Inspired by the “Weird things you believed as a kid” thread.
What kind of things did you convince your sibling of?
I’ll go first.
My sister doesn’t have any birthmarks. I told her that since she didn’t have any birthmarks, she wasn’t born. Hatched or something, I guess. Believed this for years.
I told her that you had to watch the clouds during lightning flashes in storms at night, because otherwise you couldn’t see the tornados coming. She was terrified of storms until she was about 13.
The Cody:
He has a friend whose younger sister was born in Roswell (yes, that Roswell). They convinced her that she was an alien.
We (that being my older brothers and I) convinced our younger brother that he was the only person in the world with a crack in his butt. He was very upset.
It didn’t help that he is 8 years younger than me, so we were all teenagers by the time he was 5, so I think he was convinced (for a little while anyway) that we knew everything.
My little sister believed that we had another little sister before her name Katie that Mom killed.
See, before the operation Mom use to have insane rages from time to time. Katie asked too many questions and bothered Mom too much so one day Mom killed her. Mom cut her body up and hid pieces of it everwhere. In fact, you were likely to find a finger or something if you started poking your nose some place you weren’t suppose to be (like your older sisters’ rooms). A photo in the photo album of a kid that my sister didn’t know (the daugher of a friend I think) and the lie was complete.
She beleived if for a couple of days until she worked up the nerve to ask Mom about it.
At the tender age of around 7 or so, I had convinced my younger brother that he was left on the doorsteps by gypsies. He belived it for about two years.
Since I’m the baby of my family, I couldn’t really convince my sibs of anything, but they had fun with me and with each other. There were 5 of us all together, all girls; We alternated hair color, too: child one was blonde, 2 brunette, 3 blonde and so on. One night, when child two was about 7, my mother found her sleeping in the stairwell. Turns out child one had convinced her she was an orphan (there were only the three of them at the time, and the oldest had told her that if she really belonged to the family, she would have blonde hair, too).
When I was very young, I used to talk to myself without realizing I was speaking out loud. This allowed my sister, who was two years older than me, to know things about me I wouldn’t expect her to know. She used this to convince me that she was a witch, and that if I didn’t do what she said, she’d make me live in the fish tank ( ). This particular sister was really mean, because we had a niece, 10 years younger than said sister, and sister picked on her, too. My sister has a partial denture (from a bicycling accident), and she used to convince my niece (who was about 5 at the time) that she had swallowed her false teeth and pooped them out, and would make our niece go look for them in the toilet! My sister is 44 now, and still loves messing with kids like that.
In high school, I was a studious smart type and my (one year younger) sister was the cool, socially hip type. We went to different schools (she to an all-girls Catholic school, me to an all-boys Catholic school). One day she came to me and begged me to write a report for her geography class on the nature of latitude and longitude. Being a good brother, I agreed to do so. I wrote a long paper with lots of footnotes and a bibliography and everything. It was very impressive looking. In the report I said that exact knowledge of latitude and longitute did not exist until the time of the Second World War, because the technology did not exist before then to obtain the arial photographs that showed the latitude and longitude lines on the surface of the planet. That, I said in the paper, was why really old maps didn’t have the lines – they didn’t know about them because there was no way to see them at that time. All the citations and the books in the bibiography were, needless to say, non-existent and entirely made up by me.
She turned the report in. I can’t even begin to tell you how angry she was when it was returned to her with a failing grade.
Some years later, I convinced my very young niece (perhaps twenty months? Not sure exactly) that she had a tail. I told her that everyone had a tail, and that she just hadn’t noticed because everyone wore clothes all the time. When she replied that she didn’t have a tail, I told her that she did in fact have a tail, just like a monkey, but she couldn’t see it because it was behind her. A little while later, I saw her naked in her room looking over her shoulder, turning around and around in an effort to get a view of her tail.
This niece was (still is, of course) the daughter of the very same sister mentioned above.
My sister spent most of her childhood being sick. One time, her hand was peeling (strep, or something). Having just seen the “You’ve got LEPROSY!” Simpsons episode, I was, perhaps, inspired.
“Uh oh! You know what that means. You’ve got leprosy!”
“Leprosy? What’s that?”
“Ah,” said GMRyujin, “That means your hand’s going to keep peeling, and then, it’s just going to fall off. And then your other hand. And your arms…”
She had that little kid look of horror for a moment, then, “Nuh-uh, you’re just making that up.”
“Alllllllright.”
She bought it. She asked her teacher if she could write with her other hand, because she had leprosy and her hand was going to fall off. She told my mom, who tried to tell her she was crazy, but she wouldn’t buy it. This went on for about a week, til they went back to the doctor. She was crying because her hand was going to fall off. Finally, the doctor told her she didn’t have leprosy and whoever told her that was really mean.
Not a sib, but the girl next door told me that when you go to sleep, your heart stops beating. I used to fall asleep with my had on my chest to see if it was true.
Ah, where to start… I was so mean to my little brothers. I tied a towel around Kevie’s neck and told him he was Superman. He jumped off the top of the stairs.
