smelled cigar smoke outside my window, which is also unnerving, So needless to say, I will be shutting all windows, locking all doors, and all curtains go down when it gets dark, and leaving my porch light on. No we're dark parking lot. Does Robbie detect people outside? Yeah, he loves to bark at the neighbors, but he well, a lot of the time he'll bark at nothing, So it's like I can't. He's not the best detector. But if someone came to the door at night, or like if he heard someone out in the bushes, I think he'd go off fingers crossed. So this legend reminds me a lot of the babysitter one that ever, Yes, it does somebody sneaking into house. It's called the babysitter and the man upstairs. Everybody's probably heard it. Basically, this babysitter is watching TV late at night and then the phone rings and the caller says, check the children, and then she ignores it, goes back to watching TV, and then the caller does it again. Then she gets freaked out, so she calls a police. The police says they're going to trace the call. Caller calls again. They trace the call, and then the police call a lot of calls. Turns out that the unidentified caller was calling from inside the house. They tell her to get out. Turns out that the actual legend goes that there was calling her after killing the children upstairs. Is that the version you heard? I've heard that version before. Yeah, he's killed the children already. A woman babysitting kids, you have every scenario going there. Did a man crawl in and lick her hand in the middle of the night. H No, But imagine somebody in your house is always going to be a source of anxiety because you're so posted to be safe. It's the ultimate anxiety is it's a safe zone and someone's violated your safety. More of the story. Get a dog, I think, get a Robert. Yeah, be sure to adopt and not shot. Yeah, adopt adopt fan corner where we give you a seat at the campfire fan corner. I like that. Okay, Well, let's read some reviews from our listeners. Okay, this one comes from Julie Girl eighty six left the review on Apple Podcasts best show. This show is awesome, amazing, and spooky. Also, this show is super funny and the host put me in a better mood. The one about the Hook is my favorite so far. Woo, all right the hook was the hook was mentioned? I think it'll be mentioned for the rest of eternity. It's an iconic story, very representative of modern Americana. This is now an NPR podcast anyway. Next comment, Jack Wilin says, I listen a lot to True Crime ETTC, but these two always make me smile. I enjoy their harmony together. Great team seems genuine. I hope they keep it up. Yeah awesome. Yeah, we hope to as well. So make sure you tell your friends to follow, like and subscribe. Text the show to one of your friends. Let us know what you think of the new way we're doing the show, and reach out. If you want to be in fan corner, write us a little email at Hello at campfirestory dot com. Always remember to put your fire out and stir your ashes only you can prevent forest fires. Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Worhez Wendel, a VW sound