at home

when my kids were little, we lived in a flat with hissing radiators. the kids thought the radiator in the bathroom sounded like darth vader from star wars, and believed that darth vader hid in our bathroom when the lights were off. so, they wouldn't go in unless someone went in first and turned on the lights, opened the shower curtain, and looked behind the door! needless to say, we just left the bathroom light on for years!

Our neighbors across the street had a green tool shed. Next to this tool shed, there was a tree that shaded several large rocks, covered by long reeds. Well, for some reason I believed that Winnie the Pooh lived in the green shed; and the man who owned the house told me that an alligator lived in the tall grass, so for years I believed that, too.

When I was little ( as in 8 years old) I used to think there were mummies under my bed trying to get me. So I never watched the film The Mummy again up until now ! I'm now aged twelve!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:-)

We moved into a new house when I was six and it had a very dark, spooky basement. My mom told me never to go down there. I was really interested in Greek mythology at the time and I was convinced that the River Styx ran through our basement and that's why my mom wouldn't allow me down there.

after watching candyman, i was around 9-10, and so terrified to go to the toilet alone incase he would come up and grab me,it took me years of convincing myself that he wasnt real, still 10yrs later and i wldnt dare say his name 5 times in a mirror

when i was really little i believed that drain people would pull me through the drain. so once my mom puled the plug i ran through the house screaming!!!!!!!!!!

I used to believe that if you let your arm or foot dangle off the bed at night that someone (a monster or the devil) would come and grab you at night. To this day, I still have to have my feet and hands on the bed!

When i was younger i was petrified of the dark and insisted on having the hall light on and my bedroom door wide open, at one point my bed was placed so i was looking out the door (where all i could see was the hoover) when lying down, for some reason i was always scared that there was some1 hiding behind the hoover waiting to come out and stab me to death, i have no idea where i got the fear especially as it was clearly obvious that not even a small dog would be able to hide behind the thing without my noticing!!!

i was a pretty imaginative child!!!

I had a really bad dream about some dark blob sitting at the end of my bed. I took an odd apporch to solving my fears by sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed. If it was going to eat me it would eat me, but I was not going to be able to witness this if it ate me head first. I slept this way well into my teens

When I was younger, I went to the local youth club with my best friends. The girl's toilets were seperated into two rooms - one room with the actual toilets, and another room with a small shelf and a HUGE mirror. A girl called Mary Jane told everybody that she went into the mirror room once with the lights off and said "Candyman" 3 times, and she claimed that when you did this, you could see a ghostly image of the candyman over your left shoulder, brandishing a knife.

I never went in there after that.

This wasn't neccessarily a belief, just a funny little tidbit... When I was maybe 10 or so I found this pink plastic container with flowers and butterflies on it in the garbage can in our bathroom. I took it out and my mom stopped me and was like "what are you doing with that?!?" I said I was going to use it as a pencil holder for school. She took it from me, and said I couldn't do that. I was all confused, because what I didn't know (and she finally told me, because I wouldn't give up) was that the container was the package her birth control pills came in... Even after she told me that, I still really didn't get what the big deal was. Looking back it probably would have been pretty embarressing if one of my fellow students or their parents, or the teachers had recognized my "pencil holder" as a birth control container!

My parents told me that a little man lived inside our refriderator and that his job was to turn out the lite when we closed the door. Whose parents never told them that. I spent years trying to catch that man. I figured if i could catch him, i could sell him and make a fortune. I never caught him Now my kids are trying to catch him. They want to sell him on EBAY

After only seeing Jaws for a brief moment, I was convinced that my bed was an island with the ocean surrounding, and that Jaws was under my bed and would grab me if I put my feet near the edge

I used to think since water came from rivers, and snakes lived in rivers, that you had to put a wash-cloth over the faucet when you were taking a bath or else snakes would come into the bathtub and bite you.

I have no idea when or why, but at some point in my youth, my overactive imagination — probably triggered by the slightly hollow echoes produced when stepping into the shower — seized upon the idea that there was no actual support structure underneath the bathtub. The tub was only connected to the house at the edges where you could see it caulked to the wall, and underneath there was only a vast, gaping chasm. I was terrified that at any point during a bath or shower, the caulking would give way, or the bottom of the tub would drop out, and I'd go plummeting into the depths of the earth.

Of course, this is very silly.

But even now, every so often during a shower, I'll get a slightly nervous tingle in my psyche, and quickly check the seams around the tub to make sure that there are no obvious cracks…

When my sister and I were kids, our mother bought us some mouthwash for the first time. My sister was all excited, but only knew about mouthwash from what she saw in TV commercials. So, I watched her as she poured herself a capful of the red cinnamon solution, emptied it into her mouth, and proceeded to swallow rather than spit. She followed this up with a hearty 'Ahhhh!".