In contrast to the other impossible childhood memories thread, let’s have a confirmed improbable childhood memories thread. You thought, hey I was a little kid and probably imagined, dreamed, or misremembered it, but lo and behold, an adult at the time or some other factor confirmed or enhanced it.
Mine: I saw a very bright shooting star out my grandmas window. The various adults poo pooed my claim. The next day in the newspaper there was an article about a meteorite crashing into a house in the same direction as the window. Vindicated!
I have a very vivid and detailed memory of something I experienced before I was a year old. It occurred across the street from our apartment building . . . the building we moved from when I was about 11 months old. Everyone I’ve ever mentioned this to always told me that there’s no way I could have such a detailed memory from that age.
Several decades later, I was talking with my mother and aunt, and I brought up this memory. They confirmed all the details, and confirmed that we had never gone back to that neighborhood when I was older. And there was no possibility that I could have confused this with something different. They were amazed.
I remembered seeing a bizarre show on TV about a man trapped in a small room unable to get out, even though other people kept coming and going. I was sure my dad had seen it too, and that we had talked about it some afterwards. However, dad said he didn’t remember it, and I could never find anyone else who had seen it. I thought maybe I had just dreamed it, but after the Internet came into being I started searching for it occasionally. Finally about 10-12 years ago I discovered that there were others who had seen it, and also had been nearly convinced they, too, had dreamed it. In 2003 a Yahoo group was formed for people trying to find information about it. It was called “The Cube”, written by Jim Henson as part of an anthology show called NBC Experiment in Television, only aired twice then put away in a vault, A couple of years after the group formed, copies finally found their way to the Internet. When I got to see it, I was surprised to find that every weird detail I remembered was true except one–I was sure Tony Randall had played the Man in the Cube, but it was actually Richard Schaal.
I had a very vivid memory of visiting my grandmother and being able to see the trains coming in and out of the rail yard from her backyard. However, even as a slightly older child, I knew this didn’t make any sense, because even though my grandma lived NEAR the rail yard, the way the house was oriented, you wouldn’t be able to see any trains from her backyard. Still, I asked my parents about this repeatedly, and they assured me I was making it up or something.
Two years ago, I was out to lunch with my second cousin, and she casually mentioned playing in HER grandmother’s backyard and watching the trains. This would be my great aunt, who lived on the other side of the street from my grandmother, so yes, from her yard you could see the trains. This aunt passed away when I was fairly young, so I would have been in her backyard as quite a small child and while I don’t have a lot of very strong memories of her, I obviously have at least one.
I called my mother immediately to tell her this story, and right away, she said “oh yeah, you must have been talking about Aunt Mony’s yard …” and I still wonder why, when I brought it up as a kid, no adult put this together. We visited two old ladies living on the same street all the time, one of which had a view of trains, and when I mentioned the trains, you acted like I was crazy?
I remember as a child between the ages of 4-10 having reoccuring nightmares about a bottomless pit or moat that was in front a stage in an auditorium or theatre and falling into it.
I had no idea why I was having these nightmares since every movie theatre or grade school auditorium I went to had no terrifying abyss.
It wasn’t till I was about 11 and went to see a play in a major theatre where my fears of the exsisting abyss were confirmed.
Me: Whoa, what the heck is that!
Mom: It’s the orchestra pit.
Me: A what?
Mom: It’s where the musicians sit. I remember bringing you to this theatre when you were 3 to see a children’s play.
Was there really a Batman episode where Robin gets swallowed by a giant clam? And then Batman simply pulls off the chains binding his hands and pries open the clam to rescue him? Did I dream that?
My earliest memory involves looking out the left side of my dad’s car from the rear seat at the sunset and imagining a huge orange tiger in the clouds (yes that word entered my head at that exact moment). A long time later my mom confirmed a trip we took to Niagara Falls from Cleveland (our hometown) along the lakes-in May 1963, when I was 10 months old, and the sun would have been in the right place as dusk wore on. She even mentioned the mattress they put in the back for me to play on, which is probably the only way a toddler could have gotten the height necessary to look out the window. I started speaking at 7 months BTW.
For a long time, I thought one of my earliest memories was watching a very vivid throating-cutting scene from a horror movie which one of my idiot cousins must have taken me to attend. Later I learned it wasn’t a movie. I had witnessed an actual murder which nobody talked about for a long time hoping I would forget it.
I clearly remember watching a moon landing on TV and that my father took me outside and pointed up to the moon and told me there are men up there right now. Everything checks out. But I figure it was probably the last mission Apollo 17. I think I would be too young to remember or care about the earlier ones. I was 5 at the time.
I had a really vague memory of a particular road going around behind a particular hill, in my old home town. But nobody else seemed to have any idea what I was talking about.
Turns out it is an old, disused road, all weed-grown, and closed partway with a barbed wire fence. But it actually was a road, and my parents must have driven along it once when I was young.
It was a very eerie experience when I finally discovered the driveway that leads up to that road. It felt very much like a “waking dream.”
I remember climbing and falling out of my crib once, right around the end of when I was in one. I can remember remembering it when I was only ~5 years old.
My parents denied it being possible for years because my mom insisted I never had a crib in the room the memory is in. A couple years ago, she told me she suddently realized I was for a few months before my first bed was purchased.
Not 100% verification obviously, but I’m pretty sure it’s legit.
My earliest memory was when it snowed in Los Angeles before I was in kindergarten. This happens very rarely. Through the miracle of the internet, I’ve confirmed that indeed, it did snow in January 1962 in Los Angeles.
The Apollo 11 landings. My dad woke me up, brought me downstairs and sat me on his knee and said something like “watch this, it’s something you’ll never forget”.
It was confirmed as an adult when I described how the TV sat on an upturned red plastic laundry basket. I would have been 22 months old.
I always had a distinct memory of meeting my great-grandmother, for the first time and only time as a very small child. She had a big house with very ornate furniture, and I particularly remembered a large Raggedy-Ann doll that she gave me to play with.
This was recently confirmed by my mother, to her surprise. I was 2 1/2 and she died very soon after that. Now- I was mistaken on some details; this was actually my paternal great-grandmother, I had thought she was from my mom’s side (hence why I asked my mom about it, I was looking at some family tree info and got confused).
I have a lot of very clear early memories, many have been confirmed as highly accurate.
A man killed his wife’s daughter outdoors around a group of people. I was one of the children present that day who saw the whole thing. I don’t remember being questioned about it. I imagine with so many adults there the police didn’t need the testimony of child witnesses. For a long time I thought it was from a horror movie that my cousins took me to see because they were always taking me along to rated-R slasher type movies. Back when I thought it was from a horror movie, I remembered it as the only horror movie scene that ever scared me.
Eh, my childhood was so weird that there are virtually no childhood memories of mine that I would doubt.
For instance, we had a cabin at a nudist camp summers. I was a ventriloquist while I was a child, and the middle act between my father’s magic and puppet shows. My older brother was a unicyclist. Dad was also a professional clown and was Ronald McDonald for a number of years, so on Ronald McDonald night at the circus, I was able to go backstage and meet he stars like Gunter Gabel-Williams. My Dad taught a guy how to spit a 12 foot flame in our drive-way one night.
Just some stuff off the top of my head and I’ve got a lot more.
Did I kill the thread with my stories of my weird childhood?
By the way, the next door neighbors were a pair of little old ladies, mother and daughter. The daughter wound up killing her mother during an argument about the popular local TV show Bowling For Dollars. My dad’s day job was as a policeman, and the daughter knocked on our door late at night to confess - but only after trying to haul her mother’s body out to the back yard.