Years and years later, I was wearing a brace for elbow tendinitis, the kind that encircles your forearm close to your elbow. Cousin Elizabeth was 7 or 8, right at the time that she was starting to figure out that all the stuff I told her was total bullshit, but young and adoring enough to still fall for it if I tried hard enough.
She asked what the brace was for and I told her that I had cut my arm off at work and it was holding my arm on. “Naaah,” she said, an uncertain smile on her face. “Oh yes,” I assured her. I worked on her for a little while longer and then forgot all about it.
Until dinner, when I absentmindedly took the brace off, and I heard a gasp from Elizabeth, and I turned to her and her face was white and a hand was over in mouth as she looked on in horror.
She had believed me after all and thought my arm would drop off right there at the table. Good times, good times.
In the apartment that I and my little bro were growing up, the stairs were a red strip with cream ones on each side. I convinced my brother that we were not to walk on the red part of the stairs in certain months. all was fine, untill my brother asked my elder sis not ot walk on the red part, as it was not the month to do so. The rest is predictable, sis corrected him, and he never trusted me again, till I puilled another one
My older sister and my cousin told my brother and me that we “slumbered” in our sleep. We went crying to our parents, who promptly laughed their asses off at us. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that humiliation.
My uncle told us, and every other little kid within earshot, that he lost his front finger to the knuckle by sticking into a fan. Scared all the little kids into not touching a box fan. (He actually lost it working as a roughneck.) He would also tell us that he lost it from picking his nose, but none of us fell for that one.
Oh my, let’s see. There was the one little lie when I convinced my sister she was adopted and that her real parents had great big bulging eyes. They warned my parents to start taping my sister’s eyes shut at night or else by the time she turned twelve her eyes would bulge horribly too. Even when my parents assured her that it was an ugly lie, I just told her that they were in denial. I think she was secretly afraid of her eyes bulging for years.
And later on when we made our own bed I convinced her that if the sheets or blanket were put on upside down then you would have terrible nightmares. I am a little type A and it bugs me if the flowers are not blooming up towards the headboard. BTW, my sis is now 28 and she admits that she has to put the sheets on the right way.
I also convinced her I had a complete other life and family that I went to when she thought I was going to school. I was even a mouseketeer on The Mickey Mouse Club. There actually was a girl on there that looked like me and my sis would watch it just to see me during the day. She was soooo jealous. But I would entertain her with the adventures of my other family though. After all, I had a horse of my very own!
My best friend’s daughter was home sick with the flu. I told her it was the avian flu that was going around. When she went back to school the next week she told the teacher that she was home sick with the avian flu. The teacher got a big kick out of that and told her that she wasn’t a chicken.
She didn’t speak to me for weeks.
Of course, this was many years ago. Before scientists discovered that you really can get the avain flu from chickens. So it was funnier then.
All of my siblings and I are OCD so there was alot of ‘don’t step on the sidewalk cracks or you’ll have bad luck’ and ‘touch every light switch when you come home’ going around.
We also convinced my brother that dad (a chemist) had brought him home from the lab instead of being born. For years, he thought he was a failed lab experiment that dad thought was cute.
I told my younger sister that if you cut your Barbie’s hair it would grow back. She believed me and took her favorite one and cut the hair really short. She kept waiting for it to grow back and after a week she finally decided I had lied and told our mother. I then had to give her my favorite Barbie.
When we were a little bit older I told her she had been adopted. Any time after that when we would be in public I would point to some random woman walking around and say, “There she is!!! Your REAL mom.” My sister would start crying and trying to pull away from our mother to go find her “real mom.”
God, that was funny. I can’t imagine why we aren’t close now.
I was a latchkey kid. One day I was making us all some french fries and a little grease caught fire in the well under the frying pan. I dumped salt on it to put it out. For years afterwards my sister believed that salt cooled hot food.
When my mom was a teenager and my uncle was in elementary school (circa 1965), they lived next to an airport.
When a bunch of the streets were blocked off due to a presidential motorcade, my mom convinced my uncle that the street was blocked because the Soviets were coming to invade. She told him he was to pack a bag promptly, because they were leaving.
When my grandma came home from work, she was furious.
When I saw this title I thought of something I convinced my sister of when she was back in 7th or 8th grade. I was a freshman in H.S. then, I think. My sister was asking me some questions about the fall of the Berlin wall and for some reason I decided to see how far off from history I could go before she noticed. She never did… and ended up saying in front of her class that four men from China in a covert mission pushed over the Berlin wall.
If I knew she was going to say it in front of the class I probably wouldn’t have said it.
). This particular sister was really mean, because we had a niece, 10 years younger than said sister, and sister picked on her, too. My sister has a partial denture (from a bicycling accident), and she used to convince my niece (who was about 5 at the time) that she had swallowed her false teeth and pooped them out, and would make our niece go look for them in the toilet! My sister is 44 now, and still loves messing with kids like that.