# Weird things you believed as a kid. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 16, 2002, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977 "2002-12-16T00:30:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![spittingkitten](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e495f1/32.png) [@spittingkitten](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spittingkitten)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/181 "2004-03-13T00:02:41Z")
YAY **Horkus\_Boy**! I thought I was the only one who was afraid of E.T. too! People have always laughed at me for that. I couldn’t even watch the movie tho-I distinctly remember hiding underneath the dash of the car at the drive-in for most of it! Thanks for the laugh w/ the “creepy extendable neck” thing, you put it _perfectly_! ---
**Author:** ![yellowval](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/919ad9/32.png) [@yellowval](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yellowval)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/182 "2004-03-13T00:22:15Z")
I thought that my aunt sang the State Farm Insurance song because my uncle is a State Farm agent. (Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there!) I also thought that the gas station attendant washed our windows with gasoline because, well, I don’t know why exactly. ---
**Author:** ![Marvel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Marvel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marvel)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/183 "2004-03-13T01:18:10Z")
> [@Lobsang](#): > > So, what silly thing did you think/believe when you were a kid? True story- I had heard of something called “Passover” and I asked my Dad what that was. All I knew is that it happened sometime around Easter (so said the kitchen calendar). My dad replied that it was the time the Jews “passed” on observing Easter, the way one “passes” on desert if yo’re full!! For what its worth, I’m guessing he really didn’t know himself but didn’t want to say “I don’t know” to his youngest and most inquisitive daughter. Patty ---
**Author:** ![Horkus\_Boy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/4491bb/32.png) [@Horkus\_Boy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horkus_Boy)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/184 "2004-03-13T02:15:51Z")
Oh, and on the subject of movies that scared me as a kid. That scene from The Muppet Movie where Animal eats a bunch of Bunson Honeydew’s growth pills and grows enormous and bursts through the roof of a building. I saw it in the theater. I have this extremely clear memory of seeing parts of Enormous Animal through the gaps in my fathers fingers. Apparently (and I don’t remember this part very well) I started screaming bloody murder and he had to cover my eyes until the scene was over. I watched the movie again at the age of 23 or so. I had the strangest combination of deja vu and panic when I saw that scene, as if something that I had always known was lurking in the dark places of the world had finally come for me. It’s actually one of my favorite movies now, because Jim Henson is a genius. But there was that moment that gave me the wiggins. ---
**Author:** ![Horkus\_Boy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/4491bb/32.png) [@Horkus\_Boy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horkus_Boy)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/185 "2004-03-13T02:41:57Z")
> [@spittingkitten](#): > > YAY **Horkus\_Boy**! I thought I was the only one who was afraid of E.T. too! People have always laughed at me for that. I couldn’t even watch the movie tho-I distinctly remember hiding underneath the dash of the car at the drive-in for most of it! Thanks for the laugh w/ the “creepy extendable neck” thing, you put it _perfectly_! We should start an E.T. support group. This is actually the first time I’ve ever mentioned my E.T. fear to the world at large. When I saw that movie the kids (the girls anyway) in my school were saying things like, “E.T., ooh he’s adorable!”. I was thinking, “Yeah, if you like bug-eyed things that lurk in the shed at night!” ---
**Author:** ![talking\_head](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a8b319/32.png) [@talking\_head](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/talking_head)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/186 "2004-03-13T17:23:16Z")
I recall being 14 and my brother was 6. I came home one day and found the strangest thing all over the walls in his room. He had colored my pantiliners with wings, removed the tape and stuck them all over his room. He thought they were little airplanes. Also, someone mentioned men wiping the head of their penis after a pee. My father passed away shortly after my brother’s birth. I remember my mother potty training him and teaching him to wipe those dribbles away. I believed that if you ate too much sugar, you would get worms in your belly. Thanks mom! I suppose that’s one way to keep a child from having sweets. I was horrified of candy, kool-ade, fruit loops and the list goes on… ---
**Author:** ![talking\_head](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a8b319/32.png) [@talking\_head](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/talking_head)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/187 "2004-03-13T17:38:18Z")
> [@SP2263](#): > > This is embarrassing. I remember seeing the birth of a baby on TV. The mother must have had all her pubic hair shaved and the camera was really close up so it wasn’t obvious from where the baby was actually emerging. I was quite a bit older (ten maybe?) and thought babies emerged from between a woman’s breasts. That’s cute SP2263 and a natural assumption. I know people who believe that children emerged from a womans backside. UGH. My siblings and I were all adopted from a Catholic agency. I naturally assumed that scary old nuns who were divine messengers delivered babies to all parents. Yes, the ladies with a head, hands and feet that emerged from the black robe. They also didn’t perform bodily functions like eating and using the bathroom. I’m amazed that we’re all fairly well-balanced, rational adults after reading these too funny stories. ---
