Weird things you believed as a kid

We had this thread before and some good ideas came out of it.

So What were some misconceptions or notions you had as a kid, have you ever used them to inspire lore for a game?

As for myself, I thought that all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.

I thought that magic was more common in the Time of Jesus and began to fade when he died, which is why miracles dont happen anymore.

I also misunderstood what a confession was and thought that priests had the ability to remove your soul and give you a new one

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Never understood where it came from, but when I was a kid I kept having recurring nightmares about a monster that lived in corners. Basically, if you got too close to the corner of a room that was when it could get you. It'd just sorta phase through the wall and grab ya.

I used that and made a cool encounter out of it in a modern game. Party was investigating a couple of missing kids. Last thing every parent told them was that they had just sent their child to sit in the corner for misbehaving, then the next thing they knew their kid was gone. It was neat having the player go from "Oh, well obviously the kid just ran away because they were upset" to "What the fuck? How could ALL of these kids have run away?" Actual fight with it was super frustrating as it'd just nope away back into its corner if it ever felt too threatened.

corners are creepy
i was always half expecting to see some kind of a monster crouching in the corner when i walked into my room as a kid

I thought spiders are born from snots.


Not really a belief but a really common recurring nightmare I had. People made dinosaurs from the bones of the old ones, and usually in November something happened and they got revived and roamed the streets.
It was actually kinda like they used to release bulls in the streets on Spain, except this time it didn't last a day, but till every dino was killed by the hunters
I remember there was some sort of competition between them but I have no idea how this worked.

I also remember a vivid image of entire brontosaurus skeleton waiting outside my window and me thinking how it's going to be alive soon.

It was fucking terryfing

Mirrors.
Everything about that evil Satan-glass has always freaked me out.

In the fall, our family dumps our leaves in the woods adjacent to our yard. When I was young, I was playing in the woods when I came across one of the old leaf piles, half of which had already decomposed so it looked like a big dirt mound. There was a piece of newspaper in it or something because I remember seeing the paper with a person's face on it and my young mind made the logical leap that that person was buried there. I thought it was some sort of vampire and was horrified every night that it would break inside and hurt my family.
I had a big /x/ phase through childhood, undoubtedly fueled by the X-Files, so I had a lot of paranormal delusions like that. I am trying to incorporate them all into a Call of Cthulhu setting, but I don't think it will ever see the light of day considering my friends are adamant about sticking to DnD.

I believed in my mom's "magic needle" for removing splinters for an embarrassingly long time.

Magic is just a natural part of the world when you are a kid, even when you are old enough that if someone asked you about magic you would say it was fake, you have unexamined/unarticulated beliefs in things like Santa.

Which is probably how the swarthy immigrant cultists in Lovecraft stories like the Horror at Red Hook feel. Point is, children are creepy cultists and we should build a wall to keep them out.

Are you people me?!!

Anyway, as a kid my dad trolled me hard. He said that ice cream trucks only played music when they were out of ice cream, and I believed that for years. Not only that, but because I believed him (dad would never lie to me, right?) whenever my mom would ask if I wanted ice cream I would give HER a dirty look. I thought she was being mean, getting my hopes up for ice cream and then dashing them.

I also misunderstood what a soul was, I thought is was some kind of creature that lived in your chest and fed on good behavior.

And if you're bad, it pops out.

I heard what sounded like my mother call my name in a lilting, lyrical tone often as a child. It was never her.

When I was little, us kids believed that all the storm drains and sewer systems in my little rural town were connected and formed a gigantic labyrinth beneath my little rural town. In the hillside above the public baseball fields, right next to the town hall, there was a concrete wall into which a small, round service tunnel disappeared. We all believed that this tunnel was the entrance, and that an underground world of adventure awaited us inside if we were just brave enough to enter. To my knowledge, none of us ever did.

My dad pulled that same shit with me.

For example, he told me that Santa sends your parents a bill in January, which is why he doesnt visit kids in Africa,

Whenever my mom was out and I'd ask where she was he'd say "the milkman, ran away with her". See we didnt have a milk man and I was too young to know exactly what he meant so I thought there was a serial killer going around kidnapping housewives known as "the milkman "

Asshole dads are just the worst, and the best somehow.

