I used to believe that penguins could fly, they just didn't want to.

Mariah\

steel wool comes from steel sheep

tg

i used to believe that sausages were to pigs as eggs are to hens

stuart swanston

When I was younger, I would sleep at my grandmother's house, in the guest bedroom. She told me not to sleep under the window, because of the "terrible draft". For the following few years, I avoided that bed fearing that the "terrible giraffe" would stick his head in and hurt me somehow.

Mike

"Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!"
My little cousin Melissa used to love the Wizard of Oz. Well, when we took her to the zoo one time, she kept asking to see the "Oh My's". It took us such a long time to figure out that she thought Oh My's were a real animal from the song in the movie!

Lisa Lynette

I took 'Peter Cottontail' a bit seriously, and thought that all cotton came from rabbits' tails. The first time I saw a bag of 100 cotton balls, I was horrified. Then I figured they must shed them or have them shaved off like sheep's wool. Learning about the slaves and cotton in the South set me straight.

queeneve

A friend of mine mistakenly believed that "a view" was an animal, rather than "a panorama". Thus on every family outing, some one remark "wow...look at the view", and the poor girl would look desperately out of the car window for the ever elusive glimpse of this rare species, to the evident mirth of her siblings. Despite it taking years for her to figure out the truth, there doesn't appear to be any lasting pyschological damage...

Richard

My Dad used to tell about sidehill gougers, a moose looking elk with legs shorter on one side than the other, the better to go around hills. If they went in the valley they would fall over and die. They lived on the hills of SE Ohio. Courting sidehill gougers would burrow under the hills with corkscrews that grew on their noses at puberty (like antlers), and they could walk on the round sides of the tunnels, and pop up on an unrelated hill. There were clockwise and counterclockwise gougers, and they could not intermarry, or 75%their kids would have cross dominant legs, short and long on the same side, and be unable to walk and survive. I was very, very disapointed to find this was not true. I am glad to see others had the same story told to them in their childhoods.

I also thought cows were girl horses, and cats were girl dogs, that all horses and dogs were boys, and that chipmunks thought they owned your house and were hitting you up for rent when they chattered at you.

Jill

When I was little I filled my pockets with rabbit droppings because I thought they were special, shiny, black pebbles.

Karen

For some reason I had got it my mind that humans were the creators of all life. My mother was, to say the least, surprised when asked her to give birth to a cat, since I just gotten a sister.

Anon