My sister started Brownies 2 years before me and her and her friends would come home raving about how great 'Brown owl' was. When i eventually went to Brownies, i walked in the room and saw a brown plastic owl in the middle of the floor sat on a plastic toad stool. I looked at it horrified and whispered to my sister 'Is that brown owl???' wondering what sort of strange plastic-worshipping cult she'd brought me to. It wasn't until after she and her friend's had finished laughing at me that i realised Brown Owl was in fact a real person.

Katy

I took piano lessons in grade school. The book with the music in it also had illustrations of the composers that were very lifelike. The one of Johann Sebastian Bach really freaked me out and I thought he was watching me with this stern expression. (The fact that he'd been dead for 200 years made it even more eerie.) I had to hide the music book in a different room when I wasn't using it, because his eyes followed me everywhere. I couldn't even learn the piece because he was looking at me. Finally my dad glued a piece of paper over the face, which took some explaining at my next lesson...

I'm 32 and pictures of Bach still give me the creeps. I don't play the piano anymore, either.

queeneve

When i was young i had a racer (bike) and used to hate cleaning it. On this one day i could not shift a bit a dirt for love nor money, so i went and asked my step dad to help me. Probably sick and tired of helping change tyres oil this that and the other he told me to go back and put some 'elbow grease' into it. Off back to the garage i went, i returned 5 minutes later saying 'where do you keep the elbow grease then i cant find it'!!!!!!!!!.
As you can imagine this brought much laughter and a very red face when explained.

Brian Whataprat!!

One time, when I was little, we were at the beach on a really hot day, and my cousin was flying a black kite shaped like a stingray. A storm rolled in so she had to take the kite down really fast. When she got the kite down it was hot and when she touched it, it burned her. And, as she got burned she said something like, “Ow, he got me.” After that, I always believed that kites could bite you.

Monyca

Me and a small group of my friends used to play "Victorians" when we were about 7. This involved pretending to wear crinolines and carry candles and oil-lamps, alongside the usual mums and dads type stuff.
I have only recently discovered this is not entirely normal. My boyfriend thinks it's hysterical.

Lynz (21-UK)

as a young boy I watched a film where a a cowboy fell off a horse after riding at breakneck speed across the desert. The marshal said "He's dead from loss of blood!". for years i believed riding horses fast would drain your blood. I never saw the bit where the cowboy had been shot before the desert riding scene. To this day I am wary of horsed

JohnG

In my Girl Scout handbook there was a line about how a sculptor can 'see' the figure in a block of stone. I took that to mean that if you chipped away at a block of stone or wood you'd find a wonderful surprise in the form of some fabulous sculpture inside. I tried it with a block of plaster of Paris and all I got was a big pile of dust.

queeneve

I've always loved drawing, mostly people or faces. But when I was little, I believed every single doodle you did was somehow transported to a different dimension to live forever – and I do mean live, as in walk, talk, think and feel – in the World of Drawings. So whenever I drew something ugly I’d be consumed with guilt. I thought I was responsible for condemning this defective drawing to an eternal life of mockery and misery. Boy, did I use rubbers back then.

Bel Seslaf, Brazil

I believed that crocheting was remarkably easy. All you did was get somebody to attach the yarn to the knitting needles and then rub them together vigorously and whatever you wanted to crochet would come out of where they were rubbing.

Stitched in Time