My dad also used to grab my hair and just hold it. I'd jerk away from him and say "Stop pulling my hair!" even though I was pulling it myself. He thought it was the funniest shit, and did it to my mom too.

Then there was the time at a Chinese restaurant. I love fried pork, and one day my dad said "You do know that's made of dolphin, right?" I was horrified. Still ate it, though, damn delicious. Believed that one for longer than I should've, too.

Remember to plaster your corners, lest the hounds come for you.

>I thought that magic was more common in the Time of Jesus and began to fade when he died, which is why miracles dont happen anymore.

Some sects actually believe miracles stopped after the apostles died. Not Catholics, though.

I remember watching an advertisment that showed a scene of some kids putting a fish drawing in a fridge. Later this drawing turned into a real living fish.
After that i believed that every drawing you put in a fridge will become a real thing.
Tried that myself with my own fish(decided to start simple), i wondered for a long time why picture didn't turn real and what did i do wrong.

I used to think peak oil and global warming were going to destroy the world by about this time last year.

Wait, these are a thing?

>Because of their relationship with the angles of time, they can materialize through any corner if it is fairly sharp—120° or less. When a Hound is about to appear, it materializes first as smoke pouring from the corner, and finally the head emerges followed by the body. It is said that once a human becomes known to one of these creatures, a Hound of Tindalos will pursue the victim through anything to reach its quarry. A person risks attracting their attention by travelling through time.

Oh that's awesome. Never knew there was a monster like this.

I used to think levitating was a thing. I spent countless hours looking for videos on youtube and didn't understand why people were so skeptic of something as simple as levitating. Same thing for telekinesis. A lot of telekinesis videos used the same kind of object with they called "psi-roller" or whatever and it made it look very legitimate to my young mind.

Also, my sister once described some movie about slaves switching bodies with children to my extremely religious and superstitious mom, who told her that could happen. So for a few months I also thought black magic and body-stealing was real.

Probably because of my mom, I also thought God heard every time you swore and that you needed to apologize when you did it. I was terrified of saying "bad words" until I was about 6.

I forgot the best one. My mom kept going on and on about how people "stole" children, so somehow I anthropomorphized the concept into a single guy in a black sweater and a ski mask who carried a huge sack full of children around

That's a cool design/interpretation. Also, is that that weird pelvic bone you see on some therapods, or a barb penis?

Modern day Krampus

I thought the same thing when I heard someone say that an old lady had been robbed.

Well, seems like it's a common to believe in magic as a kid.
I believed that only adults could use the full power of the magic wand, the only thing i could do is to force random passersby randomly change direction while looking behind the window.

If you were a good person and did good things. nothing bad will happen

My parents always told me never to go into the old factory near where we lived because it was a "deathtrap". Misunderstood and thought that meant that a thing called Deathtrap lived there and killed anyone who came in, only strengthened my belief when some teenager managed to set himself on fire when trying to arson the place, thought there was a fire demon or something hiding in there.

I had a brief period where I thought my dad was involved in illegal stuff. Now I was super young at the point, so I don't remember it well, but as far as I can remember it came from the fact that I confused the words "porno" and "polo". Basically I happened to catch a news report about how bad "porno" was (might have been about child porn, I dunno), but I had no idea what that word meant. However, I knew my dad owned polo shirts. So I laid 2 and 2 together and got 5, and ended up with the idea that my dad wore a shirt that connected him to some mysterious bad stuff.

Also I was deadly afraid of having my back against the dark. I wasn't afraid of the dark if I had my back against a wall, but if I didn't know what was behind me I would just imagine something grabbing after me.

But I can't really remember believing in magic, imaginary friends or specific monsters. Just general nasty stuff in the dark. I was probably just a very boring child.

Also thought that there was a dedicated section of the government that put the leaves back on the tree's and plants every spring, I wasn't the most intelligent child.

