Weird things you believed as a kid

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>The Mall of America and the National Mall were the same thing. The rollercoaster in the middle was important to the business of government.

>Hamas and hummus have something to do with each other.

>Gays in the military are controversial because they're a controversial form of ammunition, like depleted uranium. This ties in with the Air Force's research into the gay sex bomb.

>Whitewater was a scandal because the Clinton's killed a guy on a whitewater rafting expedition, buried him, and kept going.

The world was a more magical place when I watched the news at seven years old, then didn't ask anyone to clarify anything.

>Hamas and hummus have something to do with each other.

Er. The same thing, I mean.

As in I thought those bombings in Israel were somehow caused by that artsy brown stuff in the tiny plastic containers in supermarket deli cases.

I mean, the people who invented Hamas are the same people who may have invented hummus. I can't fault your logic.

I didn't know that the chirping from a nearby small woods was from crickets. I didn't think too much about it, I just thought that there was something in there, humming. Maybe aliens, or something under the leaves.

>My uncle always trolled kids in the family. He convinced me to eat ants saying eating bugs whole would make you live longer. He explained bugs live only for a couple of weeks and by eating them you'd get those extra weeks

>I'd regularly confuse Saddamn and Hitler together, and my uncle didn't help by switching them up all the time. I eventually connected evil = size of moustace

Boy was I stupid

the grandmother was actually a complete cunt.

If I crossed my fingers, than I was protected from monsters, and they couldn't get me when I slept. I think my mother told me that like it was fact back when I was really young and still afraid of the dark and I believed it unconditionally. Even after I stopped believing it would protect me, I still did it most of the time when I was trying to sleep because it made me feel calm by then.

When I was like, five years old, my mom said that if I ever went outside by myself, I'd get picked up by a guy called Kidnap Malone, who'd take me away from the house and, verbatim, kill me and eat me.

The apartment I lived in was a living area, a kitchen, and a bathroom. We had beds that were above the ground by supports (what people consider to be normal beds, but I've slept on mattresses and couches for most of my life), and I thought that in the darkness there were monsters, so when I was a kid I would constantly pull off leaps and shit to get between them so I wouldn't touch the floors so the monsters wouldn't get me.

I thought that a series of vines and branches scratching at the window all the time were monsters scraping at the glass of the window, trying to get in to eat me. This always led to me sleeping on my left side no matter what when I was a child, and eventually which position I slept in so I'd always be facing the darkness so I wouldn't have to look at the window of the kitchen, by logic of "if they can't see me, I'm safe."

Because of a poorly explained sex education video, I thought that whenever you had an erection, you would constantly ejaculate sperm in microscopic amounts. It made getting an erection super awkward for me until I first jacked off and learned THAT'S how ejaculation worked.

When I was 15, I tried to put it up a girl's ass with no lube, because that never happens in hentai, and all my experiences with sex happening were hentai (Newgrounds was a magical place). That ended poorly.

I thought girls peed out the same hole I put my penis in until I was 10.

I didn't know anime was from Japan until I was 13, because no one in my family or at school ever talked about countries outside of the United States and I had to look it up on my own.

I once thought the katana copypasta described the actual properties of a katana, because I have never NOT seen that sort of thing before.

I thought Veeky Forums wasn't for the lulz.

Man, reading this stuff makes me feel abnormal and somewhat regretful I never had anything like this. I was very rational as a child and also learned that most people are shit no mater what (for the record I was able to connect with people and was not socially awkward I just saw how unreasonable and cruel people could be).
At the risk of being called a fedora this is one of my earliest memories:
>cried self to sleep a little after turning 3 because I figured that death was non-existence thus humanities fate is to die and the majority of people won't even have decent lives
>this dumbfounded my parents and it was never spoke of again
>I waited a few days (weeks?) for religion to come up in conversation so I could figure out what adults really thought of things
>where do people's minds come from and what happens to them when they die
>"god made them in heaven and the good ones go back to heaven"
>but heaven would get pretty full of all of those people and no one can be so bad that they need to be in hell forever, why not just make only good people why make bad people?
>"heaven is infinite and people can't be made good or bad they choose to be good or bad"
>but if people come from heaven why even make people live if they are going to die, why not just leave them in heaven?
>"because god when god made everything he people to be on earth"
>so if god created everything who or what created god?
>"you don't ask those sorts of questions"
>well why not, what exists if nothing exists?
>"because you don't"
>but why?
>"..."

