A childhood belief about road signs

As a child, I grasped the notion of stop signs indicating that you should stop. However, I was confused as to how you know when to go again. Of course, my older sis gave me the answer: once you've been stopped for a while, a little man scurries out from the bushes and runs off with the stop sign, indictating that you can go.
But of course, I'd never seen the "little stop sign man", and so I assumed my mom was continuing through the stop signs illegally. So, every time she did it, I would lecture her about how we should have waited for the "little stop sign man" to come from the bushes. She was baffled, of course, and probably considered for a while that my mental health might have been somewhat less than ideal. Later, when I confronted my sister about her lie, she denied having ever said it...... thanks, sis.