**Author:** ![Lobelia\_Overhill](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/54ee81/32.png) [@Lobelia\_Overhill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobelia_Overhill)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2004, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/188 "2004-03-13T23:51:47Z")
> [@ForgottenLore](#): > > When I was, I dunno, nine or ten, I became convinced that I was an alien. I do not remember what exactly led to this conclusion, but I was certain that I had been adopted by my parents, and that my “real” Mom and Dad would swoop down in their UFO any day now and take me home. All those fake baby pictures in Mom’s scrapbooks didn’t fool me for a second! OMG! Me too!!! > [@ForgottenLore](#): > > A little later (or earlier, or maybe at the same time) I decided that I was telekinetic. There was no actual _evidence_ of telekinesis at all, but I was quite sure that if I thought hard enough at some object in just the right way, I could make it move with the power of my mind. I used to practice this a lot. It never worked, dammit. I thought I was telepathic and could control other people with my mind … ---
**Author:** ![look\_hergo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/85e7bf/32.png) [@look\_hergo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/look_hergo)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/189 "2004-03-14T01:58:10Z")
When I was about five, I thought that your brain was a shiny gold ring in your head (like a wedding ring) that just hung around on some strings in your skull. ---
**Author:** ![look\_hergo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/85e7bf/32.png) [@look\_hergo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/look_hergo)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/190 "2004-03-14T02:08:11Z")
Oh! At six, I thought that only men smoked. I was amazed at a friend’s birthday party to see her mother with a cigarette. Couldn’t have been more taken aback if I had seen her dad wearing a dress and breastfeeding. ---
**Author:** ![DevilDan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e495f1/32.png) [@DevilDan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DevilDan)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/191 "2004-03-14T02:22:46Z")
Weird things I believed as a kid? History books. Adults. Weird things I believed _in_: Inherent human goodness. Natural morality. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/192 "2004-03-14T04:49:24Z")
This one’s not especially cute or funny, but I was in my mid-teens before I realized that Bob Dylan was still alive. For some reason, I’d assumed he’d died back in the '60s. I knew that Hendrix, Joplin, and many other big names of the era had died at a young age, and I think I may even have heard of Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident and figured that it proved fatal. Then I heard about a current Dylan performance and I went, “Wait a minute…he’s _alive_?” I was working with a handicap when it came to rock history, though. In the mid '90s, I discovered that my mother thought Jim Morrison had sung for The Who. She wasn’t just mixing up the names either. She could match Morrison’s name to his face and knew that he had been dead for years, and she could identify The Who as the band that did _Tommy_. She seemed skeptical as to the very existence of Roger Daltrey and refused to believe that she could be wrong about such a thing. After I provided her with a cite (good training for my future on the SDMB!), she said that The Doors and The Who always sounded the same anyway. ---
**Author:** ![picunurse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/7bcc69/32.png) [@picunurse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/picunurse)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 7:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/193 "2004-03-14T07:52:39Z")
When I was about 4, I think, I heard a news story saying that Mount Rainier was a “sleeping” volcano, and could erupt at any time. I took that to mean that it would … tomorrow or next Thursday. I would hide under the covers so I wouldn’t know when Our house was buried under lava. Lava was the whole mountain, liquified. In my mind, it retained its general shape, but dashed straight to our house. I was probably 10 before I stopped worrying about it. I never told anyone. I didn’t want the rest of the family to be as frightened as I was. ---
**Author:** ![mkl12](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b4bc9f/32.png) [@mkl12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mkl12)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 10:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/194 "2004-03-14T10:41:17Z")
> [@Lamia](#): > > but I was in my mid-teens before I realized that Bob Dylan was still alive. For some reason, I’d assumed he’d died back in the '60s. Thank you, **Lamia** , I used to believe the same thing until … now! When I read your post I checked some websites and was amazed to find that apparently, he’s still alive. FTR, I’m 25, so that’s not really a childhood believe. ---
**Author:** ![Shirley\_Ujest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shirley\_Ujest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shirley_Ujest)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/195 "2004-03-14T15:21:45Z")
When I was about 7 or 8, I received a \*Kiss Me I’m Irish \* t-shirt. Everyone who saw me wear this would kiss me. My friends dad loved to chase me around the yard trying to kiss me, making me run nilly willy away from him at super sonic speed. I thought this shirt gave everyone permission to kiss me. I hated that shirt. ---
