My mother didn't want me outside at night so she told me i had to come in or else 'the night air would get me'

Dan

My daughter started tennis lessons and was naive as little girls are. She was very excited about the tennis pro teaching types of swings and asked me what an overhead swing was called. I told her it was a "Loblolly" swing and to tell the pro. She was PO'ed for awhile. Even before that when she was in preschool and I'd come back from hunting I had a tear in my shirt when I fell down and told her a bear attacked me but that I fought it off. She told her classmates about how brave her daddy was and her classmates told her there were no bears anywhere near here. Now she's 22 and still a bit naive. She was in Acapulco and asked a guy to watch her purse while she went to the bathroom, came back and no guy and no purse.

Bill McGraw

It wasn't actually one of my beliefs, but one of my work colleagues was told by his Dad that it was the law that you weren't allowed to have a full pudding until you were 13 years old. Another friend grew up believing that giraffes were called kangorillapigs, and that her Dad could only count to 3, which was the number of beers he always claimed to have had on a Sunday afternoon.

Johnny_Segment

I believed that the snot coming out of my head was my brain leaking. My father told me this, and my mother told him not to tell me that, which I interpreted to mean that it was true, but that I was not ready to know this.

It's why I sniffed snot up my nose for years.

Ian

My mom had a lot of wives tales or whatever you want to call them. Lies? ! She said if you had a headache it was because you were constipated. Years later I thought it was her little joke, because it mean your head was full of you-know-what. But a woman I just spoke to had migraine headaches as a child and her mother subjected her to enemas thinking to cure them!. So seems it was a common enough notion. Cats carried Tuberculosis, Milk gave dogs worms, Cutting the skin between thumb and forefinger gave you tetanus! She had a million of them!

Joan

When I was in junior high school, I used to tell a lot of lies to my parents, friends, teachers and after that I ended up believing all my lies, but now, I say the truth all the time.

Afro0o

When I was a very little girl I wanted to be -- surprise -- a ballerina. My parents and I were at a Chinese restaurant one day and when the fortune cookies came my Mom took one for me and read me the fortune: You will grow up to be a ballerina.

20 years later it hit me, and I confronted my Mom about it. She remembered that day, too, and confessed she had made it up. Now when we're eating Chinese food I get to tease her about "the big lie" :)

JS

if you lie your pants will go on fire!

Anon

When i was young, my parents told me that if i did something wrong they would know, because God wrote it on my forehead in invisible ink, that only parents could read...so whenever they saw me rubbing my forehead raw, they would look around to see what i had done.

greekgirl

I remember on the bus home from town and we were going past that field that sometimes have cows in. I was about 5 at the time and my mum pointed to the cows and said "Look! Nanny Pams!" And I actually thought they were called that, and one day I was with my nanny pam, going past some cows and..well you can probably figure out the rest XD

my mum also made me believe as a kid that if I didn't brush my hair Carrots would grow out of my hair, thus leading me to believe carrots were grown out of unbrushed hair and picked out to be eaten.
I didn't eat Carrots for a while after that

Anon

my dad used 2 tell me dat he bought me for a discount price of 100 bucks....nd i was mad at him till i was 11 fer buyin sch a cheap kid

cajena

When I was a child, my mom encouraged me and my brother to use good table manners by saying, "What if you got invited to eat with the Queen and she saw you eating with your fingers?"; and other things to that effect. So, being the literal-minded six-year-old I was, I believed that the Queen actually had people whose job it was to keep track of the table manners of all the children in the world, and then send dinner invitations to the ones with good manners, on the Queen's behalf. I seriously pictured the Queen sitting in her grandiose dining room, at a table with well-mannered little boys and girls all decked out in their best clothes. This gave me quite an incentive to improve my table manners, so obviously, my mom's words had an effect on me......but my invitation STILL hasn't arrived yet, and I'm 22, lol.

Emily

when i was 15 my friend alicie said that i act white but im not i black
i believed her for the longest time until i looked in the mirror

*Shannon* *Hnot*

When I was about 6 or 7 my brother told me when you make a snow man it comes to life at night and eats the kids that made it. I never made a snow man after that until my mom told me the truth and I hit him upside the head for that mean lie.

Shannon H.

My Mom knew when we lied because our 'Tongues would turn black'. Of course, she was 100% accurate as we'd refuse to stick them out when guilty.

We lived in remote 40's New England, and during our first visit to New York City, we both shouted "Mom - look!, that person must be an awful liar!!" upon seeing a Black person for the first time, To this day our grand-children are reluctent to show their tongues for fear of being caught in a lie.

Medved

When I was about 4 my mum told me that when I lied a black spot apppeared on my tounge. Not only did I believe this untill I was about ten I also used to sit in front of the mirror telling lies to try and see it!

princesstallulah

When our oldest boy was 5, we bought him a bow-tie, in a brown paper bag, for his first school concert, but his little brother cried because he'd missed out on a present.
In a moment of desperation, we told him, "There's no need to cry, your present is still in the bag."
Of course, the bag was empty, but we told him that only Mommies and Daddies could see the little Fresh-Air inside.
Well, we had that little Fresh-Air doing somersaults, jumping in and out of the bag and all sorts of circus tricks.
He carried that crumpled little brown paper bag around for months, showing it to envious friends and to grown-ups with looks of barely strangled laughter on their faces. We had to warn family in advance that the Fresh-Air was being brought for a visit.
Things came to a head 6 months later when he realised that nobody was feeding the Fresh-Air.
We told him, "He's eating the inside of the paper bag"...
"But there's no holes in the bag", said he, triumphantly...
"But it only eats the inside of the bag", we shot back...
That bought us another couple of weeks. He swears blind now that he twigged it straightaway.
We all know different...

Biggles

Anon

I use to believe that if you told a story/lie you would get a bump on your tongue.

Anon

When I was little, my ma made me go to Sunday School. For whatever reason, I got the idea that if you told a lie, then God would punish you. I once told a friend who had inadvertantly told a lie (she said she hadn't touched something when she accidentally had), that God would come round and burn down her house and kill her parents because of what she'd said.
Scary preaching Kid! It's a good job I don't believe in God anymore...

Beth