I used to think that when you moved, you SWITCHED houses with the person who moved out.

Sheippe

I thought an antimacassar was something that blew up macassars, which I assumed was something vaguely low class that rich people who had antimacassars hated.

blnkfrnk

i used to believe that a mortgage was a big pirates chest that my mom and dad used to keep in the attic.

lou

my mother told us that there was a mr. wall and if we touched the walls with our dirty hands he would take her away. we did and she hid in the closet acting like he took her. we had to promise mr. wall never to get the walls dirty again.

karen axberg

My grandmother had antimacassars on her chairs, but I thought they were just called Chair Covers. When I heard the real word for them, I thought it meant they had belonged to Auntie Macassar - mercifully I never asked who she was.

Rachel

when i was realy young i knew that the washing machine used water to wash the clothes so i automatically assumed that the dryer used hot water to dry them!

Guy

We had one of those automatic ice-makers in our freezer when I was growing up. I used to believe that the noise it made was a man named Stanley who made the ice. I made the mistake of telling that to my grandmother, who put a little plastic man and woman in the freezer, so that when I looked to see if Stanley really existed, I found not only did he exist but had a wife!
Stanley's wife never got a name, though. She was always just referred to as "his wife". It took me a long time to accept that Stanley didn't really make my ice.

Danielle

When I was a little kid I used to think double doors on houses were for fat people who couldn't fit through one door.

DeDe

I used to be certain that if my parents would go up and look in our crawl space, they would find a playhouse for me up there. I imagined it as a sort of flat yellow plastic bundle, but when my parents set it up in our front yard it would be quite big, with multiple rooms, and even a refrigerator, and I would be able to live there.

I also used to stare at my mother's sewing machine, thinking if I just knew which levers to push, gumballs would come out. But I knew she would yell at me if I touched it, so I never tried.

S

When I was a kid, we used to have a tv set with 7 channel buttons and one marked with "AV". We never used AV and once I asked my that what would that button do. "Well, son, the tv set would explode if you press it." I never pressed the AV button.

Anon

I thought garden gnomes were alive because when I was about 5 I went to someones house and they had an electronic driveway gate and tons of garden gnomes. I saw the gnomes standing around and the gate opening by itself.. the gnomes were alive.

Alessandra

I would help my mom with cooking when I was little, and I thought when you put things in the bowl, you were really creating a little world. The ingredients represented weather, so for example, when you put eggs in, it was sunny. Flour was snow, water was obviosly rain, sugar was an ice storm, and chocolate was a mudslide. I always felt horrible for mixing it all up and making them have a tornado! Then when you baked it, the mini world had its apocalypse and was no more. :(

Anon

When I was little, and I was very upset at times, I believed that if the walls could have feelings, they would laugh or mock me. But, when I wanted to escape them, I would look up--towards the cieling, because if it had feelings, it would like me and comfort me.

Jennifer Salisbury, CA

When me and my family movd into our new house i was 10 and my sister was 8 1/2. The basement bathrooms wallpaper looked like the wallpaper in Willy Wonka and The chocolate factory where they licked it and a schnozberry tasted like a schnozberry and so on. Well my siter and were convinced and we spent hours licking the wallpaper, but never tasted a thing.

Lisa

For some reason, I used to believe that if you put a potato in the dishwasher, it would grow a palm tree. I decided to try it, and was very disappointed when all that came out was a wet, soapy potato.

Brenden

I used to think that the vacuum cleaner performed the same function as the lawnmower. They both made lots of noise, and something happened underneath where I couldn't see, and both were used weekly on all the surfaces I thought of as 'the ground'. I noticed that the carpet never seemed to really need a trim though, and I figured it just needed to be watered more often... Yes, I tried to water it, regularly... until I got caught, and it was explained to me that carpet was not alive.

Jenny

i used to believe that if you removed those "do not remove" tags on mattresses that the FBI would come crashing through the windows of my house and arrest me.

Whitney

My mom use to make me vacuum our house all the time. She told me if i stopped vacuuming the carpet would catch on fire.... I believed it.

Lo

I believed you ran the vacuum to cut the carpet and used the lawn mower to smooth out the grass.

Michelle

Because my mum used to ask me to put my dirty washing on the landing outside my bedroom, I believed for many years that it was actually the landing that washed my clothes!

Amy Tyndall