I had some idea of rigor mortis when I was young, but I thought it meant that at the moment you died all your apendages became totally straight and flat. I decided to test this by lying on the bed in a crucifix position, hands flat to the bed and fingers pointing rigidly out, holding my breath. I thought my mother would be terrified to see me OBVIOUSLY dead...but she just told my it was time for supper.

dawn

I used to think that the people that died in action movies wanted to give up their life so they really died.....

Diandra

As a child I believed that when people died a kind of huge soul vaccuum would hover over the deceased's houses and then suck people's souls out up to heaven through some kind of tube. But as time went on and I physically never saw these tubes the belief finally was replaced with atheism

griff

I used to believe that if you died you could have 'an operation' to bring you back to life.

Mikey

I believed that the spirit of my grandfather lurked in my room each night, so I slept in my parents room for years. The funny thing is, I have 2 grandfathers, one is dead, the other still isn't. (but he's 85) I was scared of the spirit of the one who is still alive! (he was an absent father, and a pretty lousy grandfather, but I give him credit) I honestly don't know why this was, I must have been confused about which one was which.

Neato Man

I thought "skeleton keys" were made of bones from people who had died, and had powers that could open up locked doors!

JoJo the dancing bear

My grandmother told us that when someone died, they went into the big hole. So, I figured that if grown-ups went into the big hole, kids must go into a little hole. I was petrified of getting too close to any hole, in fear of being sucked into it. This included nail holes in the wall where pictures used to hang, knotty pine wall panelling, all kinds of wierd stuff like that.
She also used to tell us that when you died, you went up the old wooden hill to heaven. For a long time, we were afraid to go to bed because we had to walk up the "wooden" stairs to get there. We either ran up as fast as we could, or walked up real slow.

Anon

i used to think that when people died, the went up and lived on clouds like monkey from monkey magic. I though they could look down on us riding around on there little white clouds!!

tim

When I was little I thought my grandmothers oldest brother had died of heart disease. When she corrected me, years later that he had, in fact, died in the war, she asked me why I thought that.
"I thought you said he had a Purple heart." I replied

Samantha

I used to think that if you got run over by a car your body would just go all flat and all you could do was lie there in the street.

Mr. Mastodon Farm

when i was little i used to believe dying your hair meant that when you died your hair would change colour to red or green or something.

snoopysowner

When my niece was 3, she inexplicably became hysterical one day. My sister had just come home from the store and had bought my niece a package of new underwear and told her it was because she was "getting older and needed a bigger size". My niece burst into tears and ran up to her room. After we calmed her down, she told us that she had been trying very hard not to get older because it would make her mother die. Her father's mother had just passed away and our mother had died long before my niece was born and she thought that when children got older it made their mothers die so she had been trying to prevent it. What a sweetie!

karel

i used to believe when someone died their image on photo's would disappear

beryl's girl

I used to believe that when people died, they vanished into thin air.

KJ

When I was a kid, I used to believe that when people died, they would stand up and walk to their own graves.

Mark (england)

I used to believe that 82 was the highest possible age for people, that if you hadn't already died, you would surely die when you were 82. This is because my great grandmother died at 82. I never concidered the fact that I had another great grandmother, still alive at 96.
I also believed that my grandfather died (at 59, when I was three) because he ate too much chopped liver.

Marita (Norway)

I used to think that you died after you had breathed a million times. This resulted in spells of light-headedness as I went to sleep each night, attemtping to maximise my time alive.

ned

When I went to school I constantly believed what the other kids had told me.So far, as the hypochondiac I was,
I believed that:
If you ate shaving cream you'd die.
If you got three paper cuts you'd die.
The mirror ghost would kill me.
Any ghosts would kill me.
I'd have a heart attack from doing too much exercise.
My arteries would clot from eating cream
The other kids would really give in and twist my wrist off.
That's about all of the sad fears I can conjure up for now..Trust me there'll be more...

Jopp Linn Haze

i overheard my parents/sisters talking about my grandfather's death and the dangers of popping zits on your nose around the same time. for years after that, i believed that my grandfather had actually died from popping a zit on his nose!

Anon

When I was younger i heard all the stuff in church about 'eating christs body', but my mum was not religious so i never really had anyone to explain things to me, so I thought that we must be suppossed to literally eat EVERYONE we love once they died, but that we had stopped doing it here in britain because most people are not religious, but that in America, people still did it and that was what 'thanksgiving' was. All the people who died that year would be stored and then eaten by their family/friends on thanksgiving, and they would all be so 'thankfull' for the big meal they got. I also thought that spam was 'left over' dead people who died here in britian, who no one cared about, like tramps and stuff, and that they were made into spam so that the genral public would eat them as that would be the cheapest way of 'salivating' (salvating) them.

Anon