**Author:** ![picunurse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/7bcc69/32.png) [@picunurse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/picunurse)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/196 "2004-03-14T17:02:31Z")
> [@DKW](#): > > The first VCR we ever owned…a top-loading tape player-style box with levers, where you couldn’t rewind or fast forward while playing, and it didn’t have a timer, or even a clock…was the most insanely wicked cool thing _ever_. [sub]tiny hijack[/sub] We had an answering machine that weighed over 20 lbs. It had a full sized reel to reel tape, a hard wired mic, a lot like a stage mic, but smaller. It had a “remote” for picking up messages away from home, which was nothing more than a small play-back unit recorded with one’s three tone entry code. You held it next to the mouth piece of the phone and pressed the button to activate the machine. ---
**Author:** ![The\_world\_s\_most\_deadliest](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@The\_world\_s\_most\_deadliest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_world_s_most_deadliest)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/197 "2004-03-14T22:21:40Z")
When I was little (4-5 years) my family and I used to go to Florida every winter for my father’s work. We always went near Orlando, and I remember interpreting the word as “our land-o”. (Always wondered why they threw in that chipper little “o” at the end.) I was saddened when I found out central Florida wasn’t actually ours. You have to cover every inch of yourself with the covers when you’re in bed, otherwise the monsters can get you. (I think I still believe that subconsiously.) When a guy got a boner, it was actually a bone that pushed out from inside his body into his penis to make it hard. (I believed that longer than I like to admit.) Along the earliest memory path: I remember being very young - just learning to walk, so around 1 year old? My father is holding up an Oreo cookie and walking backwards so I would walk across the room toward him. While proper language skills probably eluded me at that age, I still distinctly remember thinking something along the lines of “Yeah, I want a f$#king cookie!” ---
**Author:** ![failureisafunctionofpotential](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9a140/32.png) [@failureisafunctionofpotential](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/failureisafunctionofpotential)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/198 "2004-03-14T22:53:42Z")
Lungs were tiny, kidney-shaped glass containers in your neck, one on each side of the Adam’s apple. I knew for some reason that they had to be glass, not plastic, even though they could break that way. The body was made up of a skeleton, random organs (heart, kidney, liver, and whatever else I could remember that day) floating around in blood (which I guess must have had the consistency of Jello except for a more liquid layer under the skin), and skin/hair. (No muscles or anything; the only bones were in your limbs, neck, and head.) After my brother and this other kid told me that I should wake up the giant concrete troll under the Aurora Bridge in Seattle, I believed for months in pre-kindergarten that sticking a pocket knife into a statue would bring it to life. I knew for a fact that our cattle would try to eat me if I went outside alone wearing pants with flowers on them. (I had walked with my mom to check the cattle once while holding a chocolate chip cookie and wearing said pants; the cows were attracted to the cookie but I thought it was the pants and so was terrified.) After I found out about sperm and eggs, but before I found out about sex, I thought women got pregnant through French kissing. (Probably I mangled that idea from some nature show or another.) The most embarassing one: Despite always listening to Neil Young, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, the oldies radio stations and that sort of thing with my parents, as a 5-year-old, I claimed to have full knowledge of all current popular music. On early memories: I have a definite memory from when I was three; I have probably made-up memories from age two. In pre-kindergarten, I was seriously convinced that my frown wasn’t “frowny” enough and probably people couldn’t recognize it. Some of the older kids (they could have been 1st graders, they could have been 8th graders, all I know is that they were bigger) had my entire group of friends (including me) convinced that a child killer lived in the house next to the back corner of the field at school, and a boogy man lived in the little dip in the grass about 20 feet from the playground. Meanwhile, the “Bear-Hunt” with toliet-paper-tuble “binoculars” in preschool left me theorally convinced that a bear lived in the woods by school. I also believed anything my brother told me. ---
**Author:** ![bigsister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@bigsister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bigsister)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/199 "2004-03-14T23:23:36Z")
I believed that chocolate milk came from brown cows and white milk from white cows. I believed that if I accidently swallowed a watermelon seed that I’d have a watermelon growing in my tummy - like all the other women walking around with one in their tummy. I believed that each state looked differently, and when I passed from Ohio to Indiana (my first out of state trip when I was in junior high), I was shocked to see that they had to post a sign when the new state started, and there wasn’t a huge black line to distinguish the states. ---
**Author:** ![failureisafunctionofpotential](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9a140/32.png) [@failureisafunctionofpotential](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/failureisafunctionofpotential)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2004, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977/200 "2004-03-14T23:31:55Z")
Speaking of states- The first time I went to Oregon (the summer before 1st grade, I think) I freaked out when we went shopping, because we didn’t have any “Oregon” money. I had been to California before and knew that it had the same money as Washington, but I thought Oregon was a seperate nation, or something. Luckily my mom went to an ATM before I brought up this fear and so I escaped ridicule. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-things-you-believed-as-a-kid/142977.md?page=11)