I always heard it as special ink that wouldn’t wash off, and it didn’t just spray your hand. Apparently it sprayed in a wide arc, so your hand and arm and upper body got sprayed, too, as well as any potential accomplices that might be standing close to you. The cops would come and know immediately who had pulled the fire alarm.
But I didn’t hear that one from my parents; like the special urine-detecting chemical in pools, it was knowledge passed down from the Big Kids.
If you don’t lift both your feet while we are driving over a bridge, the car will be too heavy and we will break the bridge and fall into the river.
The axe and split wood on the patch on my dad’s jacket was because Abe Lincoln had been in the same regiment. (Unit? Not sure of the right word.) To this day I don’t know what the patch really means because I totally believed him.
My sister was born in a hospital across the street from the zoo. My dad told her she’d actually been born at the zoo, was actually a monkey, and Mom and Dad thought she was so cute they smuggled her home. Her childhood nickname was, cleverly, “Monkey.” I thought she was totally in on the joke, but recently found out that she spent her early years filled with anxiety because maybe a) she really was a monkey, and b) the zoo officials would eventually find her and put her in a cage.
I also got told that the rainbows in oily puddles were because angels had touched them.
The call of what I later learned were mourning doves were great horned owls who were as big as me (age 4) and they lived in the woods outside our house. Actually, Dad may have actually believed that one. Seems like a pretty lame joke.
Also, packs of wild dogs lived in those woods, so listen for them and if you hear them, climb a tree.
Something I thought was a lie but turned out to be true: someone was setting bear-traps in the woods, so I needed to watch where I walked. We were in SE Wisconsin. There were no bear. Not even many coyotes. (Maybe the coyotes were what my parents were on about with the wild dogs.) My mom and I actually ran across one of the traps, and she angrily sprung it with a big stick. She tried to take the trap, but it was chained to something heavy. I was so proud of my normally nonconfrontational-at-all-costs mother.
I thought the dye/fire alarm thing was true. It isn’t?
(Side note: does stolen money explode with dye like in the movies?)
My husband, a retired firefighter, confirms that tamper dye in fire alarms does exist, but it’s never been in widespread use, so your elementary school probably didn’t have them. 
Here’s one company that sells it: http://www.safetymedia.com/index.php/product/00/AA67/Tamper-Dye
Actually, though this seems untrue, there’s actually evidence for it…
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021105080817.htm
If you keep making that face, it will freeze like that.
Don’t go outside with wet hair or you’ll catch your death of cold!
Don’t play around with firecrackers or you’ll lose a finger. I never once saw a kid with a finger missing, although I did know a man who lost his hand to a blasting cap.
See Dye Pack.
Less of a lie than a family in-joke, because my son was a preteen when it started and therefore wasn’t as gullible: the noise and light in a thunderstorm was generated by my parents in heaven fighting.
He a preteen when they both died, and knew about the tempestuous divorce, hence the joke.
However, there’s little evidence that antioxidants are good for you. Antioxidant - Wikipedia
And I see from that article they hadn’t determined if that had any effect in boosting levels in human plasma… so possibly a partial vindication? (Except that Mom was totally saying it because we were being picky eaters.)
Close, but I think it was all green and black. But I see it was the Reserves and Fort McCoy, so that matches up with that time period. I may be blending that memory with another patch which had a black horse head and diagonal stripe against a green background on a shield-shaped patch. He told me that was a 1st Calvary patch from his active duty in Vietnam. But Wikipedia shows it as a yellow background. Maybe it was really dirty. It was an old jacket. It’s got to be the right patch, though, because he jumped out of helicopters during the war.
Great. Now I’m all curious about stuff he will not talk about.
My father-in-law grew up in a small town the Allegheny mountains in Pennsylvania. He said that the old men who hung out at the general store used to tell him and his friends that there were “hoop snakes” in the mountains. These snakes would put their tails in their mouths and roll like hoops down the mountain slope, to chase children and attack. He said they were all terrified to go up the mountainside into the woods for fear that the hoop snakes would get them! He said he was an adult before he realized that the old guys were pulling his leg.
Of course, FIL told the same story to my son when he was little!
Ha! I was told - and believed for a good while - that thunder & lighting are both caused by clouds colliding during a storm.
Also that it was caused by angels bowling in heaven, but I didn’t believe that one. I always hated bowling, and figured that meant it couldn’t be heaven! 
I also got the thing from my mother that any sleep before midnight was worth double than that after midnight.
She also told me to never wear a coat indoors, you won’t feel the benefit when you go out.