In my elementary school P.E. class, we played a game that involved throwing around and catching some rubber balls, with a big red ball that the teacher would roll at us and told us never to touch because it was “poisoned”. I genuinely believed that the ball was poisoned and if I touched it I would have to go to the hospital.
What outrageous stuff did adults tell you when you were a kid that you believed like the gullible sap you were?
When I was bad (well, annoying) on road trips my parents would threaten to put a sign in the window with a price on it and sell me. I’d beg them to make me expensive. They had no idea I believed them.
For years my dad told me stories about this Indian Brave named “Falling Rock”; we kept driving past these areas marked “Watch Falling Rock” and my dad had me convinced to look out for this Indian guy…
Wait! Falling Rock was an indian princess! I’m still looking for her.
When my grandfather didn’t want to get out of his chair for some stupid thing I wanted him to do or see, he’d move his knee cap around and tell me he couldn’t walk right then, because he had a bone in his knee. Not really a lie, since, indeed, he had a bone in his knee. I never questioned why he could walk at other times.
A chaperone at band camp convinced me that my burning lips were due to a lack of vegetables and not sunburn. I ate more vegetables.
All of a piece of bread’s vitamins were contained in the crust. Same with potatoes (although in that case it was the skin, and not the crust).
My sainted maternal unit told me this when I wouldn’t eat the crusts of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
I was actually traumatized when I discovered that she had LIED to me.
Really.
I am still in therapy over this.
:dubious:
My father once told me that lebanon bologna (a regional thing) was horsemeat. I didn’t eat lebanon for almost 10 years.
Oh, I forgot - bread crusts make your hair curly. Only I didn’t want curly hair. (And also I didn’t and still don’t like crusts.)
My Mom told me that one too! I didn’t believe her even then but I do love my curly hair.
Grown-ups told me that God was real. Also Santa. But one of the oddest was that my father claimed that “Schuylkill” was an Indian name. (It is obviously Dutch and means something like “hidden river”. Actually nowadays we know it means “perpetual traffic jam”.)
My parents told me I was the kidnapped Romanov princess Anastasia. I used to beg them to send me back to Russia, where I’d be royalty and not have to deal with my evil older sister.
I really did believe that if I made weird faces/bent my ears, it would stay that way forever.
Wait, that’s not true of potatoes? I’m sure I’ve heard that from a reputable source!
Quite the opposite. Potato skin is a cork-like substance that’s actually a little bit poisonous in large doses.
ETA - your mom? Not a reputable source, probably. Mine wasn’t.
Charlie Brown actually said that once. I’m not sure if it was in the strip or one of the specials.
One time when I lost a ‘baby’ tooth, my Granddad told me if I never touched the space where it fell out, the new one would grow in gold. I tried so hard not to but eventually did. I was crushed.
(Our only toothy smiley).
My grandmother told me that if I ate chicken wings I could learn to fly. All because I HATED wings and that’s what was left over for the children (olden days when all adults were served first). She’s lucky I only tried to “fly” from the roof of the shed into a snowbank.
When I was a kid there would occasionally be heard some kind of air-raid sounding siren off in the far distance, I don’t know what for. My father told me it was a moose, off in the hills.
When I was a young 'un, my grandpa used to talk to me in ‘Chinese’.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that he was talking gibberish.
mmm
Oh, I remember another - my dad used to armwrestle me and let me win, and I just thought I was naturally talented at arm wrestling. (I was, like, six. He was, like, 6’2".)