What weird false belief did you have as a kid?

There was a place by the beach called Helenback.

My siblings and I in the car: Where are we going?

Mum (shouting): Hell and back!

I was an adult before I realised it had another name.

That Everyone the Police arrest is a bad person.

I thought that dogs were boys and cats were girls. No idea why.

Its funny, my niece made it to like 8 thinking that aunts were adults and uncles were kids. She had one young uncle, and me. Called me "Auntie Phanto." I still haven't lived it down.

That prayers appease god to make things better.

That America was the greatest country in the world. And truly, not trying to be political, but honestly the propaganda in Midwest America was real. I didn't know anything about other countries - except for we were better. We figured it out, we built the best system ever and everyone else wanted to be like us.

Now those are the people I see overseas who are about to get punched in a pub.

That our blood was blue, but turned red when exposed to air and light. All because a teacher told us so.

I used to think that hair grew when it was watered - like a plant - and therefore showering was what allowed your hair to grow. No one ever told me that, I just assumed it to be true at a young age.

Volcanos being caused by overpopulation in hell.

I thought that apt-get was a wrapper around the apt command

My mom told me that Dad went to work to make money, and I actually expected to see money making machines when I visited him at the office.

I swear a social studies teacher told us that most rivers tend to flow north to south. Young impressionable child I was, I of course filed it away as a long-term core memory -- right there next to PEMDAS, FOIL, and so on.

Then I mentioned it in college and got fucking embarrassed.

I thought that women drank tea and men drank coffee, because that was what my mum and dad did.

I believed that peas were the pupa of something similar to a butterfly or a moth. I refused to eat peas for years because I felt so bad eating little baby critters. I think my aunt might've "encouraged" me to think that.

I thought that if you swallowed your gum, it would stay in your stomach forever, so you had to make sure to never do it because eventually there would be no room for food anymore.

Also, old CRT TVs had this static electricity sort of fuzzy feeling on the screen, and if you ran your hand over it, it would dissipate. I thought that by doing that, you were absorbing the TVs power and if you did it too much, it would eventually stop working.

Lastly, I believed with all my heart that all the pets you ever owned were waiting for you in heaven and it made me mad when my (very devout Catholic) grandma told me that pets and animals don't have souls and so they didn't go to heaven. I said if that was true then I didn't want to go to heaven! I'm atheist now, so I don't even believe that anyone goes to heaven, but if anyone deserves to go, it's all the kitties, puppies, and various rodentia I've loved in my life.

Oh yeah I had a few.

• That the moon you see during daytime is actually Mars (I then repeated that to my big sister and she believed it for an embarrassingly long amount of time)
• That the "up" arrows on traffic lights were for planes

I used to think "change" you got from a store was just the business being nice and making sure you didn't walk away without any money.

That people with a beard where poor people. I always felt sorry for them not able to afford a shaving kit.

As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster's sucking hunger.

Traffic lights were hand operated.
The small town where I grew up had one pedestrian traffic light for crossing the main road. There was a small brick shed next to that traffic light with no windows and a little door. When I was little I was convinced that was an operation's center where someone worked to turn the lights red or green.
In reality it was a power substation for the neighborhood, but I was seriously convinced that behind that door was a man looking at a TV screen and operating the traffic light at the right moment.
When we went to a larger town nearby, where there were traffic lights without a convenient mysterious building nearby, I told myself that the traffic light people were most likely working under ground, peeping through the drains.

I.. was good at making up answers for myself instead of just asking my parents.

When I was young and hanging with my great aunt's church friends, we were walking to the store. I went to link arms with my great aunt and her friend was like, "Hey, that's dangerous. You can't defend yourself. Someone could jump you." From that point, I assumed that anyone who was linking arms was, like, giving a show of dominance. Like, "Yeah, we're linked up, because we can still take anybody even with only one arm." Didn't change that mindset until I was in middle school after I tried to explain to my friend how dangerous walking with her boyfriend was because "how would they defend themselves." 🙃

I didn't understand time zones, but heard about "losing" or "gaining" hours when flying, so I thought that time moved differently while you flew, depending on if you were flying with or against the spin of the Earth.

That my parents knew what they were doing, made good choices, and were reasonable people.

No, no, ... and no.

That I'd grow up to eat candy, collect baseball cards, play video games, and read comic books.

No (type II diabetes runs in my family), no (wtf is a baseball card anyway), no (video games were replaced with homework permanently), and — well, actually — yes.

I love a good comic book, graphic novel, and/or animated series.