I don't remember how old I was, maybe... 6?
But I used to be geniunely terrified of Vampires, like I thought they were real and completely unstoppable.
I really wish somebody had brought up the concept of Vampire Hunters up.

My dad had a green card when I was a child, he showed me his green card and I read the word "Alien" on it and thought that meant I was half alien and my dad accidentally showed me something that was supposed to be a secret. This happened when Men in Black had just come out. I remember asking my dad if he was a cockroach alien or one of the good kind, with out missing a beat my dad said "hold on let me check" and reached for his neck as if to pull of his face mask. My sister (who was in on it) ran screaming from the room while I continually begged my dad not to. My mom would later explain what "alien" meant on the card.

I can see a cyberpunk campaign where the PCs overthrow the Polo Shirt Society controlling the world as a shadow government

I don't even know why but a nightmare from when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old about being chased by a skeleton holding a cup of sugar, it happened in like the upper floors of the apartment building we lived in back then, but on the outside of it like on the outside windowsills and shit, so I'm running away from a skeleton holding out a cup of sugar towards me along the outside windowsills of a yellow apartment building except that we're also so high up that you can't see the ground, it's a bright sunny day and all but it's like there's just me and the skeleton alone in this world. It was pretty weird

The people that live in the walls.
Usually seven or eight feet tall, sometimes headless, had long claw-like fingernails, and thin enough to move around inside the walls although if they got out and had room to grow they would quickly become morbidly obese. Like to eat people and wear the bones of their victims. Will sometimes disguise themselves as normal humans and live among the homeless during the day before returning to the walls at night.

Fucking hell that is one detailed nightmare for a kid to have!

Though, I also "believed" in this hand that lived in the bathtub drain. It was a real person's dead hand, and it would sneak up out of the drain and try to strangle me or grab me if I wasn't paying attention. Never took my eye off that drain until I was like 9.

I once thought I was going to prison because the computer said it had performed an illegal operation.

I used to believe that hair was the memories you couldn't hold onto anymore. At about the age of ten I... continued believing it but thought it was some kind of chemical thing, like maybe memories are stored in chemicals and those chemicals deteriorate into hair?

My dad denies ever telling me this bullshit, but I'm pretty sure it was him.

HAHAHAHAahaha.. ah.. oh why

As a young kid I firmly believed that after you are born you are a baby, then you grow up a bit and become a kid, then you grow up some more and become a mom, and then grow up even more to become a daddy.

I had a neighbor to my summer house who had some "Venus de Milo" and other statues replicas on his garden that I could only see well at night. I thought they were some kind of ghost that liked to carefully watch humans but didn't mean any harm, didn't stop me form being afraid but I didn't mind much, and I used to be scared to shit of everything paranormal.

There was also a time my sister told me something about there being many "Anons"(not saiying my name, but it's not very common, specially in my country) in the world and I was like:
Oh shit! There are other MEs? Neat.

Misbehaving kids turn into gypsies. The one visit I had in juvenile detention center certainly didn't dispel the belief.

This is a thread for misconceptions, user.

I believed the abuse would end. That people were better than this.

I don't remember much of my childhood beliefs... but I think I was afraid of clicking the "Start" button on the family computer, because I didn't know what it would start.

I like you

If a cat looks at your back while you are walking up a staircase, it will kill you.

does this look like /x/ to you, newfag?

Its actually primal fear of the hounds of tindalos
Just the same reason you don't let ypur feet and arms dangle from the bed

>>>/tumblr/

Well my rape joke certainly backfired

I believed black people pooped white/vanilla colored shit.

You got it all wrong. The people in the walls were midgets who turned their victims to stone and used them to make more walls.

But user thats not wrong

My upstairs shower had one of those glass doors with space at the top, and the floor always creaked and I was terrified that if I showered in it, a pterodactyl would break in through the window, crawl through the space and then eat me.

>As for myself, I thought that all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.
you did open this thread years ago. I remember you.

The Codex Astartes was a good thing

No fedorable answers?

Sincerely doubt it. I had the exact same belief as a child as OP. I'm sure it is common.

I thought that all ATMs were connected to a personal vault of cash and wondered if there were any that could hand out jewellery.