I always just sort of assumed that 'glory' was a sauce.

I have no idea why.

Used to think that deja vu was me remembering having had prophetic dreams.

>implying it's not
My perception of time and memory has been fucked hard because of how often I get DejaVu.

I had a similar fear of skeletons rising out of my floor and attacking me.
I wasn't afraid of an actual skeleton being there, because I figured I could fight off a skeleton. Rather, I was afraid it would get a sneak attack off on me and injure me too much so that I couldn't fight back.

Speaking of dreams. I often dream in specific settings. Schools, towns, communities, usually fairly small and self-contained, but recurring. I suspect they may be parallel universes that I observe while sleeping.

I used to think that girls had a penis tucked away between their legs somewhere.

Now I'm into dickgirls.

Go figure.

Non-native here, I used to think that speaking english meant speaking in reverse:
>!Sélgin odnalbah yotse

...which is actually sort of a thing when you compare the syntaxis; guess I caught the idea from that

>Niglés

typeod theer, soryr

That dogs and cats were just the males and females of the same species.

Also that girls peed out of their butts

My dad told me a lot of bullshit. Let me watch Evil Dead when i was 7 or something.

>Demon living in the furnace, you can even hear him breath.(the wind was causing this)

>If you walk past a mirror in the night your reflection can grab you.

>English speakers all have a speech problem (when english news footage was shown without dub)

>The old Lady next Door is a Witch.

>Soap is made of Human Bones.

Holy shit i was afraid of a lot of things.
Also the Krampus and saint nick came every Winter and they knew EVERYTHING i did.

I tought teachers would live in the school.

>If I crossed my fingers, than I was protected from monsters
Im gonna steal this one, if you don't mind

hey I had the whole worried about death thing as a kid as well, just when I was older and with non-religious parents.
i remember being obsessed with cryogenic preservation for a while

My friends and I had a hardcore Wiccan phase. We'd cast spells together and everything - and were obsessed with it in general.

One of my friends would be the one to "see the spirits", another cast a spell to walk across sand without leaving footprints, I'd always screw up the magic and it would backfire horribly, but mine had the strongest effects.

>>Soap is made of Human Bones.
It can be.

Due to my dad being a bit (read, incredibly) twofaced when it came to authority over him, I grew up thinking that it was perfectly normal to reinvent your personality and use a different one for each person you knew.

Sleep was literally the little death, you died and had to come back each night. How strong you were to pull yourself back was inverse related to how old you were, because the weight of your life would pull you down.

The dark is safe. You can't see them, but they can't see you. I had incredible hearing as a kid, so I stuck to this one for a long time.

Animals are just as smart as people, they're just not allowed to talk or use tools. 'Training' them means that you've got them to realize you know the secret.

>gay sex bomb
Sounds dangerously hot

I thought that when you died, you IMMEDIATELY turned into a skeleton.

Fucking THIS.
It still happens. Not as often, but it does happen.

>Used to think that deja vu was me remembering having had prophetic dreams.
>>implying it's not
This.
I dream the future.
But the fact that this was mentioned last thread suggests that was a playful dig.

That'd be pretty bad-ass
Especially if you woke up from a near-death experience

>I thought girls peed out the same hole I put my penis in until I was 10.
There are men in their 20s who still believe this.

>katana
I used to believe Ancient Japanese blacksmiths really folded steel a thousand times.
Why would people say it if it wasn't true.

>Someone is at the front of all the traffic in the world
>If I passed an electrical enclosure a couple blocks from my house without my parents some man would put me in a box and take me away

What happens when you combine
>I thought that when you died, you IMMEDIATELY turned into a skeleton.
With
>Sleep was literally the little death, you died and had to come back each night. How strong you were to pull yourself back was inverse related to how old you were, because the weight of your life would pull you down.
?

Waking sleepwalkers just got freakish.

>There are men in their 20s who still believe this.
I remember hearing a story about a 50 year old couple that was never able to have kids. The wife was prone to urinary tract infections. While getting examined by her doctor the doctor discovered that she and her husband had been having sex with the urethra instead of the vagina.
Possibly a fake story but still.

I have had this too.
I described one reoccurring place and someone told me I was describing Toronto Place.
Never been there, kinda freaked about the idea of going there and confirming.

