A man climbs a strange staircase and the dead things on it answer him. In the Grimms' Household Tales (collected 1812–1857, in an 1884 English translation), a poor man is given by his newborn's godfather a little glass of "a wonderful water" that heals the sick — he need only watch where Death stands: "by the patient's head", and the water cures; "by his feet", and the man must die. Grown rich and famous by the gift, he goes one day to visit the godfather and finds "such a strange establishment": on the first stair a broom and shovel quarrel and beat each other, on the second lies "a heap of dead fingers", and on the third "a heap of dead men's heads".

Every object he passes speaks and sends him higher. One of the fingers "replied"; the heads, for their part, "again directed him to a flight beyond". At the top he peeps through a keyhole and sees the godfather wearing "a pair of long horns" — Death, or the Devil, keeping house — who then denies the whole vision and sends the terrified man running.

For the motif of the speaking head this is a thin and glancing witness: the heads are only one rung in a whole stairway of talking things — broom, fingers, frying fish — and, unlike the finger that plainly "replied," they are merely said to have "directed him", with no word of their own set down. Still, the record keeps them in the file. Why does a heap of severed heads earn a voice at all in this house, even when, as here, the story lets them barely speak?