When I was about four, I believed that statues ( the big ones in parks) were bad people covered over with cement. I didn't understand why they had to cover their horses with cement too sometimes!
I thought this is how criminals were punished before there were prisons!

Keri Cahill

When I was very young I was listening to the radio, when a guy said a man was arrested for child pornography. I asked my mother what this was, and she said "He took bad pictures of children".

So then a few weeks later, I saw my friend drawing a mustache on a photo of his sister! Then I ran to his mother and yelled "HE'S DOING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY!".

Anon

I used to think that if a lawyer lost his case, he had to go to jail with his client.

Anon

when i was a little girl our next door neighbors were robbed. for some reason i believed that all day every day robbers were hiding in the woods around our house waiting for us to leave so they could rob us. i would never want to leave. if i had to i would either leave messages or blow on the window and write things like "go away. don't rob us. love, katie" after a while i started feeling bad that they had to wait out there all day and night so i would sneak food out to the front porch for them. i would sit in the middle of the woods and talk to them but they were hiding. i thought i could be their friend and they would feel bad and go away. finally i just left one of my plastic vending machine rings on the porch, thinking they would be content with that and go away and rob someone else.

Firedancer

When the news were talking about statutory rape, I thought that they were raping a statue. Also I used to believe that statutory rape was something about a person who rapes a statue and they were arrested for public nudity.

Anon

when i was little i saw the news and there was some guy sentenced to life plus 40 years, and i couldn't understand why they would keep his dead body in jail for another 40 years

Anon

I used to think that the ages on game boxes was legally how old you had to be to play that game. Whenever my family was playing a game with someone was playing who wasn't old enough and I heard sirens I just knew that the police were coming to arrest us all.

Sarah

I used to sleep in my bed all rolled up in a ball. My mom would ask me why and i would tell her that it was beacuse I was afraid that someone would break into our house and upon seeing my incredibly comfortable bed, steal the bottom half of it. I slept balled up to make sure that my legs wouldnt get cut off when he cut my bed in two. Yes, this actually terrified me.

Anon

I used to be really paranoid that a robber would come through my window so I always used to sleep with my covers pulled up to my chin. I thought that it would make it look like a severed head in a bed and would scare the robber away.

Puck

I used to believe that if a burgular broke into your house you could easily persuade him to have a seat and wait while the police were called.

Anon

When I was little I put a safety pin in the the screen on my window thinking that if a robber climbed up to get me he would prick his finger on the pin and let go and fall to the ground. When my mother sold the house 27 years later, the pin was still there, the ever faithful guardian of the house.

LaLa

I was always afraid of getting accused of shoplifting when I was little. I've never stolen a single thing in my life, but for some reason I thought that I looked suspicious. I always thought that the adults in the store were all guards, and they were all watching me--so I'd make sure to always keep my hands in sight, and refused to put them in my pockets if I was in a store. And if I did pick up anything from the shelves, I would make these exaggerated gestures in putting it back, so the "adult security guards" would know I wasn't stealing. (I suddenly realize just how paranoid I was as a child!)

Kimberly

When I was little I thought all criminals wore black & white striped suits and when they escaped from prison, they went "underground". To reach the "underground" they had to open up a utility access panel (the PC name for manhole cover) or storm drain cover and drop down into the large underground passageways located under every city street.

These dimly-light passage ways were filled with crooks in black & white striped suits who spent their days lurking around the dark corridors of the underground hiding from the law.

The cops looking for the escaped crooks dressed in blue suits similar to the cop on the Monopoly Community Chess card who's hauling the guy to jail. The cops would rarely go into the "underground". I knew this because I never saw them opening manhole covers.

Occasionally, the cops would go "underground" to bust someone only when they did, they used disguises. The cops dressed up like phone company workers and set up teepees over the top of the manhole. Then, the police, wearing hardhats and tool belts would go into the underground and arrest crooks. The teepee was to keep people from seeing into the "underground" because if you did, the crooks down there would come out at night and kill you because you'd seen them.

The cops would sometimes try to electrocute the crooks living in the “underground” because you could see them working on green boxes filled with all kinds of wires.

Sean Inge

At age 6 or 7, I'd occasionally go around the house and gather various things -- shampoo, washing up liquid, cooking oil, food colouring, that kind of thing -- and then bottle some up in a bizarre-coloured mixture, with a label to the effect of "Burglars: drink this!".

We never had any trouble with burglars, so it must have worked.

Jim, UK

When I was little I found a little bit of broken (clear) plastic that was shaped very roughly like a little diamond. While I was smart enough to realize that it had no real value, I still put it in a clear display box, placed prominently on my dresser in my room. I did this in the confident belief that if a robber broke into our home, he would take it believing it to be valuable, and possibly leave after grabbing it, thereby saving my mom's genuinely precious jewels.

The question of why a robber would believe it was a diamond when an 8-year old kid knew it was plastic was never an issue for me. Clearly, I was a genius, and robbers must be much dumber.

Family hero(ine)

when I was little, I loved George Michael's Careless Whisper. I used to believe that the line "guilty feet have got no rhythm" meant that you could find a criminal by making him dance, and if he couldn't dance, he was guilty.

when I first came to this conclusion, I excitedly told my dad that I'd found a new way to solve crimes.

kei

Oh, around age six and anyone would talk about cat bulgerors, I thought it meant cats that would rob you. So every now and then, I'd make sure our cat (snickers) wasnt trying to rob us. (My parents really started to wonder) And at night, I would make my parents keep my bedroom door shut so snickers wouldnt rob me.

Once I misplaced my GI Joe box (had about 30 gi joes) and swore up and down that snickers had robbed me when I was asleep.

Needless to say, I had slid it under my bed, and snickers wasnt to blame at all =\

Dennis Kiper

When I was quite young, I saw an Alfred Hitchcock tv show that had these two brothers killing their aunt to get her money by grinding up glass and putting it in her food. After that, whenever my mom made soft boiled eggs for me and I found a small piece of shell in it, I thought it was glass and that she was trying to kill me.

Meggie

Until I was nine or ten I thought Jack The Ripper was a dude who went around ripping pages out of people's books....

Yeah, my mom laughed.

PAGES ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS

I thought that serial killers had serial numbers like products did so the cops could identify them easier.

C