Funny, Strange or Just Plain Weird Childhood Beliefs
 

Yes, I'm branching off of the thread http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/general...ood-fears.html, but I'd been considering this one for a while anyways.

What sort of things do you remember believing as a child that turned out to be entirely made up?

(Please, do not make this a political thread. I don't want to hear things like "I believed that policemen are good", or "The government is here to help me.")

I grew up in Massachusetts, and for some reason, I was positive that my family had taken a trip to Denmark. I was discussing this with my mom recently, and it turns out that we had visited Cape Cod. I have no idea where Denmark came from; we never visited Europe as a family.

My friend grew up in a well-off part of Long Island, and only discovered after college that the white puffy weeds are also dandelions. They never lasted past the yellow stage in his neighborhood.

As a kid I had a babysitter who told me that Hush puppies the food were really ground up hush puppy shoes, that had been fried. I don't know why I believed her, but it took 20 years before I ever had my first hush puppy from Long John Silver's and was able to quelch that myth.

When I was young I thought shyness was a good trait.

When I was a kid (until I was like 9 or 10) I thought horse radish had actual horses in it.

I had this one too! My grandparents had a horse farm and I was always afraid I might be eating a horse.

Speaking of horses, I thought MacDonald's hamburgers were made with some horsemeat which made them taste different from normal beef hamburgers.

When I was very small my family had been to the beach and when we came back I asked my father how many grains of sand there were in the whole world. He said he didn't know about the whole world but told me a very large number which was the amount of grains there was in the UK. He said he knew because when he was younger, he had a job counting all the sand on all the beaches in the country. For a long time I believed him and had a very clear picture in my head of him on his hands and knees, on a beach counting each and every grain of sand. I remember thinking well, as a job that kind of sucks but someone's got to do it otherwise we wouldn't know how much sand there was.

A combination of watching The Christmas Toy and my uncle, who liked to move my Cabbage Patch doll around when I left the room, had me convinced that my toys came to life when I wasn't looking. I would have heartfelt conversations with my dolls, telling them it was okay for them to "reveal" themselves to me, and I promised not to tell anyone if they did.

....it never worked. Or maybe they just didn't believe me.

I was told that on Jesus's birthday a large fellow in a red and white jacket flew around neighborhoods via reindeer sleigh and dropped into houses through their chimneys to leave presents for children. My parents said it was nice to leave cookies for him, but he never ate more than part of the cookies because he had many more houses to visit. My parents said that I could finish them off, but I thought that was gross.. Why would you finish a cookie somebody else started, especially somebody who had been crawling through chimneys all night? I don't want a partially eaten cookie picked up with a chimney tar-covered glove.
Still, everybody seemed okay with it, because everybody got a free gift unless they were bad, so I played along. Then one year I asked a friend what he was getting, but he wasn't sure what I was talking about. I didn't know Santa thought Jews were bad.

i grew up with horses, rode them every day since i was about five years old...

when i was seven, i was thrown after we hit a car and broke my neck...

continued to ride for a number of years after the third vertabra healed...

used to see these things growing out of horse manure piles - dad said they were mushrooms...

to this day, i get physically ill when i even smell mushrooms...

and dogshit..

I wonder if they were Shaggy Mane mushrooms.

My great-aunt Loretta always made poppy seed cake.
When I was 7, my older cousins told me it was really ant-head cake.
I didn't mind. I thought to myself: "My, ant-heads are tasty."
A year later I figured it out. To this day, the family calls it ant-head cake,
even great-ant, Loretta.

When I was a kid I thought black people's shit must be white.

I was thinking about following up my other thread with this exact same topic! Good call Redlemon :thumbsup:

I recall when I was really young that I thought babies were made strictly from kissing. Now somewhere along the line I worked out that a man and women were needed in the process and of course it only made sense that something had to be exchanged between the two for anything to happen (I hadn't worked out what that was yet), I thought for sure it must be the most repulsive thing people could possibly do and made up my mind that I'd never have kids or do that kissing thing with anybody. Yeah I'm glad that one was entirely made up.

I also remember thinking the people on TV were in the TV and spent many hours as a small child staring at the back of the television wondering how I could get inside. After an unrelated broken glass incident, involving my brother I figured out that the front of the tv, being glass, would break in the same way and I could climb inside and hang out with all my favorite tv pals. My Dad recently told me he still gets a chuckle out of having to wrestle a block out of my hand after he caught me pounding away unsuccessfully on the TV screen. I guess thats probably a pretty common one though.

I also believed that if I ate m&m's I'd shrink down very small and nobody could see me...which in my mind was somehow the same as crawling under the bed. I was convinced that the perspective of peering out from under the bed meant that I was small enough that nobody could see me and of course it would be a great hiding place if I ever got in any trouble. So of course the next time the shit hit the fan, I hit my secret stash of m&ms, shrunk and went into hiding...I found out pretty quickly that the science behind that one wasn't very sound.

Anyway fun and interesting thread so far folks, I enjoyed it.

I did not like chicken, one time we were in at Grossinger a resort in the catskills and I loved their chicken. For a few years my family lied to me weekly and told me that they had ordered special Grossinger chicken.

I would never drink milk and then orange juice because that is how you made American cheese.

i used to think that doctors were nurses who had been promoted.

My alleged friend told me that the artists who made records, were actually living inside the record player. I sat there, while listening to The Sound of Music, imagining the lives of the mini Von Trapps, and how incredibly dark (and cramped) it must be for them all in there.

Nearly took an ax to the thing in the 80's to get a piece of Bon Jovi.

i thought if i swallowed watermelon seeds... a watermelon would grow in my stomach.

Oh, right, and if you swallow gum, it'll stay in your stomach for SEVEN YEARS!

When mom pulled the plug on a bath tub full of water, I was sure I could get sucked down the drain like a soggy spaghetti noodle and be gone forever. Especially when the drain started making that dreaded *sssccchhhllluuurrrppp!!!* noise.

Interestingly, I was not afraid of showers.

Just remembered two more.

I was sure that the pushbutton at crosswalks counted how many times it was pressed, so that it would know how many people were waiting to cross, and would change the light to "Walk" if there were lots of people. As I got older, I realized that it wouldn't register as multiple people if you pressed it in a regular frequent pattern, so I would then stagger the presses every few seconds to trick it.

After I understood about the sun travelling around the earth, but before I understood about time zones, I thought that each town set the time based on noon being exactly when the sun was at its peak in the sky. This explained why the clock on the bank sign a couple towns over didn't match the time on my watch; that town was a couple of minutes behind my town.

I remember watching a movie where rats and snakes came out of toilets....After that I always had to turn on the light when I used the bathroom at night, I wasn't gonna risk something biting me on the ass....