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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

charliebrown said:
Another thing I still do to day is if I knock over the salt shaker and salt spills out, I throw salt over my left shoulder.

If I did not do this ritual, my mom would go “ ballistic “ saying evil spirits would enter the house.
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I learned that this was a thing and when my grandmother saw me do it she lost it. "This house is not a garbage dump!" or something to that affect.

I mean, she was the oldest one in the family and surely had heard of it, but among other superstitions that she definitely believed, this was apparently not one of them.
 
MercuryCrest said:
I learned that this was a thing and when my grandmother saw me do it she lost it. "This house is not a garbage dump!" or something to that affect.

I mean, she was the oldest one in the family and surely had heard of it, but among other superstitions that she definitely believed, this was apparently not one of them.
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Yup, I didn't see that done until someone demonstrated during school meals when I was about 10. Seemed a waste of good salt to me.
 
I thought a blood clot was an actual physical little thing, getting stuck in your blood stream. At my grandmothers place, there was a little red rubber door stopper behind her door and I thought that was a blood clot.
 
I try not to transfer any of my fears and superstitions to my grandkids, but when they throw their hats on beds, I try to remove their hats without attracting attention.

When I was growing up, a hat on a bed meant news of a death was coming, and if a male did not remove his hat when entering a house, that was disrespectful.

The hat “ thing “ shows I am still controlled by my mom.
 
charliebrown said:
I try not to transfer any of my fears and superstitions to my grandkids, but when they throw their hats on beds, I try to remove their hats without attracting attention.

When I was growing up, a hat on a bed meant news of a death was coming, and if a male did not remove his hat when entering a house, that was disrespectful.

The hat “ thing “ shows I am still controlled by my mom.
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Yep. Its so interesting to understand how we retain training from decades or generations ago. This understanding gives us the chance to change it if we wish. Some people never notice and so never change. Charliebrown, where did you grow up?
 
Well Endlessly Amazed,

I was born In Nashville, Tennessee and we were poor and lived with my mother’s mother until about 10 years old when my father did better financially.

The women of that time period were called “ southern steel magnolias “ because they were ruff and tuff.

These women determined what was proper “ southern “ procedure for us kids.
 
escargot said:
Yup, I didn't see that done until someone demonstrated during school meals when I was about 10. Seemed a waste of good salt to me.
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if i spill any salt i have to stop myself chucking a pinch over my left shoulder as i seem to have been brainwashed into doing it . I can blame my grandmother for this. Just a pinch mind, and you are throwing it into the face of the devil. I think.
 
I think you are right JaneD, one is stopping evil from coming into the house.

This might be traced back to Buddhism traditions.
 
The superstition about spilling salt being a bad omen and practices using salt to ward off evil are different traditions. The superstition dates back at least as far as ancient Rome. The diverse religious / esoteric uses of salt probably date back even farther.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spilling_salt
 
charliebrown said:
Well Endlessly Amazed,

I was born In Nashville, Tennessee and we were poor and lived with my mother’s mother until about 10 years old when my father did better financially.

The women of that time period were called “ southern steel magnolias “ because they were ruff and tuff.

These women determined what was proper “ southern “ procedure for us kids.
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Northern Indiana here, but in a Polish neighborhood so like rural southern Poland with electricity thrown it.
 
I was told that you throw spilled salt over your left shoulder to knock the Devil off, if he's perched there.
 
We always had at least a couple of cats in the house when I was growing up and I can recall my mum buying the occasional little carton of cats' milk.
At first I didn't realise that it was simply cow's milk which had been chemically treated to lower the lactose content and I had visions of weird farms out in the countryside where big fat mama cats were kept in pens, with their teats plugged into milking machines, while they moo/meowed softly.
 
Although it doesn’t bother me too much when I’m out and about these days, when I was growing up I thought there was a possibility a piano could fall on my head. Falling pianos seemed to be a thing in the media when I was growing up.

Edit - Seems like they’re still a thing.

1640169825145.png
 
When I was growing up, my mother (who had come from very classy stock, down on its 'uppers') wouldn't hang washing out on our big garden line on a Sunday. It had to be hung up under cover. I was always puzzled as to why this was the case, and never really got a satisfactory answer, so I think I made up my own about it being bad luck to hang out laundry on a Sunday.

I only realised later, grown up, that it was probably part of religious observance. Yet my mother wasn't in the least religious, so I remain vague about the whole thing.
 
Analogue Boy said:
Although it doesn’t bother me too much when I’m out and about these days, when I was growing up I thought there was a possibility a piano could fall on my head. Falling pianos seemed to be a thing in the media when I was growing up.

Edit - Seems like they’re still a thing.

View attachment 49647
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Whenever a waiting line at the Doctors or Hospital was portrayed in the comics I read as a kid, there was always a kid with a cooking pot/saucepan stuck on his head - humerous but not odd. Don't modern day kids use head protection when out jousting ?
 
catseye said:
When I was growing up, my mother (who had come from very classy stock, down on its 'uppers') wouldn't hang washing out on our big garden line on a Sunday. It had to be hung up under cover. I was always puzzled as to why this was the case, and never really got a satisfactory answer, so I think I made up my own about it being bad luck to hang out laundry on a Sunday.

I only realised later, grown up, that it was probably part of religious observance. Yet my mother wasn't in the least religious, so I remain vague about the whole thing.
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The very working-class area I lived in as a child also followed Sunday observance, even the non-churchgoers. It was about being respectable.
Kids couldn't play out, even in their own gardens, and they had to wear their Sunday Best clothes. To sit inside the house. Bored stiff.

I hated Sundays. We used to have a thread on it. :chuckle:
 
You keep hearing of stolen goods being sold on the black market. I thought the black market was an actual place. I imagined a marketplace, with canvas covering the stalls but all in black.
 
When very young I thought that if someone broke and arm or leg it meant that it had snapped off completely like breaking a twig and that the plaster was needed to make sure the two halves grew back together.
 
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hunck said:
I imagined Bethnal Green to be a lovely semi rural place.
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I was bought up there and oh for that to be true. (East End of London)

You would have been right 1000+ years ago but possibly a bit 'marshy'.

If I remember correctly, in Saxon bethnal means a quite, peaceful place.
 
kesavaross said:
I was bought up there and oh for that to be true. (East End of London)

You would have been right 1000+ years ago but possibly a bit 'marshy'.

If I remember correctly, in Saxon bethnal means a quite, peaceful place.
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My illusions were shattered when I worked around there several years later. It wasn’t very green but there was a lot of Bethnal.

I looked up ‘Bethnal’ but didn’t find any definition other than with the Green added except there was a British rock band with that name in 1972, members of which later joined Hawkwind.
 
Analogue Boy said:
When I was little, I was told if you put a stamp on the envelope upside down it was an act of treason against the Queen and if you could end up in the Tower.
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In the USA there's definitely been an urban legend that it's illegal to put a stamp upside-down on a letter.
 
When I was a very small child, I used to dream that I was a meaningless grain of sand in the immense expanse of the universe. I could feel it viscerally. And I could "see" that this universe itself was a globe, suspended to the ceiling of a child's room, among many other similar globes.
 
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