Odd things that you believed as a child

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When I was little I thought I was an alien from another planet in a human disguise and I just couldn't remember how to turn off the disguise. I kept waiting for my real parents to fly in on their UFO to come save me and take me back home. I even came up with maps and planet names and stuff for my "home".

You know those round bales of hay they put in fields? Sometimes the bales are wrapped in a white tarp thing and they look JUST like marshmallows. I thought those were actually marshmallows for the longest time, like farmers put them out there because cows really like marshmallows.

I once thought as a very young child that I came from my mother while my brother from our dad. That girls came from their mothers and boys came from their fathers.

I assumed things I came across in fairytales were make belief if I didn't know about it IRL. So when I saw a dwarf when I was 6 years old, I stared and shouted to my mom: "A dwarf! Look, it's a dwarf!"
I wasn't being insensitive, I was really excited, because I thought they only existed in Snow White, so I was as excited as if I'd seen a dragon or something like that.


When I was 4, I woke up in the middle of the night and went to my window and looked outside. I saw a lynx lying on a branch. Next morning I told my mom, who said it was probably a dream. I was so sure I really woke up and saw a lynx in that tree, I thought so until I was 13 and we went back there one day (we moved when I was still 5), and I realized that there was no way I could have seen a lynx that clearly because the trees were simply too far away to have seen it like I saw it.


When we moved back then, I somehow got the idea that when people move, they trade flats with whoever lived in their new place, so they get their old place. When my mom tried to explain that wasn't the case, I thought she didn't understand what I meant and was very frustrated. There was no way people didn't just trade houses, because otherwise someone would always be moving, and then the country would be so chaotic.


I believed the claim that if you meet badgers, they might attack and will bite your legs until they hear bones crunching. That's why you should always wear boots in the woods and fill them coal, so the badger will hear coal cracking.
Can't fault me for that belief though, I did after all learn it from our teacher in elementary school.

I thought dragons were real until I was about 12 or 13. One day I was playing a PlayStation 1 game called Spyro the Dragon, and when I asked my mum if dragons can breathe underwater she said that dragons aren't real.

^ Well I thought being a knight, as in armour and horse etc, was on the list of viable life-choices until that age.
Specifically I wanted to be the black knight of the black lands from King Arthur: because I hadn’t yet worked out that fiction wasn’t real, somewhere out there...

(I still feel swindled by reality on that one: where’s my gold-etched black armour? )

^ on the subject of knights... at one point of my childhood, I had the misconception that the Middle /medieval ages with castles and knights took place in the 1800's.

that one day id grow up

I might have shared this before, but I heard that men usually die before their wives. I believed I should never get married because I was afraid my husband would die in our house, and I wouldn't know what to do with the dead body. I thought I might get arrested for murder, or have to live with the corpse. I was terrified of marriage for that reason.

I remember when young and I did something I shouldn't have done (I think I threw a stone, but not at anyone). Anyway. When I came in from playing my teacher said that a little birdy told her that I had thrown a stone and I should not throw stones (Or sometjing like that).
Well. I was really angry at this little birdy for getting me into trouble and I tried my best to try to catch one or scare them away etc for ages. Naughty birdy for telling the teacher! Which birdy was it? Grrr!

I used to believe that the locked room in the basement of my parents' house was a haunted crypt, and if whatever was in there ever got out it would come straight to my bedroom and try to kill me.

One day, I crawled under the front porch and looked through a window that I never knew was there before.  Inside was the dimly-lit room.  Inside the room were shelves with old bottles, jars, and electrical equipment.

It was not a haunted crypt; it was a mad scientist's laboratory!

Then I bumped up against the window, and found that it would open, so I crawled inside and dropped down to the floor.

Then I screamed.

I had stepped on a board with nails in it.  Two of the nails had pierced my shoes and gone into my foot.  I could not reach the window, and the door was still locked.  I was trapped.

My parents heard me and got me out.  Had I not been bleeding, I'm sure my dad would have used The Belt on me.

Anyway, mom had me soak my foot in a basin of Epsom salts and water.  Then she wrapped it up, and I was exempted from all household chores for a week.

Epilogue: The room turned out to be nothing more than an old storage-room, where dad kept things like insecticide and weed-killer, and where the electrical breaker panel was located.  It was kept locked because of the hazards inside.  The window-latch had corroded, so it was easy to open and no one had ever expected a curious six-year old boy to crawl under a porch to look for "adventure".

And I got better!

I used to think you could get AIDS from masturbating.