I used to think that fountains were taps left running all day. Could never work out where all the water used to go to.

Anon

ever since i was a baby, we have owened a beach house, and up until i was 7 i used to believe that the waves would stop crashing on the shore at 7.00pm, when i went to bed.

To me it made perfect sense, I as a child got tired, so why wouldnt the ocean, get tired of churning up water???

boog

when I was around 5/6 I didn't know what a drought was back in the 70's so I thought if I took a cup of water outside and poured it into the street gutter that it would find a stream somewhere and add to that to fill up the other streams which led to rivers,ponds,lakes,etc... and finally end up in the ocean.Uh... nope..My mom wondered back then what on earth I was doing making sporadic trips with a cup of water. Then she told me the truth. Man I must of made about 3 dozen trips every so often thinking I was ''helping'' !!

Stacie B.

When I was young, I believed everything my older sister told me. SO, when we visited Niagara Falls when I was 8 years old, I asked her if the falls ran all night. She told me they turned them off at midnight. And I believed her.

Jenn

I used to look for raisins in the ocean when mum told me to be careful of the currents

Karina

I used to believe you got high tides when the sea was full (I lived on the Thames, then)

rosy

I used to believe that all rivers ran south, or down. This just had to the truth because the rivers were on the big pull-down map hanging in our classroom and the fact that gravity makes water run down.

Anon

When i was little, the town pool was called the 'Old Mill' although i thought it was the Old Milk and i used to think that everyones wasted milk was put into that pool.

Liz

When I was younger, my brother told be that mud puddles were actually chocolate milk! I would drink the water by the cup fulls!

Anon

When I was younger I used to be scared to go swimming at my cabin because the waves made the water look like jello and I thought I would be sucked in and trapped.

Leslie

When I was probably 4, one of my dad's co-wrokers told me there were fish in the lake that liked biting toes Well later on some of my parents friends had said how a fish had deflated their pontoon by biting it. I didn't go near the water for a long long time.... to this day I can't be in a lake by myself!!

fish'll eat me!

When I was a little girl, we went to a public pool that has fish in it. we drove a good 200 miles to go swim at this pool, and right as we get there my grandma tells all of us grandkids, "If you get in the water the little fishes will swim up your butt!" needless to say Nobody went swimming that day!

Morghanstein

I also believed that the ocean froze in the winter time; frozen waves, foam and all. I grew up in NJ and we would never go to the ocean to look at it in the winter time; I thought it was because it was too dangerous being frozen.

Maggie, NJ

As a kid I had heard that song 'there's a hole in the bottom of the ocean, there's a hole in the bottom of the sea.' I had also been read that 'Cinese Brothers' story about the boy who could swallow the whole ocean. So the two got linked in my mind.

After that, I thought if I went swimming I would get sucked into the hole. Even though we lived near the beach, I refused to even stick a toe in the water for years after that.

Anon and on

We (me and my brother) didn't realise that the ocean was salt water...until our first trip to the beach, when we both raced in, then raced out again, spitting and crying.

Anon

when i was around 3 or 4 i belived that the sea had a large plug like a bath and it was draind every night

James Cameron

When i was young my Dad would warn my against swimmiing to far out to sea by telling my there were giant sea slugs that lived at the bottom of the ocean that would bite the legs of people who swam over them.

The worst part is that i beleived this until i was 18

Dave The Rave

my dad would take me fishing at the coast and would tell me not to step in the foam that washed up on the shore because sailors used to pee over the side of ships and it would wash ashore

jacob

i used to believe that the water in the ocean went away a night......then came back in the morning.

Beverly

My grandfather told me that the foam at the edge of the ocean would suck you in if you got too close. Said a little boy was grabbed before his mom could reach him and was never found again. I believed it for the longest time and refused to go near the foam.

Barbara Duncan