When I was a young kid, I saw ghosts around every corner. I had an older friend who told me some pretty weird stuff-like dead people lived in funeral homes-you could see them at night, peeping out the windows.
One night, my mother had to go out on an errand, and bundled us into the car-she parked-right in front of a funeral home!
I could have sworn I saw the drapes and blinds moving, as the dead people peered out at us.
I also had this crazy idea the people lived underground, in caves and subway tunnels (you could tell them apart from regular people, because their skin was so pale.
What similar beliefs did you have as a child?
Maybe not quite as extreme as your example, but when I was little I always thought that people with the same name would grow up to look the same.
Thinking back, I’m not sure what gave me that idea since there weren’t hoards of identical Julies or Sams or Allisons.
I’ve posted this before. I thought that people were assigned a church the same way we were assigned a school. There were certain church districts that dictated which church you attended, but obviously it was a different district system than the educational one, because not all of my classmates were at my church.
There was only one kid my age living within a block from me and she went to my church, so it was some time before I realized my error 
This is really embarrassing… when I was a kid I thought Bob Barker was Santa Claus. I guess I saw him on TV giving presents to people so I figured he was gonna bring me presents too! :o
You know those round, white-painted stones some people line their driveway with? My older sister once told me those were the skulls of people who were *buried standing up. *
To this day those things creep me out.
I went through a phase where I thought that losing gravity was a natural disaster that happened from time to time. For weeks I was hyper-aware of things that I could grab to keep from flying off into space.
That if you were in a hospital you could not die, after all a hospital was where you got better.
I thought when people fell in love they had babies. In second grade I had a huge crush on this boy named Shane, such a crush that I was sure I was falling madly in love.
One night of constipation had me terrified that I was about to deliver a baby.
Arkansas (pronounced phonetically) and Arkansaw were two different states. One I only ever heard about, the other I only ever read about. And I believed this for an embarrassingly long time, until I was 14 or so.
I also believed that, with enough practice and effort, a person could breathe through their ears. Your ears popping was an exhale.
I used to think the checkout workers at grocery stores got to keep all the money in their till at the end of the day.
Since it seemed to be a taboo subject, I came to the conclusion that sex was illegal. Why else would people only talk about it behind closed doors?
At the same time, I never made the connection between sex and procreation. They were two different acts as far as I knew, one which created babies and the other was some deviant thing like drugs that everybody liked to do and nobody liked to talk about.
I was seven when I finally confronted my mother with these beliefs, and she straightened me out.
Catholic school taught us that you can’t get pregnant until you’re married. Notice the semantics used. Not shouldn’t, can’t. When condoms were brought up in sex ed, I honestly didn’t understand what they were needed for. They told us they were for preventing pregnancy, but since you couldn’t get pregnant without being married… (They mentioned STDs, but monogamy and waiting until marriage should take care of that)
At some point I started wondering what, biologically changed, on your wedding night that suddenly allowed a woman to get pregnant. Coming to the realization that the answer was ‘nothing’ is one of the things that caused me to ‘lost my faith’ so to speak. This was some time around 5th grade IIRC.
This reminds me. In supermarkets, I didn’t understand the concept of intercoms. I imagined that above the main level there was a second floor, and people were paid to lay on their stomachs and talk through holes in the floor (which then came out through the ceiling of the supermarket.)
That (telephone) operators were medical surgeons/nurses.
I also believed pygmies lived in the Florida Everglades, and it scared me because it wouldn’t be that far for them to migrate to Texas.
(We watched a lot of Tarzan movies.)
When I went to Sunday School at one point we were told that “sinners had black hearts, liars had white hearts, and good Christians had golden hearts”. Thing is, I took it literally, not as metaphor and being the kind of kid who browsed through my parent’s encyclopedias for fun I knew that was wrong; we are supposed to have red hearts! I ended up deciding that being a sinner sounded healthier*; a white heart sounded like a blister full of pus, and I couldn’t see how a gold heart would even work. Wouldn’t it be awful heavy? How would it beat? But black sounds close to red, it’s a dark and organic color, right? I kind of pictured a sinner’s heart as black on the outside and red on the inside, like a charred steak.
- I was too shy to ask them how we could get a proper red heart.
I can only think of one that still gets me ribbed from time to time, my belief that salt and pepper canceled each other out. My grandpa was very confused one Thanksgiving when I caught him adding both to mashed potatoes.
I was crazy scared of cowboys as a child. Yes, cowboys. Creepiest thing I could think of.
In fact, I’d personally make sure the front door was locked every night before going to bed, lest those dirty no-good cowboys would sneak in at night and kill me and my whole family in our sleep. :eek:
When I was about three years old, I believed that a vampire version of Kermit the frog with was lurking under my bed waiting to get me. It started because of a picture of Kermit from the Vincent Price episode in a book about the Muppets. My brother was also a bit freaked out by this. I don’t remember this part, but according to my brother, the episode was on TV shortly after we saw the picture, and we happened to turn it on just as Kermit bit Vincent Price. Kermit without fangs was perfectly fine and my favorite Muppet.
That’s NOT embarrassing! That’s AWESOME! 
I hate to break this to you but that one is partially true. Mole people is a term used to refer to the homeless people living under large cities in abandoned subway tunnels and shafts. There are a number of documentaries on the internet on them if you you want to learn more about them. Underground people are very real.
I am big at debunking urban legends that I heard as a child but equally amazed that some of them are completely to partially true. I have learned as an adult that the real world is a lot stranger and scarier than anything I could have imagined as a child. I am pretty hardened at this point but still get thrown by new and real strangeness from time to time.