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What Were YOUR Erroneous Childhood Beliefs?

maybe that one should have gone in the erroneous parental beliefs section - should be a lot of fun there with computers, video recorders (remember those) and other high tech wizardry that only the young can understand.

Joe
 
When shopping, my mum would point to shop mannequins in store windows where they stood being in the process of being dressed. With no wig, arms missing and unclothed they looked (to me) not scary but bizarre.
"That's what happens when you eat too many ice lollies!" says my Mum.
What a wag! I still don't like ice lollies!
 
When I was a sprog, an uncle told me that during the war ships were launched using banana skins as there was a shortage of grease. :roll:
 
Not exactly Fortean, but anyway: that Enoch Powell was the leader of the Liberal party, and that he was West Indian.
 
Childhood Beliefs

For years my father rather cruelly had me believing that a haggis was actually an animal with shorter legs on one side than the other and the way to catch one was to scare it as it ran round a mountain, so it would attempt to go the other way and plummet to it's death.
 
But it must be true! It was featured in a recurrent investigation printed in The Beano, IIRC.
 
LymeswoldSnork said:
Not exactly Fortean, but anyway: that Enoch Powell was the leader of the Liberal party, and that he was West Indian.

Spitting Image on TV used to have a black Enoch Powell as one of their puppets. Could that be where you got the idea?
 
There is a statue in Edinburgh of the Duke of Wellington on his horse. When we were young, my father had my sisters and I believing that when the One O'Clock was fired, the horse nodded it's head. Very effective as the gun makes you jump (it does, no matter what any Edinburgher tells you) and that makes you think the horse did nod it's head.
 
this a a brilliant thread.

when i was little my mum had me convinced that if i played with my belly button my skin would fly off and that if i told lies i would grow horns and my tounge would get covered in warts
 
My Granny told me that if you picked a guinea pig up by the tail its eyes would drop out. It was some time before I realised the problem with this story!
 
I just heard Gloria Hunniford on the radio. She said that as a child she used to sing along to the BBC radio, her reasoning being that if she could hear it all the way over in Northern Ireland, they could hear her in London and would write her a letter or something.
 
That Chase and Status single keeps reminding me that when I was little, I was convinced that the words to "Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner" went:

Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner,
That I love Paris so...

The second line would be sung in a French accent. Don't ask me where I got that idea.
 
I thought it was 'maybe it's because I'm a londoner/that I am such a wanker' but I got that off a Viz cover and had never heard the song.
 
LaurenChurchill said:
When I took ice out of the ice tray, I would try and leave a few cubes near each other so they wouldn't get lonely.

Even today I feel guilty when I sort my digital pictures and I have to delete a few ones. Like: "What right have I deciding the life and death of digital pictures." :?
 
I don't want to go all the way back to check, but I came across this website recently:

http://www.iusedtobelieve.com/

And a lot of things were very funny, its just like this thread, only "out there".
If it has been covered somewhere, just ignore it.
 
I used to be a bit ocd when younger and couldn't get to sleep until I repeated/did certain things 3 times in a row. I'm not too sure what I thought would happen the next day if I didn't but it would be very bad.
I also used to believe that my dolls/teddy bears would get offended if I paid one more attention than the others and made a point of saying goodnight to them in turn every night. I also remember distinctly having a long conversation with one of them telling him that I did love him and he mustn't be upset if I spent more time with the others.
I was an only child, quite lonely and odd, with a very active imagination!!

Oh, and when I was about 13 and in a secondary school in the London suburbs I was caught up in the "Chelsea Smilers" urban legend and convinced I'd be horribly disfigured on my way home from school for not knowing anything about football, let alone Chelsea!
 
One way my mother successfully persuaded to get me to eat my meals as a kid, (thinking of all the starving children in Africa never persuaded me to eat up my lamb's heart or other repugnant meals as I always offered to send them to those starving kids and she could never get past that stage with me) was with a story she told me of a 'girl she went to school with', who wouldn't eat her meals and ended up being so skinny that one day she slid through the slats in a grid in the road and disappeared forever.
They really knew how to terrorise kids back then. Of course I was never tempted to see if it was possible for me to slide through the slats, just in case, y'know... so that one worked pretty well.
 
Not sure if this was a childhood belief or misapprehension, but one Saturday afternoon, when I was young, I remember saying "that poor horse bar has run in every race." Much adult laughter and mockery followed :oops:
 
When I was about 9 or 10 a few kids in my class had gone to the cinema for a birthday party. On the Monday when they came in they were buzzing with this tale of how they only saw half the film as the cinema was evacuated because there was a ghost in there. I believed them, who wouldn't!

Thing is I still go to that same cinema and on several occasions in the intervening 20 years I remember briefly thinking about the time it was evacuated because of a ghost until just recently it entered my mind and suddenly realised what a riduclous truth it was. Obviously it never happened but for 20 odd years it was in my mind remebered as a real event.

I also realised only a few years ago how my Christmas stocking as a child was semmingly empty at bed time yet full in the morning and I was never woken up by the noise. Obviously I knew it wasn't Papa Noel but I always wondered how my Mum stuffed it without waking me until *lightbulb moment*... two stockings!

Strange the things that you don't actually question as a child or the obvious things you never actually work out. Or maybe it is just me who is very dense... :(
 
As a very young child having been told about the earth spinning I thought the clouds moving was visual evidence of this. Not sure how fast I thought we were goig because some of those clouds can get quite a shift on when its windy!
 
