animals: creepy crawlies

My mom told me once, when I was about 6, that I came out of my room yelling "There's a black weirdo in my room!" and she ran in there thinking there was someone dressed in black really in my room (like a robber). She went into my room and didn't see anything. She asked for me to show her what I was talking about and I pointed out a black spider. I thought it was a black weirdo....not a black WIDOW!!

My Dad used to place slugs onto a badminton raquet and launch them into next door's garden whilst telling me how much slugs loved to fly. I still believe that they do.

as a young boy i was not allowed to have a dog, so i brought home a pet ant. after playing all day, i believed my ant needed a nice hot bath. after drowning the poor boy, i believed he needed to dry under the blow dryer. after burning my little friend to a crisp, i believed i was a murderer. i flushed him down the toilet and hid from mom.

My older sister used to tell me that ants were bees. My mom was very confused when I refused to go outside.

When I first heard the words "flea market", I actually thought it meant "selling fleas".

When I was about 4 I would not wear the color yellow. I thought that if I was wearing yellow, bees would mistake me for the middle of a flower and come after me!

When I was young I saw a Tarzan movie with a huge ten foot tarantula attacking him in a cave. Later, in my teen years, I was shown a real tarantula and said that must be a baby - the adults are 10 feet tall. I had believed that was their real size!

When I was a kid, I heard that earwigs can't walk backwards. (Later I found out there was a Star Trek episode about this, maybe?) I was terrified an earwig would go into my ear and, only being able to move forward, would have to eat through my brain to go out the other ear. I slept with my hands over my ears for years.

I often saw dragonflys mating in the air while flying when I was young. I assumed that they were giving each other rides. My friends and I often pondered why the dragonflys liked to ride one another. When I asked my mother she said she didn't know why, I can only imagine how hard it was for her not to laugh now.

i used to think that dragonflies were baby dragons.

My sister was always very skinny growing up. One time, on a long car trip, my dad convinced her that she had a tapeworm, and it lived in her stomach and ate all her food. The only way to get rid of it, he said, was for her to starve for three days. Then it would smell food and crawl out of her mouth!!! We both cried we were so scared and we BELIEVED it!!!

When I was younger I used to believe that mosquitoes liked to bite me because I had a lot of sugar in my blood from eating sweets.

I strongly believed that if you caught a black coloured cicada, you could take it to a pharmacy, and the pharmacist would give you $5.00 (in 1973), as the major part of the 'cure for cancer' that 'they' had just discovered, relied on the black wings of the cicada and the special 'medicine' they contained. Having caught one, I thought I was the richest kid on the block. After telling my partents, they gave me $10.00 not to go.

When I was little, I believed that slugs fell from the sky because they always came out when it rained.

I used to love catching fireflies in jars as a youngster. I thought we could solve the planet's electricity problems by just filling rooms full of jars full of lightning bugs so that we would have constant light without electricity forever.

When I was a kid, I used to believe that if I stepped on a bug, it would step on me in the other world.