at home

When I named all the bedposts on my bed "prettygoons" and covered them with socks or toys every night before going to sleep to keep them from coming to life and menacing me.

I was helping my parents wash their car one day, and must have not been doing a very good job because mom told me to use some elbow grease. I never found the can of that damn stuff.

I used to think that a lady werewolf was under my bed when I was six well into my 6th grade. To this day I still can't sleep with any limbs hanging over the sides, even knowing better.

I thought it was because I remembered a scene in a movie called "Werewolf of London" where a woman discovers blood under her bed and a werewolf hand snatches at her and she wakes up. Someone was trying to make her believe she was a werewolf. No such scene exists in that movie, though. And I still haven't found out if that scene was actually in a film or not.

When I was very young I believed that a family of witches lived underneath my bed. I imagined that when one of my feet was on the floor, the witches could open their refrigerator and see that foot inside. I always got into and out of bed quickly to avoid having my feet eaten.

I used to believe that the Slestak (from the TV show "Land of the Lost") lived under my bed, and if I didn't sleep with my hands and feet under the blankets, they would cut them off and replace them with the weird crab-like claws they had.

For some unknown reason to me I used to think that a terrible lobster lived at the bottom of my bed, and that if I put my feet all the way down to the end it would pinch off my toes.

I was scared to grow taller for fear that in my sleep I would put my feet all the way down by mistake.

During the summer, when I was around 5 years old, I would lay on the floor and listen into the air conditioning vent. I thought that all the air conditioning vents in the world were all connected together underground. I would yell into the air conditioning duct hoping that some other kid had figured it out too and we could talk to each other.

When I was a kid, in the bathrooms, there was the big wall mirror and then a smaller one on the door of the medicine cabinet, so they would face each other when the cabinet was open. I was convinced that the "corridor" effect created by two mirrors facing each other closely was a sort of a dimensional portal (spent too much time reading big brother's Dungeons and Dragons books, maybe... and now they're mine, heh heh), and I had only to figure out how to "open" the big mirror so I could crawl through the corridor into a fantasy world where I could learn more magic and get myself a suit of armor and cool medieval weapons. I thought maybe writing the right thing in the mist from a shower would do it. I puzzled over this until I was a good nine years old...

When I was little, I used to think that our house was haunted, so every time I had to go to the loo in the night, I would drape a blanket over my head and shuffle toward the bathroom "ooh-ing" softly, so that any passing ghosts would think I was one of them. A cunning disguise, I think you'll agree.

When I was growing up, my mother had a set of plastic bowls that were pretty much generally just for me to use (I was an only child). Identical except for color, the bowls were pink, brown, and yellow. They would get stacked in the cupboard in a random order, and I believed that whatever color bowl I had for my cereal that morning, that was the kind of day I would have. If the bowl were pink, I would have a good day, brown meant a bad day, and yellow was just neutral. I often skipped the brown bowls, preferring to pull out the next pink one.

I used to think there were skeletons in my closet. But these weren't normal skeletons. These were screaming, sword weilding 'Jason and the Argonaughts' style skeletons.

Ya know when you hold a mirror in front of another mirror? I always did that, and thought it was a portal to infinity. Silly me. I have, however, wondered, if you made a room of all mirror, and somehow shonelight in, what would happen? I did and sorta still do think the light would keep reflecting, never stopping, but i know its impossible to prove it, cause being in the room would mean giving soemthing to absorb the light.Ok enough physics. I also think i'd be cool to be in a room of mirrors... once again, "infinity". Even cooler: a SPHERICAL room of mirrors!

The previous owner of the house I grew up in had been a photographer, and he had made a small darkroom downstairs. He removed his equipment when he moved out, and my parents used the room for storage while still referring to it as "the darkroom." I thought it was a common thing for houses to have small, windowless storage rooms, and that they were all called darkrooms.

As the saying goes - breaking a mirror will bring you seven years bad luck. As a kid I was terrified. Seven years is such a very long time (when you are 7 years old!). I broke a mirror and really worried about how long it'd be till my life got better again.

After my evil parents MADE me go to bed every night, ALONE, upstairs in our OLD, creaky house, I used to believe that in order to stay alive I had to be a very brave little girl and follow these certain rules:

1st, eyeball the room very carefully, make sure the stuffed anims were not alive & breathing;
2nd, I had to talk to my stuffed anims really nicely to make sure they liked me and wouldn't suffocate me ("Cat's Eye") in my sleep;
3rd, I would crouch down and make sure no monsters were yet under my bed;
4th, (this all happened from the doorway) I shut off the liteswitch, then sprint to the bed (I memorized how many steps it took) and jumped into bed completely ingulfing my body in blankets. No skin could show except my nose to breathe. I knew the boogie man was under my bed at that point, until morning.
Good night!!

My little sister always used to be scared of a man with a bald head peaking up over the side of the bed at night and had to wake me up because she was so scared.

I used to believe…

That under the bed live lots of things with hands that would grab your ankle. I used to think that if you jump on to your bed from a distance the hands couldn't reach you. I still do this.

when i was little, everytime my uncle farted he would tell us there "was a bear in the basement". so everytime we heard that sound we would to the baesment door as fast as we could to try and see the "bear". I find myself using that excuse now.