At around 6, I used to believe that you'd die if you swallowed gum. And then I swallowed some... Wrote a will and put it under my pillow that night. Was well chuffed the next morning :)
food
5,406 beliefs in this area
Visiting some friends of my parents at their lake cabin, I went for a walk in the woods with their daughter (a couple years older than I). We found this little reddish object in the road, and she told me it was the heart of a dead animal. She pointed to the holes in it where the "veins" entered, sounding very authoritative, as if she'd seen plenty of animal hearts lying in the road.
She had me grossed out for a few minutes until she finally laughed and admitted, "It's a <i>peach pit</i>, dummy!"
My friend used to believe that Pepsi naturally came from the ground like water and it too had to be bottled at the source. She was 17 when I tried to convince her that she was wrong.
I have a sweet (rightly so) childhood memory....Once I asked my grand mother, can chocolate get kids? I loved chocolate (I still do...) and was thrilled by that idea...She said "wait and see". In the evening she laid some chocolate at a piece of paper and told me to wait till next morning....The next morning a lot of similar chocolate was there....Oh, the chocolate got kids! I was so thrilled!
My mother used to tell me that diluted juice was poisinous unless water had been added to it (to stop me drinking it). One night I sneaked to the kitchen to get a drink. I drank the juice without diluting it thinking it had already been diluted. I started screaming for my mother to call an ambulance quickly because I thought I was going to die in a couple of minutes
My childhood in the 1970s was marked by high gas prices and inflation. In particular, I remember coffee prices being very high and my parents often reusing the coffee grounds. To entice customers to eat out, restaurants would often advertise a "bottomless cup of coffee". In my naivity I used to believe that a "bottomless cup of coffee" meant you could drink as much coffee as you wanted before it ran out of the 'bottomless' cup.
I used to believe that when u swallowed a watermelon seed and u drank water that it would grow in my stomach. Lol
I used to believe that everyone in the world, when making a sandwich, would only butter one piece of bread. I carried this with me (and made sandwiches this way) until I was about 17 when I just happened to be making a sandwich while I was talking to a friend... he asked me.. "why are you only buttering one piece?" to which I replied "what? thats how sandwiches are made!" I thought it was just a strange thing that my nan did that I picked up on... but no. No one I know does or ever did the same thing.
(I still butter one side)
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It was not until college that I found out that pickles came from cucumbers. As God as my witness, I thought there was a pickle plant. Thanks Vince.
For years, Seven-up was one of the only cokes on the market that didn't have caffeine in it, and because they advertised it on the label, and that was the only coke that Mama would allow me to have, I called it "no-caffeine" for years.
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Another curly hair/crusts one. However, on the basis of this, I refused to eat crusts until the age of eleven not wanting to look like Richard Simmons.
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I was told as a kid that if you kept stuffing a Big Buddies (bubble gum)I would get lock jaw.
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I used to like to eat pats of butter when I was small, and my mother told me if I ate too much, a wall of butter would form around my heart and I would die.
Because of the ad slogan, "there's always room for Jello," I believed it literally; that Jello had a magical power that made it possible to be able eat as much as you wanted to. It was the perfect dessert. Jello is strange so it made perfect sense to me.
I used to believe that drifters contained raisins, I believed this for many years besause my dad used to buy large packs of the funsize variety and to stop me from eating them he lied about the content......I only found out quite recently.....gutted.
When I was a child, my step brother told me he had heard a story about a restaurant who couldn't afford to buy shrimp to put on their pizzas. Instead, they cut up baby mice and served them in place of shrimp. I believed him. To this day, I will not eat shrimp.
When I was about 6 I overheard an elderly aunt say to my grandmother "Jo, I've decided to stop drinking!".
This puzzled me and I inquired, "But won't you get thirsty?!"
When I was 5-8, I used to spend quite a bit of my spare time at my grand-parents' and we'd often take the car to reach a nearby forest where they knew I'd have a great time admiring the trees and playing hide'n'seek.
During the ride, I'd usually sit on the left side of the back seat, right behind my grand-father who was driving, and my grand-mother would sit on my right-hand side (my then-teenage aunt had decided once and for all that she belonged on the front seat, next to her father).
At first, when I happened to be a good boy, gran'ma would show her "approval" by picking up a piece of candy from her handbag and handing it to me with a gentle smile. After a while, this protocol evolved in that she'd let *me* pick up the candy of my choice from her handbag --a subtle mark of trust. Eventually, as she became confident that I wouldn't abuse this treasure trove, she made it a habit of letting her handbag sit slightly open between the two of us: I made careful efforts to control my craving, and only every once in a while, when I felt it was ok, would I stealthily slide my hand into the bag towards the pouch I knew was home to my favorite candy.
There weren't many of them, but that usually sufficed. Yet, as it went on, I progressively noticed that if I took care to leave some of them in the pouch, there'd more to enjoy the next time; whereas if I ate'em all they'd turn out much scantier.
Thus, I began to wonder if they had the magical ability to reproduce. Of course, Gran'ma's subtlety somewhat escaped my juvenile understanding, and, as I'd never ever seen her refill the pouch, my belief grew stronger.
I began respecting those candies, always leaving a couple of them in the pouch, trusfully letting them a fair chance to multiply until the next ride. And it worked ;)
Well, I've since grown up with kids of my own, but I still remember those days with a spark of magic glittering deep in my eyes.
When I was young we used to order pizza on Friday nights, and I hated it, because my parents would always order saugage and peppers, and I thought thats the only way pizza came, so I used to eat mac and cheese, till I got older and figured out it came however you wanted it. Never let my parents live that one down...
I overhead my mother talking with someone one day when I was around four years old about someone that didn't drink. When I asked "didn't they ever get thirsty?", she explained that it meant the person didn't drink alcohol. I thought she meant rubbing alcohol, and I wondered about people that actually DID drink that awful stuff...