I also had reoccurring dreams where I fully understand the rules of physics and magic in that universe. I would know everything when asleep, forget upon waking.
One time, I woke up groggy, slid my feet to the edge of the bed, and literally forgot which way they were supposed to go. As in, I forgot which direction gravity pulled and how it works. I figured it out.
Actually, I can greentext one dream I remember...

>Because of a poorly explained sex education video, I thought that whenever you had an erection, you would constantly ejaculate sperm in microscopic amounts.
Fucking hell, I think they must still be showing that because I talked to a friend of a friend the other day and his 10-year-old thought that too.

Medical anomalies are wild, but that sounds fake as hell.
That's less likely than one guy having sex inside another guy's penis.

Unless decades of "having sex with" didn't involve penetration, which would be extra stupid, but possible.

I thought animals in zoos where not the same as animals in nature because I was explained natural selection and I didn't grasp that it needed lots of generations before any significant changes occur in the species.

So for me animals from zoos, that where born in zoos, where not the same as those outside because they adapted to zoo life, which meant that sharks, lions and all carnivores adapted to not eat meat so visitors wouldn't get eaten.

I wondered for a very long time what the 'actual' animals looked like, because all the pictures I found in books looked exactly like the ones I so in zoos (so I figured oh thoses ones were in a zoo too when they took the picture)

>When I was 6 and having growing pains my dad told me to stop growing or I would grow out of my skin
>the next time I had growing pains I was with my grama and spent 20 min bawling my eyes out cause "I DONT WANA GROW OUT OF MY SKIN"
>Until I was 9 I thought my dad could control stop lights cuase he watched the green lights on the other streets

my dad fucked with me a lot but I guess because of that I am super suspicious of everything now so it was good overall I guess

Looking back the growing out of my skin one was fucking funny af

Also since childhood I've had recurring dreams, but not in the sense that they are always the same dreams

But it was always the same universe.
Like I would dream I was in a sort of magic school mixed with government secret agency (like a secret school for people with magic powers rules by the government to use them later), having one particular friend named Mindy, that one of my teacher fucking hated my guts and Mindy's, sometimes having actual missions to retrieve monsters or creatures with magic because Zone 51 bullshit happened... And I actually had a lot of dreams in that universe, having adventures and shit.

So I was led to believe that actually I just witnessed stuff that was hapenning in a parallel universe (since it was all coherent with itself).

Also I had a reocuring nightmare of RV's taking over the world and enslaving everyone until I was 6 so I was deathly afraid of RV's

I forget the events before the scenario, but:
>be me
>be dreaming
>being transported in the back of a car by two "bad guys"
>to a place where other "bad guys" are holding two women
>I know and value the women in the dream.
>use telekinesis magic to take control of the car
>smash car around a bit
>amused by them freaking out
>then fly car over a high overpass
>intend to teleport out of the car and let it crash
>remember that the way teleportation magic works, I'd technically be leaving this universe and reappearing in a new one just like it, only where I'm where I want to be
>This would technically be abandoning the women in this universe
>which would be a dick move
>decide to gently feather fall the car to the ground
>ask the shellshocked guys in front to continue driving.

I was listening to the radio and there was a Science Friday or something about this topic. And a woman was explaining that she just thought unicorns were real and lived in Africa. Lions, giraffes, zebras, hyenas. Sure: why couldn't there be a horse with a horn? Didn't seem any weirder than a rhino, so she'd never really thought about it and just assumed that unicorns were out there, somewhere.

Mine was that people knew what I was thinking if my forehead wasn't covered. No idea where it came from, but I couldn't sleep without a blanket over my face because, otherwise, people would know what I was fantasizing about while I drifted off to sleep.

I remember watching this when i was a kid and thought for like a week that it was real youtube.com/watch?v=8FIDeOOL52Q

They do put over a thousand folds in it, think of folding like computer memory, 2, 4, 8, 16...

I have a couple, though I'm not sure how much use they will be to Veeky Forums. Hope you'll forgive my chronic inability to be very brief.

Non-folklore related weird ideas:
When I was about 4 years old, I saw a book describing a asteroid fall scenario, complete with image of an asteroid falling on New York city. It made me absolutely TERRIFIED of stars and night sky in general. For almost four years, I actually refused to look at sky at night, because it reminded me of my asteroid-based anxiety. The idea that at any moment, a giant rock can fall from heaven and kill us all while there was nothing I could do about it was unbearable for me and hunted my dreams too. (It should be no surprise that I grew up into severally clinically anxious and fucked up adult...)