>I'm sure it is common.
Yup, especially if you're ESL and your primary language has one of those as a implicitly female word and the other as male. Or it could be the other way around ( кoт / coбaкa )

Also was worried about being sucked down the plughole for a long time. bathing was fine but as soon as someone mentioned it ending I sprang out screaming.

Oh, can I have a Whippet please?

>she calls you from the kitchen
>a closet door opens and she pulls you inside
>"shh, I heard it too"

My weirdest belief as a kid was a chronic fear that on my way to the bathroom school I would slip into a parallel universe where boys were called girls an girls would call boys and I would then get in trouble for walking into the wrong restroom.

>priests had the ability to remove your soul and give you a new one
This is now cannon for my setting.

* bathroom AT school

I connected the notion that the only things to survive a nuclear war or similar global disaster would be rats and other small hardy animals and early mammals being small ratlike things, and got the idea that time was essentially cyclical and at some point in the future mammals would go extinct and be replaced by dinosaurs again.

Also, upon learning that there are stars that are so far away from Earth that the light of them we see now left the star before dinosaurs went extinct, I got the idea that the the light of the star could somehow "reset" things to the way they were when it left the star. I didn't seriosuly believe that but thought it'd make for a cool premise of a story or something. Like all of the sudden there's a flash in the sky, and bam! Suddenly you've a mesozoic jungle just superimposed/teleported in the middle of the city, with dinosaurs walking around and shit. Tbh that still sounds like a cool idea even if it makes no sense.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!

you win.

I grew up in a stereotypical sitcom family, so I believed almost everything I saw on TV - the fact that I was kept pretty much isolated from other people until I started school didn't help. My school years were a nightmarish hellscape of shattered illusions.

...

According to my parents, there was apparently a period where I was absolutely adamant that 2000 was the largest number in existence. I'd deny all suggestions to the contrary.
>"But user, what about 3000? 3 is more than 2".
>"No! 2000 is THE BIGGEST number!"
They thought it was hilarious. In fact, they still do.

>Or it could be the other way around ( кoт / coбaкa )
Russian doesn't apply, we have the word кoшкa which is feminine (and is the official name of the animal) and пёc which is masculine. The words кoшкa and coбaкa don't necessarily refer to the female animals and are used as generic terms, while кoт and пёc are specifically male.

If that's canon, what happens to the extracted souls?
Can they pass on? Or do they continue to exist?

Hound of Tindalos?
also these captchas are getting a little out of hand

This thread is a goldmine

Imagine a bottle universe where that was true, I can imagine it being a treasure on a Wizards shelf.

>Behold. In this jar is a compressed space, within it are 2000, stars made of 2000 atoms, each made of 2000 immeasurably small units of energy.

The jar appears empty because that is not much matter at all really.

What did you think would happen after 1999 ends?

...

I mean 2000.

Obviously, we'd go to year 2000.
What's more concerning is that I think I held this belief in the 2000/2001 period. I'll have to ask my parents if they remember circa when this was.

that sounds like it would make for a good story

>Dad buys new electric razor
>Fast forward a few days
>He goes to shave, but someone has opened up his electric razor and smeared toothpaste into it
>It's ruined
>He blames me
>I protest, because it wasn't me
>Don't really get punished, because I basically never did anything like that before or after and they didn't have the habit of punishing me
>Still argue about it almost 20 years later
The "Razor Toothpaste Incident" is a defining moment of my early years, and one of the reasons I've always doubted my own memory.
On one hand, I for as far as I can remember I've always been 100% convinced of my own innocence, and I remember feeling really upset for getting yelled at for something I didn't do. Furthermore I was always a nice kid, and there weren't any other incidents where I willingly and maliciously destroyed something.

But on the other hand, there are no other suspects. The only ones in the house that day were me, my parents, and my baby sister. My sister wouldn't have been able to reach the cabinets or know where things were, and my parents wouldn't have any reason to destroy an electric razor and blame me for it. So, logically, I realise that it has to be me. But my entire life I've been earnestly convinced hat I didn't do it.
The only option is that I did it and managed to convince myself that I didn't. I brainwashed myself. Or some unknown entity broke into our house and smeared toothpaste into an electric razor.

