Odd things that you believed as a child

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My grandmother had a small barometer hanging on the wall, the kind with a tube full of mercury that rises and falls when air pressure changes. The mercury had been coloured red.

For some reason the thought entered my head that should the glass break the red liquid would leak out and then begin expanding. It would expand so much that it would cover the entire floor, then outside of the room, outside of the house and so on until eventually it would cover the whole world.

I kept asking members of the family whether this was true and of course there were a number of responses.

I also believed for some reason that this was the only barometer of this type in the world - not sure why.

Even as I grew older and understood that this was obviously not going to happen if the glass broke I found that the image of it breaking and expending would pop into my head now and then.

This evening it popped into my head when I was out for a walk. I didnt find it disturbing just interesting and a little as if an old friend had come back to visit me.

Once when I was a child, I asked my mom what would happen if anyone had an itch that they weren't able to scratch, and she said that they would probably go crazy. I spent a long time believing that was actually how people went insane.

My mother told me that if you put salt on a wild bird's tail feather, it wouldn't be able to fly. I think she said this so I'd get out of the house and chase birds with a saltshaker, which I did. For hours. And years.

i used to think:

that the olden days were in black and white

women didn't break wind

that if you wore glasses you were smart

that as long as I kept all my body parts under the blanket at night the monsters wouldn't get me

that when i lied my forehead would say the word lie on it so everyone knew i lied

My parents would call tapioca "fish eyes," so that's what I thought the little round things (the actual tapioca) in tapioca pudding were.

Yes... If I kept under the blankets monsters would not get me.

But other things like if I was really naughty my Mum would put me back into her tummy and I'd never be heard of again.

That if one sneezed with ones eyes open, ones eyeballs would fall out.

That if I stayed in the bathroom while the chain was flushing that the toilet monster would come to get me.

That if I flushed the chain while I sat on the toilet I would be sucked down the loo...I was terrified incase I fell in!

Lots of things!

I used to believe that I'm a witch who could actually curse people with the power of hate. For having too much coincidences; i.e. apparent karma against those who wronged me.

And my sister was bad luck by having apparent inconveniences. She turned out to be needier than I'm.


Or that it snows where I came from -- I live in a tropical country. I had at least waited for winter to come, only to find that it doesn't happen here.

Or that I may or may not be allergic to ghost or some invisible force no thanks to idiopathic rhinitis. Or that ghosts are allergic to me for not having paranormal encounters of my own when others do.



It's not many in my case.

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I thought TPing someones house was teepeeing it and was very confused as to why it was called that.

among other thing
having a evil eye or being a witch,
before elementary school i got attacked by an older girl, very frightening
then first day i got accused by the big girls of something violent that happened,
there was something wrong about me i didn't know what it was

also that i couldn't tell parents bc they would put it back on me, or anything else that would make things worse,
there were so many times i couldn't eat something and made them very angry,
the expectation of perfection, or was it a wacky perception?

That if I didn't hold my mother's hand when crossing a city street or parking lot, the drivers in their cars would deliberately try to run me over. I imagined them thinking, "Oh look, a little girl is all alone, let's kill her."

When I was little I was told that everyone had to have an operation that would remove something called a "bull's eye" out of their bellies. The operation would have to take place around the age of 12 and I was terrified. It took a while until I found out that that was untrue.

My dad used to tell me that there were little pixies lived in the nearby forest and if we built them little houses out of sticks and leaves they would be happy about it. So I always built a little house whenever I went into the forest.

My dad also claimed that silverfish were two-dimensional and thus couldn't see us because we are three-dimensional. My husband told me that his mother had told him that silverfish are born out of dust.

And I can't have been the only who was sitting in their room after having seen StarWars and practiced moving things with their minds or rather the Force, because they believed that it was a real thing.

I know this is a common one, but I believed that it was illegal for somebody to drive with the lights on inside a vehicle and I also believed the emergency brake was the "ejector" and that my father pulling it would eject me from the passenger seat

^ it’s not specifically illegal here in the UK, but the police can use it as an aggravating factor when charging you with dangerous driving.

I used to believe that there was a gorilla under my bed, he was there to rock me to sleep at night by shifting the legs of the bed up and down.

I used to think that each country was its own island, meaning no countries were joined. It's probably because I've always lived on an island so I thought all countries were the same.

As a child I believed I could tell if something was hot by looking at it.

It worked, but I think it was a matter of intuition incorporating a variety of clues from the environment and context, rather than an actual visual sense.