For a certain (thankfully not very long) period, I entertained the idea that cars and all vehicles in general are actually a sham. I was never "certain" in this, but thought about it a lot: I thought that maybe, the adults are only pretending that cars and trains are actually moving, that the machine makes noise while footage of landscape passing by is being projected onto the windows to make it seem like we are traveling, but in reality we are completely stationary.
Eventually, at one point I of course started wandering how is it possible that the landscape has changed between entering and exiting the car, and figured out that while we had not really moved, the entire reality was rebuild around us. For some time, I actually thought that if I opened the car doors mid-ride, I would find the world outside to be blank or incomplete, as I would find it mid-transformation. That was also how I explained myself why my parents were forbidding me from opening the doors before we came to stop.
It was such a bizzare fucking theory. I still can't figure out why did it possess me.

I also believed there is a small, physical room under every single traffic light that has a human operating it.

Folklore based ideas (I had a lot of those).
I was born in glorious slavlands, but I lived in USA between the time I was 3-5 years old, give or take. This caused some pretty strange ideas about magical creatures and shit.
I thought (for a very long time, actually) that elves, witches, chorts, fairies and similar things are real, but somehow I assumed they are only an European thing and that they don't live in America. Complimentary, I thought the exact same thing about Dinosaurs but in reverse: I thought they are real (meaning that they still exist and live in the wilds), but live and always lived only in America.
As a result, while I believed in fairies and demons, I did not worry about them at all as long as I was in america, through I was worried I might get killed and eaten by a dinosaur if I get lost in woods or something.

When I was about four, my family went to visit friends family in Canada for a few days. At one point of that trip, I snuck up on them and overheard them talking about a Witch living nearby where our host family lived.
This absolutely terrified me for two reasons: A) the fact that adults were talking about it among themselves made the existence of a witch much more real, and B) witches were not supposed to be a thing in America.
I was scared shitless and later, when we moved to the host place, I saw an abandoned house and assumed that is where the Witch must have lived, and started worrying that maybe old european magical creatures are all moving to America, just like people were, and that made me super anxious. Ever since that, I was scared of old abandoned houses and places thinking maybe some european demon or a witch may have moved in there.

Much later I asked my parents what the hell were they talking about that day, and they recalled that the host family was just complaining about some crazy Wicca lady living across the street.

>Possibly a fake story but still.
It's actually very real, but it took place around the beginning of 20th century in countryside, I think somewhere in central Europe. The couple was illiterate and poor.
Similar story exists with a doctor as asked for help with a couple that repeatedly failed to get a child. When examining the woman, the doctor discovered her hymen was intact and after talking to the husband (man in his late 50's), he discovered that (I quote) "The man in his simplicity assumed that ways of reproduction and ways of excretion were one and the same". Translation: he was fucking her in the ass the whole time.
Both stories are based on actual medical reports.
Lack of sexual education in backwards and rural areas can be one hell of a drug.

Shameless bump.

For years when I walked home at night I'd walk in the street instead of on the sidewalk, to stay out of reach of the trees which came alive at night and obviously would grab you if you came too close. I think this one is actually pretty common for young kids

When I was a kid, I played a game with my dad where we would take turns naming things in a category and whoever couldn't name a new one on their turn lost.

One time the category was ''things with fangs'' and we started out all with real animals--and then, when it was my turn, I realized that I was stumped and hado run out of ganged animals. So in a desperate bid not to lose I say ''Vampires'', fully expecting my dad to go ''those aren't real, you're out''-- only my dad is only half paying attention, and he just goes ''yeah, good one''and takes his turn.

And from that point on I believed that vampires were real, because obviously if they weren't I'd have lost our game. I uses to sleep wrapped up like a goddam mummy, with the blankets up around my head, because I thought that if a vampire flew to my window and could see my bare neck, he would come in and bite me.

I thought that the reason you could make fire by rubbing two sticks together was that sticks were hollow inside and filled with fire, and by rubbing them together, you would rub away the exterior, exposing the firy core. I don't know why simple breaking sticks didn't cause this to happen. I was retarded apparently.

for about 2 years from the age of 7-9 i thought that i was the only person in the history of mankind to ever wonder why the wind blows

in my defense i was A. very stupid & B. very very sheltered

I'm pretty sure it's not common, since it actually implies a dangerous behavior that very few parents would let fly. I mean: walking in the street, where there is traffic, rather than sidewalk, in dark when the danger of a driver overlooking you is dramatically increased: if I ever saw my kid doing that, I would slap that shit out of them brutally.