It's enough to make a young boy question his sanity.

Could you possibly have mistaken it for an electric toothbrush?

I have the exact same feeling about a tub of house paint that was spilled over a newly carpeted floor.

Also read this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation


I have no memory of doing it, and I swore I didn't do it at the time, but I was the only person who could have been in the room at the time.

Maybe, but as I said I have no recollection of the actual smearing itself. I also have very little memory of how the razor looked afterwards.

But it was one of those big three-headed Philips razors, I'm pretty sure of that. So it doesn't really look like a toothbrush. And if I thought it was a toothbrush, I don't see why I would open up all the laps and stuff and just smear toothpaste everywhere from batteries to the top.

What makes it even more incriminating is that it was done using my toothpaste.
I know that I must have did it, I just don't know why. Maybe I was just being a little shit of a change.

>Memory implantation
Yeah, it must be something like that. As I got older I sort of came to terms with the fact that I must have false memories regarding the event, but as a younger child it confused me to no end.
The concept that I could strongly "remember" something that wasn't really true hadn't really dawned on me back then.

Cool dad.

I thought that black people had brown blood. I assumed that my gums were pink because you could see the blood underneath, like a rat's eye. Therefore, since black people have brown gums, their blood is brown.

I also thought that women get pregnant from the wedding kiss, since of course only married women get pregnant.

it's incredibly /magicalrealm/ but
>boys get girls pregnant by peeing in their butt
>no 2nd hole
and
>monsters can't get you/see you if you're under a blanket
>stuffed animals have feelings

I also believed that if I really REALLY thought a monster was in my closet I could sit up in my bed and banish it from existence by willing it out of the universe. This usually involved straining every muscle in my body while sitting cross legged and making kung-fu arm movements at my closet and visualizing hitting it with a cannonball of directed holy force.
>tfw 8-year-old me was 200% more Deus Vult than I am now

I recall being totally convinced (around the age of 10) that I could reach out and touch the moon if only I could find something tall enough to stand on. I climbed on our house, trees, and all sorts of other stuff trying to get higher than I did last time. I even eventually convinced my parents to take me hiking "up a mountain" (a rather large rocky hill maybe 45 minutes north of where we lived) so that I could be even closer.

Both my parents attempted to make me understand the vast distances involved and how the moon orbited the planet, but I didn't care.

I used to think that banks gave you money just because you asked for it, and that adults paid to go to work because they had to.

Yeah, I was that dumb.

God existed and is benevolent, people are good, bad things only happen to bad people.

For a time I was convinced I could control my own gravity. I had dreams where I could jump from the top stair down to the bottom and not get hurt, or glide around my house.

The weirdest thing in my dreams though are me dreaming of locations I've never been to, but when I did end up going there, it was totally accurate to my dream.

>The weirdest thing in my dreams though are me dreaming of locations I've never been to, but when I did end up going there, it was totally accurate to my dream.
That's called false memories.

>be me
>about 6
>standing out by the car ready to go to church
>about 8am on a sunday
>black pickup speeds by
>men in sunglasses and black suits standing at attention in the back
shit freaked me out hard. I still don't know if I really saw it or I just convinced myself that's what it was

Even if I would write or sketch out the location while it was still fresh in my mind, and then visit sometime later with a pretty accurate depiction?

Well you're not wrong, in a way

Some Jerk teenage kid told me that if I was bad the "hooligans" would get me at night.

I thought some kind of goblins lived in their house and would claw me to death if I fell asleep

No, because then you'd see that your sketch isn't accurate at all.

My little kid belief was that a rat lived in the toilet, and fed off my poop.

I used to have a lot of these instances as a kid but I also started to realize that it was more a matter of framing than location.

I'd remember certain features from a single view and when placed in a similar location they snap into place and take my head for a ride.

Most were.

Maybe you were sleepwalking? You could have walked to the bathroom and decided to brush you teeth in your sleep, and then you failed and went back to your bed.