neighbourhood

When i was little my older brother told me that the ice cream man was bad and if i went up to him and asked for ice cream that he would kidnap me and take me away. i was scared for years

You know those cartoons where people are in a swimming pool and there is a shark behind some bars.When i went to a new pool i always had to check if they had a shark or not.

My Dad told my sister and I that if an Ice Cream Van was playing a turn it meant that it had run out of Ice Cream!

I used to believe that in the deep end of one of our town's pools, there was a huge sea serpent that would kill you if you touched it. I never knew for sure, because it was the kind of pool that is designed to look like a lake, you know, with murky water and sand on the bottom. So one day, I decided to see if I could find it. I jumped off the dock in the middle of the deep end and swam straight down. Now, I was about 7 years old, and the pool was 18 feet deep, so once I got pretty far down, I was not thinking clearly. I had my hands stretched out, and my hand brushed something. I screamed while I was under the water, and swam as fast as I could (not very fast) to the surface. I was convinced that the monster was chasing me. So I burst to the surface and got on the dock, breathing heavily, as I'd almost lost conciousness by that point. I now know that I'd touched the bottom, but I was too scared to ever go in that pool again.

When I was about five(ish) there was a water tower in my town and for some reason, I thought it was a giant pineapple! Every time I passed it I got so hungry. Looking back at it today, it doesn't even look like a pineapple.

when I was a kid and saw a van drive past that were a firm of shop fitters - I always read it as shop lifters & wondered why the Police didn't go after them

(It still catches me out sometimes)

I used to think that the eye symbol on the Neighborhood Crime Watch signs was a toilet lever, and that it meant some kind of motto like 'Help Flush Out Crime'

When I was little there was a pool store nearby that had an actual pool in the front, and mirrors on the building so that the pool reflected out to the road, and I thought there was a sideways pool, and I used to wonder how they kept the water in. Finally one day I decided they had glass over the side. I only figured it out a while ago

I used to get nosebleeds a lot as a kid. When I was around 12, I was looking for concert tickets for my favorite band. Another fan said the only seats left were in the nosebleed section. I thought, "Perfect! They have a section to accomadate people who get nosebleeds!" I thought they would have people with plenty of tissues for us, and everyone in the section would be sitting there bleeding freely, enjoying the show, and talking about ways to stop nosebleeds. Yeah. I learned the sad truth a couple of years later.

i used to think that u know those doors that open automatically (sp?) well i used to think that they only opened if i blew them a kiss like i was there queen and that they where magic doors

I thought 'Miss Selfridge' was an actual person. When I questioned who it was that was giving my classmates all these lovely clothes, I was laughed to the ground.

My mother told me that the ice cream man didn't wash his hands and that's why we didn't buy ice cream from him. She was horrified when I saw him in the local supermarket and pulled me to the next aisle before I could run and tell him. I had a habit of repeating things.

I was only 4...

In one of the neighborhoods that I lived in growing up there was this old house that had its windows boarded up and the grass outside was like three feet high and all the kids were positive that a mean old lady lived in there. We called her the cat lady because whenever a kitten went missing it was said that she lured them to her house and fed them poison... forget the fact that we all bought those kittens at the town fireworks for a-penny-a-paw and thought they were old enough to run around the neighborhood by themselves. And it meant nothing that the house was condemned by the town. There was an old lady cat-napping our kitten!!

A friend's mum told her that when the ice-cream van was playing music it had sold out of ice-cream!

In singapore we have these drain gratings on the pathways next to roads. On rainy days, my mom used to tell me "Watch out for the gratings, they're slippery". Only i thought that she was calling them "Grey Things" because well, they were grey and i thought she didn't know wat they were actually called..

When I was a kid, my mom told me that they put something special in the water at the pool, so that if you peed it would change the water around you into a different color and everyone would know what you did. I was so afraid of this happening that I always scrubbed myself off (down there) before putting my suit on because I didn't want there to be even a trace of anything on me that would alter the water color. It took me years until I found out that that's not true.