part0054

Adolescent girls’ “slumber parties” or “sleepovers”—where a houseful of youngsters giggle and gossip until all hours—are favorite times for telling urban horror legends. A classic tale of this genre even has its setting at a slumber party.

The legend I call “The Licked Hand” (discussed in The Choking Doberman ) is certainly horrifying, but barely plausible. The plot dictates that the girls in the story actually fall asleep during the all-night party. (As a father of three daughters, I find that idea fantastic.) In the story, a girl’s hand is licked when she awakens several times at night. She never turns on the light, just dangles her hand over the bedside. Presumably her faithful pet dog licks the hand.

But in the morning, she finds all of her little friends murdered, and in the bathroom her dog, too, lies dead in a pool of blood. Written in blood across the bathroom wall is the message “People can lick, too!”

“The Licked Hand” has circulated in the United States for at least twenty years. Young women telling it never need to explain that the killer must have been hiding under the bed licking the hand himself. The handwriting-on-the-wall motif at the end makes this gruesome fact perfectly clear.

The old slumber-party story also shows up as a college tradition. The scene shifts to a women’s dorm on campus in which one student comes home late and quietly goes to bed without turning on the light or awakening her roommate. In the morning, she finds her roommate murdered and a note either left by the body or written (sometimes in blood) on the wall: “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light last night?”

Sometimes a dog remains in the story—an odd resident for a college dorm—and its spilled blood becomes the writing medium. Occasionally the bloody message is written on a mirror.

If that last detail seems familiar, it’s because in the climax of one of the hottest urban legends going around, a variation of the same motif appeared. A man awakes early one morning to find a frightening message scrawled across his bathroom mirror in vivid red lipstick: “Welcome to the world of AIDS.” He learns from his doctor and the police that his female sex partner of the night before, an embittered AIDS victim, had deliberately transmitted the deadly disease to him.

This is the legend of “AIDS Mary,” a story that is everywhere, though it’s completely unverifiable.

The way that “AIDS Mary” leaves her message behind has puzzled several readers. One man wrote, asking, “Why the lipstick? Why didn’t she just use a pad and pencil?”

A prosaic penciled note is not as dramatic as the lipstick graffito, which perhaps suggests the overnight guest’s scarlet reputation or the sinful nature of the liaison. But probably the real reason that the message is left in red handwriting upon a mirror is that the motif was borrowed from “The Licked Hand.”

Urban legends often lift such motifs from each other and are updated to fit the major concerns of the time. Now it is the AIDS epidemic and not an imagined threat by a demented killer that we fear.

The ominous appearance of a message handwritten upon a wall is the subject of the old proverb about someone being able “to read the writing on the wall.” The proverb, of course, alludes to the Biblical passage in Daniel 5:5, where during Belshazzar’s feast, fingers of a man’s hand write strange words upon the plaster of the king’s wall. When the Hebrew prophet Daniel, a captive in Babylon, is summoned to interpret this cryptic writing, part of his translation is “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”

This idea seems appropriate for the urban legends reviewed here. If only she had not assumed that it was the dog licking her hand! If only she had turned on the light! If only he had taken precautions against AIDS! If only they had not been promiscuous in the first place!

The legends could still have disastrous endings, but at least if their main characters had been weighed and found sufficient, then the victims in the stories might have had a fighting chance.