Outside of being genuinely funny, interesting and at time quite inspirational, this thread also makes me think and learn a lot about shit I probably should and should not do around little kids.

That said, your father was right, and vampires are actually real. There is a growing problem caused by environmental destruction that more and more species of vampiric animals who never used to prey on people are being forced to more to urbanized areas and are starting to attack humans as a result in some parts of the world.

kek no man I had the same thing, except I wasn't as articulate as you so when I was about seven I just started basically /r/atheism shitposting at my grandma like WHY DO WE EVEN GO TO CHURCH WHEN GOD ISN'T REAL

That woman raised this little piece of shit into a semi-functional human being and is the closest thing to an angel I've yet to see.

Nah I went through a fedora tipping phase when I was a teenager but most of my good bros are christfags, kikes or mudslimes desu it's all good

I thought oral sex was aural sex because I didn't knew the word oral, but I did know the word aural. I had no idea how it would work.

When I was a child I thought there was a portal to a witch's coven at the bottom of my toy box and if I didn't go to sleep with my comforter covering all my skin they would steal my soul/eat me.

I used to think my cat would turn into an egyptian cat man at night and defend the house against haints and coyotes.

I used to live on a ranch in central texas as a kid my mom told me there were chupacabras in the fields and that if I swam in the stocktank (man made pond for cattle/fishing) La Llarona (the crying lady) would drag me under. It's weird cuz we aren't even hispanic.

There was an upstairs at my mom's favorite hair dresser that she and the stylist would always tell me a monster lived up there and would protect the shop at night in exchange for being fed all the extra hair. If I went up there though he'd eat the hair off my head. He wouldn't eat the hair ladies hair from her head though because they were dating. When she got engaged I embaressed the shit out her at her wedding cause I told the groom he couldn't be her husband cuz she was dating the hair monster that lived up stairs. She also told me that she broke up with the hair monster when she moved to a new store.

When will the hair monster find true love?

>If you walk past a mirror in the night your reflection can grab you.

I tought it was creatures that could only see you if they saw your reflexion in a mirror in the dark (I have no idea why), so I needed to turn on all the lights in my ath close to the bathroon so they didnt materialize and... did things. i didnt know what they would do, but I was scared shitless anyway.

I tought people getting more bugg or more fat was "evolution", and if I tried hard enough, I would grow horns and wings

I tought in the church if I looked up, I would find the face of god watching everyone, but onlly when you did an oration. Thhat made god give attenttion to us, like a phone number.

I had a strong belief that if I believed in something hard enough, I could force it to exist, so I tried making a bunch of toys and people, mainly lego pieces I didnt have.

Maybe they believed only a dwarf would need to aim UPwards to blow Granny's head off while she was sitting down.

Maybe their parents encouraged them to keep believing that...

I somehow believed until 6 that superheros could be real in america. At 6 I finally asked myself why spider man and the teenage mutant ninja turtles never worked together, and i came to the conclussion, that they are just fiction,

I refused to believe for a long time that reptiles would eat other things than vegetables and fruits.

I thought my grandma could manipulate traffic lights.

I believed you had to pee into girls to make them pregnant.

I believed that kids could talk to babies like Angelika in Rugrats. Boy, I was diappointed.

I thought it was very unpolite to tell anyone I had to use the bathroom, so as a preschooler Id rather pee my pants, than tell anyone Id like to go to the bathroom.

>tought
It is "thought".
Typos are typos and okay.
But you were consistent enough that I suspect that English is not your first language.

To be fair, Tweety Bird and NYC residents do pronounce it "tawt".

>I believed that kids could talk to babies like Angelika in Rugrats.
There is anecdotal evidence of this, actually.
Apparently, my uncle could reliably translate back and forth with my mom when she was a baby.

But it could've been something like that horse that appeared to be able to count and understand english enough to accomplish small tasks. It was just a smart damn horse that could read people to know when it got the right answer.

The very fact you were walking in the middle of the goddamn street should've been your parents' nightmare, backwoods or not. And the implication that this wasn't the case scares me.

The marvel is still there, with only the reason being changed. Animals notice more things about people than we think.

I had this as well user. I thought oral exams were aural exams because they were spoken out loud and listened to.

Yeah, that horse had scientists stumped for a while.
They were certain the horse couldn't know what it seemed to, but proved the owner wasn't faking it.
Smart damn horse.