Humans Can Lick Too

[00:00:01] 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

[00:00:21] With playful banter that'll keep you up at night. So throw some wood on the fire Put a wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight Ka-ka! I guess that's not like a wood noise, but there could be crows out here

[00:00:42] We don't know in these woods. So we're out in the woods The fire is crackling that wiener is roasting and we are Ready we are ready to tell you a campfire story Whoo-hoo-hoo

[00:00:59] I'm gonna tell a classic a story that takes place on a night much like this one Edwin you have offered to dogs at my sweet Robert. Oh Sorry sidebar. I got his DNA back. What is he? What is he? What is he? Oh, it's horrible

[00:01:18] 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 chihuahua. What about his hair? His uh, well, he's only 18% Poodle oh Is all chihuahua. Yeah, it's all all chihuahua

[00:01:37] I've been telling everyone everyone in America that he's a chug and he's actually a chihuahua. 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

[00:01:56] Everything's peaceful. Robert settled down. You're watching a rerun of the big bang theory as it blows on the tv Suddenly a news bulletin breaks in Breaking nose be on the lookout for an escaped prisoner or lunatic I haven't decided which word to use

[00:02:13] 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 roberts here. You're safe so you start to drift off to sleep

[00:02:36] About an hour later, there's a loud noise in the house The power's out Robert you call as you sleepily shift You've reached your handout for reassurance from Robert The dog gives you slobbery licks on your hand Good boy, you murmur as you fall back to sleep

[00:02:57] The next morning you wake up and head for the bathroom. The door is closed Which is odd since you basically were 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

[00:03:17] 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

[00:03:35] Geez that is so disgusting. This is actually my roundabout way of asking you to dugs at robert So, uh, can I get you scheduled? I guess but Do you believe that someone could sneak in and lick a hand?

[00:03:49] You know, there's enough weirdos out there plus there's abraham lincoln, you know with this whole Licking thing and then um, what was that show now on netflix? That's like really baby reindeer

[00:03:59] I haven't watched it yet. But yeah, I heard of it. There's been, you know weirdos that really stalk you and like really bug you I feel like they're be capable of sneaking into your house and doing something weird like that

[00:04:10] Like licking your hand. No, see like that's so amazing 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

[00:04:21] 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

[00:04:32] 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 90s snopes found

[00:04:48] That this motif has been around since the 19th century and originally it was like first recorded in 1871 in the diary of victorian squire Fancy his wife heard noises in the middle of the night told him to go look at what was happening urged him to go investigate

[00:05:04] 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

[00:05:14] 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 mr. Pointer And this was published in 1919

[00:05:31] 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

[00:05:49] 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

[00:06:06] 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

[00:06:16] 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

[00:06:31] All sorts of things but in real life the only story that comes a little close to it Would probably be denis 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

[00:06:50] 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 so nasty You know, it's a cautionary tale about living away from home We fear being vulnerable in an unsafe world

[00:07:05] 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

[00:07:21] 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

[00:07:35] Everything is going well. It's a healthy going out right you go to the bowling alley and you go get some ice cream Everyone starts going home eventually. It's late. It's nine o'clock I would have never left the house if we didn't leave before like six. So it's fine

[00:07:53] Nine o'clock i'm ready to go home You pull up to your driveway, right? But something feels off. We can't really put your finger on it Something's just a little bit Different you're not quite sure what it is

[00:08:07] You shrug it off and you instead just keep going. We'll do 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

[00:08:23] 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

[00:08:32] 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

[00:08:42] Right, so you agree and you go home. I never agreed 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?

[00:08:59] 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

[00:09:13] You just stumble 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? I was like, yeah Well turns out Robbie had been choking on three human fingers

[00:09:29] You hang up the phone you call the police and they come to your place right away You give them permission to search they searched the house and eventually they find that this burglar Was hiding in the closet

[00:09:41] But passed out after losing so much blood from three fingers that were bitten off Oh my god, Robert the hero My little cheapo But of course there are a ton of variations

[00:09:58] This is actually one of these really famous urban legends when we talk about like the vanishing hitchhiker or the babysitter or the all these other urban legends This one's popping up

[00:10:09] 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

[00:10:25] Yeah, that when they told this story They used a poodle instead of this doberman, which is how the original legend goes It's a doberman eventually in the 90s a change to like a pit bull In another version that I think makes more sense of this legend

[00:10:40] 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

[00:10:54] Here's how the story could not be true right first off you said it the vet usually doesn't ask you No, no, and they'd be like this was $5,000 you just bringing Just walking through the door before your insurance But this urban legend is actually called the choking doberman

[00:11:14] Which later turned into choking pit bull then into the you know, it's 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

[00:11:25] It looks to be this article written by phoenix new times on june 24th 1981 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

[00:11:44] According to the story police arrived at her house and found an unconscious intruder Without fingers lying in a closet Newtimes 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 another employee

[00:12:01] Who in turn had heard it from a woman whose relatives This is a good one knew the dog's owner As of friday newtimes was not able to nail down the identity of the doberman's mistress

[00:12:13] According to a spokeswoman at Las vegas son 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

[00:12:31] The police are baffled the son 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 local newspapers

[00:12:42] But like an internet article sure but a newspaper article in like the 80s Really? It's funny because I feel like they spent resources trying to dig it up that they just couldn't find one

[00:12:52] So they're just like I guess our story is us 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 missing fingers, right?

[00:13:00] 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

[00:13:12] 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

[00:13:25] Locking all doors and all curtains go down when it gets dark and leaving my porch light on no more 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

[00:13:41] 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

[00:13:54] This legend reminds me a lot of the babysitter one that I mentioned. Yes, it does With somebody sneaking into your house. It's called the babysitter and the man upstairs Everybody's probably heard it. Basically this babysitter is watching tv late at night

[00:14:07] 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 And she gets freaked out so she calls the police the police says they're gonna trace the call

[00:14:21] Call her 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

[00:14:33] 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

[00:14:46] Scenario going there did a man crawl in and lick her hand in the middle of the night? Oh, no, but imagine Somebody in your house is always gonna be a source of Stories like that anxiety because you're supposed to be safe

[00:15:01] 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 shop. Yeah adopt adopt

[00:15:19] 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 86 left the review on apple podcasts Best show this show is awesome amazing and spooky

[00:15:38] 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 Whoo. All right

[00:15:49] 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 will in says

[00:16:02] I listen a lot to true crime et cetera, 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

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[00:16:47] This podcast was edited and sound designed by sarah warhees wendell of vw sound