death: people

When my grandad died I was only 4 years old. My mum told me that he was needed by God to paint the skies blue as he was a painter and decorator. When ever there was a brilliant blue sky I would look up and say to my parents and my nan that it was grandad's shift starting!

My friends fooled my to touch a wire by a telephone pole and said that I would die before the end of the week afterwards. I was really scared!

I belived that you could died if you laid your hair in the wrong way. If you one day had your fringe in the wrong direction you would die at night! My older friends were really good at keeping me beliv in this...

As a kid I used to believe that the flower holders in cemetaries were for the dead people to come out of their coffins to take a drink from after they were filled up by relatives when they left flowers.

The old vicar of our parish church is buried near the boundary of the churchyard - you can see the grave clearly from the road. At primary school, many of us believed that if you went to the churchyard at midnight on the anniversary of his death and said the right words (unfortunately for amusement purposes I cannot now remember them) you would see his ghost fall from the top of the church spire and into his grave.

I don't know where we got the idea he had topped himself by jumping off the spire, but many of us believed this for years. It was only as a teenager that my parents disabused me of this notion.

I belived that when someone died they would be watching down on you from above....fair enough! But it led to a strange paranoia about whether or not they were watching me whilst I was on the toilet.....

I thought the cremations were for people that wanted their love ones buried at home.

When my granded died I thought he turned into a daffodil. He would buy me dresses in my dreams and I would search for them in the morning and be shocked that they weren't there. Sometimes I was scared of daffodils because I thought my grandad was angry that I had lost the dresses.

At my first ever camping trip I was horrified to see a small piece of burnt twig in the potato billy. I pointed this obvious hygiene hazard to the scoutmaster. He simply used his knife to flick the offending ember out of the boiling water and offered the following advice. "Son, it takes a ton of s**t to kill you: and then it's got to fall on your head."

When I was younger I thought you could die only from being shot or hit in the head or the heart. I have now found out you can die from everything from an undercooked hamburger to alcohol poisoning, just to name a few.

I believed that I died at the age of five. I was teasing my 3-year-old sister about something on Sesame Street and she got mad and killed me with a poker by the fire place. I believed that all the people in that reality mourned my death. And I just went on thinking that I was alive. I though that it happened like this for everyone all of the time.

When I was young I wanted to join the airforce, because when I was killed in action I would not have so far to go to reach heaven.

I used to think in my dreams (until 8) that after people die, you 'll go to China (I dont know why I thought so..) and wait in a queue, the officer will decide whether to send to you to hell or heaven.

By the age of 4 or 5, I'd noted my parents were taller than my grandparents, and both were taller than my great-grandmother (whom I'd been told would soon die). I therefore concluded that people grew to a peak height at my parents' age, then progressively shrank thereafter. I assumed at the time that Great-Granny's 'death' would be a matter of her shrinking to nothingness in her bed. This latter part of the theory was revised after her funeral a couple of years later.

When we were kids playing Cowboys and Indians, when my brother was 'shot' he always 'died' lying on his back legs straight and with his arms out each side. Eventually I became cross with his lack of imaginative poses and asked why he always 'died' like that. It turned out that he believed that everyone went into that position when they died because that's how Jesus died on the cross.

I used to believe that, as heaven was in the sky and it was always represented as people floating about on clouds, grey clouds had more dead people on them. The darker the cloud, the more dead people on it. And they could SEE you...