Once in second grade, (I thought) a teacher told me "If you don't throw your trash away in the trash can, the world will stop spinning." I certainly didn't want that to happen! Her scare tactic worked good. At 24, I still make sure my trash gets thrown away properly.

Danna

air would soon finish in the world then humanity would be in trouble but only I knew this and I didn't want to panic the entire planet so I secretly tried to think of ways to save air only I would use.

Abdul

That hurricanes were big truckers who drove around causing damage because noone was big enough to stop them. This came from them having peoples names and seeing an image on TV of a trucker getting into a truck to clear some wreckage after a hurricane hit

Grant

When I was very young I had an irrational fear that the world was about to run out of air. Selflessly I'd hold my breathe as oftern and as long as I could so that there'd be enough for everybody.

toon

when i was little i thought that if i littered somewhere in the world there was going to be a tornado.. i thought this because my cousin told me that..

Anon

when i was 4 i thought an earthquake was an earth cake!

chardog

When I was about four or five, I used to think that a "cyclone" and a "cyclops" were the same thing.

Anon

I used to belief that a hurricane was a giant crab that emerged from the sea (from time to time) and ate people.

BJ

I live in California where we have frequent earthquakes. When I was four, I experienced my first one (the big '89 earthquake) while I was singing in the shower. Later on that evening my dad explained to me that when god doesn't like what you're doing, he makes earthquakes. He did a little demonstration of shaking a lego piece on a magazine until the lego piece fell off. Then it was bedtime and I couldn't go to sleep so I asked my mom for a glass of water. When she came back with the water, we had an aftershock which felt like our apartment building was tipping over. She sat down just as it stopped and for the longest time I thought that she stopped the building from falling with her weight. I ALSO thought that I was the cause of that earthquake because god hated my song, so for years I tried to remember that song I sang in the shower.

Anon

I used to believe that when someone said a tornado hit somewhere, I thought it meant that there were huge tomatoes that hit the city.

Anon

When I was younger, my father told be about Tornados. Well, I was scared out of my freakin' mind when I found out that something could just rush by at any given minute destroying everything in its path!

That night, I filled my suitcases--many of which said 'Going to Grandmas!' on them (does anyone else remember those?)--with everything: money, pictures, stuffed animals, clothes, whatever.

I fell asleep that night holding the handles to about four suitcases, ready to spring into action in case a tornado came tearing through the house.

The next morning, I woke up and found all my suitcases on the floor.

Laurie

I used to believe (when I was little) that when there was a dark sky early (like at 6 p.m.) there was a storm coming with tornados, so I put all my Hot Wheel cars in a bucket and then I put the bucket on our porch, thinking it would make our house not be able to get knocked down. lol

Henry

I used to think that tornados were made when God farted.

Catherine

When I was six or seven, I read the Pompeii issue of National Geographic and became convinced that volcanoes were going to get me when I slept, though we lived nowhere near any. In fact, they were waiting outside my window, though if I looked outside they'd duck around back so I couldn't see them. A bad dream about fire or lava traveling along our fence up to the house was the kicker, and I remember I took the magazine outside and left it there at some point so it got ruined by rain. I was so worried about a friend who was going on a vacation to Washington because of Mt. Saint Helens, too.

My defenses against the volcanoes were always sleeping with my comforter over me, even in summer, and sleeping with a huge stuffed dog that would shoot... something, I guess... out of its nose to keep the volcanoes away. The habit of sleeping with the comforter always on lasted until I was at least fifteen or so, though the belief had long since passed...

Amanda

At school they taught us about earthquakes in Geography. I then imagined people falling in to these holes opening up in the ground and then the ground closing again on top of them. I constantly worried about this happening and was nervous every time a lorry or train rumbled by, thinking this is it. Unfortunately they forgot to tell us that this was extremely unlikely in the North West of England.

Jean

I used to believe that tornadoes were potatoes. Whenever there was a tornado warning I thought Mr. Potatoe head was walking around stomping on houses.

sm

When I was in 4th grade, almost every kid in my class was convinced that the peninsula of Florida would sink into the ocean by the year 2000.

Anon

Until I was in 3rd grade, I used to always make sure that I slept with my back facing the window during tornado season, even though tornades were fairly uncommon in my area, they still happened, so I wanted to be sure that a tornado didn't happen while I was sleeping and facing the window, because glass pieces would fly into my eyes and blind me!

Of corse, I think if there were a tornado while I was sleeping, I'd know, and my window and where I slept on my bed where about 8 feet apart...

Amanda

I used to believe that when there was an earthquake, rocks would fall from the sky.

Nai

When I was 6 years old I was afraid of the "eye of the hurricane" passing over us because I thought it was a real eye.

Rosemary