When I was about 7 years old, I watched a show about atomic bombs. They mentioned that the destructive force was brought about by splitting atoms. For a long while after that show, I believed that there was a small chance that I could split an atom while doing something like cutting bread with a knife. I was always terrified that by cutting my jelly sandwich into halves, I may accidentally wipe my town off the map.

SMooSH

I was told as a child that if you ate bannans you would grow a tail and become a monkey. I didn't eat any but I sure fed a lot of them to my little brother since I wanted a monkey.

No Body

When I was 4, I deeply believed that eating ants is healty and even lenthen my life, so I ate "an ant a day" alive from my yard. I still remember the sour taste.

Yuping

I used to believe that the inside part of the banana was posonous, but fortunately the outside part was the antidote, so as long as you ate the whole thing, you'd be fine. I was told this by a microbiologist when I was 9 and believed him utterly.

Janet

When my parents were out and my Sister looked after me, she used to make up a drink from jelly cubes. I used to love this but after I had drunk it she said if I stopped moving it would set in my stomach as a big jelly...so I would keep jiggling about for about an hour.

Ally

I used to believe that if you didn't wash apples that you would get poisoned and die. I also thought this is why Adam was kicked out of the garden of Eden. "You know, they should have washed those apples before they ate them."

Anon

I moved to the USA when I was a kid and had to learn english on my own. I didn't understand much about what was going on around me. Lunch time was hell because I was on my own. I knew what a jelly fish was, but I didn't know that 'jelly' by itself meant something. I thought for months that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served at the school cafeteria were actually peanut butter and jelly fish sandwiches. Needless to say I brought my own lunch on these days.

ricolarno

When I was a kid I was told by my Mom that if I didn't go to bed before 10pm Pumpkins would come after me. I really don't know why she said Pumpkins of all things but it still scared me. I always pictured Pumpkin heads rolling up my driveway and into my front door. It scared me enough so that I always went to bed earlier than 10.

Allie

Remember Pop Rocks, those little candies that used to "explode" in your mouth? When I was 6, a friend told me that if you mixed those with soda and drank it, you'd blow up. My older brother put some into my cup of Sprite when I wasn't looking once and told me with a smirk after I had taken a long sip. I was so upset that I ran crying to my room and laid there for hours, convinced I was going to die and cursing my brother's name for all eternity. When I heard my stomach rumble from hunger, I believed I was in the final moments of my life and I started screaming so loudly my neighbors called the cops because they thought something was seriously wrong.

Kelly

When I was little, I heard my mother call my belly button a "navel." A few days later, she offered me a navel orange. I was convinced that it was some sort of belly button fruit and from then on I spent hours cleaning out my navel with Q-tips and antiseptic.

Kelly

When I was a kid, I was very afraid of chicken pot pies, and wondered why anyone would ever eat any such thing. It was probably because I wasn't yet clearly hearing a distinction between "chicken pot" and "chicken pox". So I must have been thinking of them as "chicken pox pies".

Jennifer

When I was about six years old, I saw an advertisment on TV for those cream-filled chocolate eggs. There was a rabbit on-sreen bawking like a chicken, and a real-live chicken making no noise. I was scared to eat one because I knew rabbits did not make that sound. I was convinced that if I ate one of the candy eggs, that I would start to make that chicken sound uncontrollably, and never be able to comunicate with my friends again in words. For years when Easter rolled around, I would give all my eggs to my cousin. Why his English wasn't translated to bawking I never knew.

Loren

When I was about 4 or 5, I had (and for some reason loved) a children's book about Louis Pasteur, which had illustrations of rabid dogs with white foam all around their mouths. One day, a family friend served me some blueberry pancakes with blueberries for eyes and a whipped cream smile, and I FLIPPED OUT. I cried softly at the table and when everyone asked me what was wrong, I told them that I couldn't eat my pancakes because they had rabies.

hyperchondriac child

I used to believe that if you inadvertently ate the bones of chicken or fish it would add extra bones to your skeletal structure.

Catwoman=^..^=

When I was in kindergarten, I was "going out" with a boy on my street. We introduced my older sister to his older brother and they started going out. One day when we were playing together, we mixed up a potion that we were convinced would shrink us to the size of legos. We talked all the time about what we would do when we were shrunk, where we would live, what we would eat, how we would swim at the pool and so on. We didn't want to take the potion till we had planned it all out and built our teeny lego houses and cars and things. Before we got to take it, our boyfriends' mom found our concoction in her fridge and threw it away. When I think back now I'm sure that the potion we made would have killed us. I can't remember everything we put in it, but I do remember that windex was one of the ingredients.

Midget

I used to eat doggy chocs until my older brother told me that if I did I would have puppies.

EG

I assume sometime when I was a young child, I ate a banana and then requested another one. My mother, thinking that one piece of fruit was enough, told me "No, you'll get sick." For the longest time, I thought there was something special about bananas in that one was a tasty treat but two would make a person sick.

Frank W.

I didn't want to taste M&Ms at a birthday party, but my parents made me, and I found out that I liked them. I liked the red and yellow ones, but there were green and black ones too. Green and black were "boy-colors", so they were disgusting, and probably poisonous for girls.

Anon

I used to have phobia about seafood (shrimp, crabs, etc.) because I thought that they would slither up my face and crawl into one of my orifices. There it would proceed to nest and slowly eat my brain and lay eggs...

Taylor

i used to be deathly terrifed of Rice Krispies cereal. I thought the "popping" noise it made was a warning for me not to it eat!!

Snapcracklepop