I used to think that instead of getting better from an illness, your body just got used to having that particular illness and that the build up of illnesses is what made you age and die.

Basically, the more illnesses you got in life, the sooner you aged and died.

This was probably me trying to get a handle on always being ill with chest infections as a child.
 
_Cobh_ said:
One way my mother successfully persuaded to get me to eat my meals as a kid, (thinking of all the starving children in Africa never persuaded me to eat up my lamb's heart or other repugnant meals as I always offered to send them to those starving kids and she could never get past that stage with me) was with a story she told me of a 'girl she went to school with', who wouldn't eat her meals and ended up being so skinny that one day she slid through the slats in a grid in the road and disappeared forever.
They really knew how to terrorise kids back then. Of course I was never tempted to see if it was possible for me to slide through the slats, just in case, y'know... so that one worked pretty well.


This reminds me of a book that my mother had and read to me when I was very young.

Struwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

It comprises ten illustrated and rhymed stories, mostly about children. Each has a clear moral that demonstrates the disastrous consequences of misbehavior in an exaggerated way. With blood chilling results.

eg:

In "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher" (The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb), a mother warns her son not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.

It's German; presumably grisly childhood tales are acceptable in a country that begat the Brothers Grimm.

And I wonder why I grew up .....a bit odd....... :gaga:

Here's the whole book, digitised: http://www.fln.vcu.edu/struwwel/petereng.html
 
Those stories seem very familiar to me i think i read them as an older child, and it reminded me of something my dad said to me when i was about 3 and sucked my thumb. He told me it would go soggy and fall off. I stopped sucking my thumb that very second and would try and stop people i was at nursery with from doing it aswell.. Goodness knows how traumatised i would have have been if he'd have said someone would come and cut it off with scissors!
 
My mother assured me that if I ate bananas after 8pm, they would stick to my ribs. :roll:

I think she had a grudge against bananas, because on a holiday in England with my parents, I befriended a local lad whose mother introduced me to the banana sandwich. I had never tried such a combination before then. Then, after lunch one day, she offered me sliced bananas in ice cold milk with a sprinkle of sugar. This was mana from heaven. I mentioned both dishes to mam and she was horrified at the prospect warning me about the damage I was doing to my ribs.

I wasn't to eat the stringy bits either as they were poisonous. I still peel them off before I eat a banana.
 
Blinko_Glick said:
This reminds me of a book that my mother had and read to me when I was very young.

Struwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

It comprises ten illustrated and rhymed stories, mostly about children. Each has a clear moral that demonstrates the disastrous consequences of misbehavior in an exaggerated way. With blood chilling results.

eg:

In "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher" (The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb), a mother warns her son not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.

It's German; presumably grisly childhood tales are acceptable in a country that begat the Brothers Grimm.

And I wonder why I grew up .....a bit odd....... :gaga:

Here's the whole book, digitised: http://www.fln.vcu.edu/struwwel/petereng.html

Thank you for that! I look forward to reading the stories - I do love grisly children's stories :D
My sister sucked her thumb til she was in her thirties, so it's a shame my Mum didn't have that book.

Now that you've mentioned the book, I have a mental image of a child being lifted into the air on the end of a balloon or a kite - I wonder if the child who wouldn't eat was from a story in a book my mum read to me?
 
Ginando said:
My mother assured me that if I ate bananas after 8pm, they would stick to my ribs. :roll:

That made me LOL! Fabulous quote!

I think she had a grudge against bananas, because on a holiday in England with my parents, I befriended a local lad whose mother introduced me to the banana sandwich. I had never tried such a combination before then. Then, after lunch one day, she offered me sliced bananas in ice cold milk with a sprinkle of sugar. This was mana from heaven. I mentioned both dishes to mam and she was horrified at the prospect warning me about the damage I was doing to my ribs.


We grew up on banana butties (sandwiches) and also the banana, sugar and milk combo. I still love banana butties for lunch. yum :)
 
_Cobh_ said:
also the banana, sugar and milk combo

I was just thinking about this the other day.

If you gave that to a kid as a dessert these days they'd look at you like you were mental.
 
McAvennie_ said:
_Cobh_ said:
also the banana, sugar and milk combo

I was just thinking about this the other day.

If you gave that to a kid as a dessert these days they'd look at you like you were mental.

They would probably threaten to call ChildLine :)
They might think you were mental but if the only other option was a jam butty (as it was for us) then they might think it was a treat!


Have you been watching the tv show 'It never did me any harm?' where kids have to live a few weeks like their parents did in the '70's?
It's worth watching if like me you were a 70's teenager :)
 
as a littlun (in the mid-late '80s) i remember being fascinated by the big brown/black smokey-coloured glass bowls that hung from the ceiling in a department store we used to visit. i asked my mum one day what they were and i learned that they were coffee machines. made complete sense to me, they were coffee coloured after all and i imagined people standing underneath with their mugs all ready to receive a nice cup of java from about fifteen feet above their heads.
it was only when i was in my mid-teens that i realised one day how dangerous this practice had been, i mean what if someone was caught unawares by a molten cappuccino from the gods?

it began to dawn on me, surely... SURELY... mum hadn't told me a fib about the devices to avoid explaining the fact that they were actually CCTV cameras, and thus also deftly avoided the need to explain burglars and other types of 'naughty people' to a three year old?

turns out she had. the woman's a genius.
 
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