I thought rabbits and hares were the same species but just the male and female name similar to cow and bull.

I used to think the poles holding up traffic lights were hollow, and there was a person sitting inside throwing switches to change the lights while looking at a watch to keep the timing fair.

That Europe is a separate country where all the politicians live

That, despite my feelings and emotions at the time, I would never be a girl. So, that was a fucking lie.

I used to think that the whole world was in black and white, just like all the old pictures and movies I had seen, then at some point we discovered color and turned it on! After that there were no more black and white pictures and movies anymore.

For a long time, i thought that people thinking that the pyramids were made by aliens was a joke and that the number of people who truly believed it was 0

We found a dead baby bird. Was told most animal babies don't live to adulthood. Knew people were animals so it was likely me and most of my friends would be dead by 21

I was like 6 years old when my dad randomly told me that if a player dies during a football game, the others players have to eat him before the game can continue.

I never watched sports so I didn't even question it lol

That god(s) exist(s).

That my grandma's name was "grandma".

I believed that you'd only get a finite amount of words in your life. So I didn't speak much and I would think that the annoying kids in school that always were talking through the teacher's explanation, would get their punishment later in life when they'd go mute because they would have used up all their words.

That my family cared about me and supported me.

That the Gulf War was in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the only one I knew!

That enough hot water bath could work just as well as sunbathing for getting a tan. Hey, both things can burn your skin, it's perfectly logical!

Ass cheeks were shit tanks.

That democracy was real.

The crust on bread had more nutrients than the center. My dad didn’t want to cut my crusts off lol.

My uncle always swapped the words breast and best so my cousin mixes them up sometimes to this day. He said ‘breast friend’ at his brother’s wedding

I always thought cigarettes contain tar, as in the substance asphalt on the road is made from. It always felt weird to me, why would they put it in the cigarettes but I figured maybe they need it so the tobacco doesn't fall out or something.

That I could dig to China

That there was a disembodied head that lived in the toilet at night.

when i was a child, i was told that i would get worms if i ate raw brown sugar. i believed this for quite some time at least until i was 12.

That all large salty bodies of water were called "the mediterranean sea."

When I was six years old or so, my sister called me a "cosweb" and told me it was the worst thing ever. I completely believed her for a long time.

I do not know where I got this from, but I thought all dogs were male and all cats were female. I thought this while I had a dog named Betsy and a cat named Sebastian.

If that's not bad enough on its own, I think I was in first or second grade when I learned the surprising truth. I wasn't a dumb kid, either. I learned to read when I was about 3.5 yrs old and started 1st grade as a 5 yr old.

I'm now in my 70s and I still can't figure out where I got that from!

I thought the moon had a face. Like, as a kid, I would look at the moon and in my mind the craters formed what clearly seemed as two eyes and a mouth.

That the Mormon god was totally real

Trees make wind because whenever there was wind, they moved.

You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it and try hard enough.

That Africa was largely unexplored by humans and mostly unpopulated

Hiccups mean youre growing.

Thanks parents.

I thought chocolate was a color

The big stereo speakers in my living room contained tiny orchestras

That the ice crystals on popsicles were bad for you and only girls could eat them cuz they were immune to the koodies

Einstein said that if you move close to the speed of light, you'll go forward in time. Therefore, I thought, if you go backwards at close to the speed of light, you'll go backwards in time.

That someday I would be free from the social trappings that invade our personal lives.

That I wasn't adopted.

Kind of a weird semiotics misunderstanding. There was this trashy tabloid news program that did sensationalised nonsense most of the time, and they advertised the show with these teasers that were like, "tune in for the shocking conclusion OMG SO DRAMATIC", it was ridiculous.

One time they were talking about a security guard who was killed, and the ad had some footage of the incident - or a reenactment -shown in slow motion with a red filter. The implication was you were seeing real footage of a lethal encounter, and OMG SO DRAMATIC.

Then later that week they were doing a piece on school bullying, and they had what was probably actors where two kids walk past each other in the halls and bump shoulders, you know, like you'd do in a TV show as shorthand for bullying. They put the same slo-mo red filter over it, and the same ominous DUN DUN soundtrack OMG SO DRAMATIC.

I thought that red slo-mo filter meant death, so I thought I was watching security camera footage of the lead up to an incident where one kid literally killed another kid. It was pretty traumatic.

I'm glad I didn't grow up on a diet of that, I just saw the ads and didn't like it. This is how people grow up to be afraid of everything they're told to be afraid of.