neighbourhood

I used to think that there were Spanking Stores that parents took their children to if they misbehaved while shopping. At these stores different spanking objects could be used depending on how bad the kids had been.

when i was 4 my father told me that automatic doors didn't open without first chanting 'open please, magic doors' a beleif which i embarassingly held until i was at least 10!

My parents covered our above ground pool with black plastic every Winter. To keep us away from the pool they told us there was a monster in the pool and I believed it for years until I finally started wondering where did the monster go in the summer?

When I was six I saw the sign at the gas station and it had a picture of a key with an x through it(telling you to turn off your engine) and I thought it looked like a lollypop, and I wouldnt eat lollypops because I would get arrested.

When I was younger, I asked my mother what was in the water towers. ( Not knowing thats what they were. Hey! I was one and a half!!) My mother told me that people, and bad munchies ( children) were put in there if they didn't do what's right. One day, my younger cousin over flowed my aunts sink, and flooded the bathroom. We blamed it on our imaginary freinds, Mr.Hopples and his sister Bill. (Don't ask me why her name was bill..it just was...)Then, my mom and my aunt looked at each other, picked us up, and put us in the car. We asked them where we were going, and mom said the water tower. Mom and auntie came home, tempoarily deaf, and my cousin and I lost our voices.

I used to think those huge water towers that you see in the middle of the town held huge pools of water with alligators in them. I always wondered how they would get them out...

Ok, I haven't even started reading this website yet, but I just had to post this. Did anyone else have an obsession with mannequins when they were little? I had all kinds of ideas about what they did, how they "lived". One of my beliefs was that when the store closed, they would go to the pajama section, put on pajamas, and if it was a department store with furniture, they would lay on the beds and go to sleep. If there were no beds in the store, they would "lean" against the clothing racks.

One time when I was little, my mom took me to a department store in the mall for some Christmas shopping. The store was somewhat busy. For some reason, I just blurted out, "Mom, do mannequins have BUTTS?!" Some people looked over and smiled, and my mom was kind of embarrassed. She said quietly, "No, they don't." I blurted out, "Well then how do they go to the BATHROOM?!"

I used to think Hooters was a donut shop.

Whenever we went walking, my mom would tell my sisters and me to "criss-cross" which meant "hold hands with her and hurry up and cross the street before we got hit by a car and smashed flat like a sail-frog." I always did because I'd seen flat frogs by the side of the road that you could sail like a frisby!

when i was younger my aunt, my grandma (who i called momo) and my mother all told me that the manakins in the stores would bite me if i touched them. needless to say, they didn't, but i still cringe when i see them. i happen to have a very vivid imagination, and i can just imaging one jumping out at me!

When I was little, I would sometimes wait for my mom in the car while she ran into the store or finished her shopping. I used to believe that if I sat perfectly still when someone walked by, they would think I was a statue and not kidnapp me. Sometimes it occured to me that I might not pull it off because I was wearing a seatbelt and clothes but overall I thought it worked well. I believed this until I was about 10.

My friends dad told us that if the ice cream man was playing a tune in his van when he came down the road then it meant he had run out of ice cream. Cruel or what?

When I was a kid, I used to believe that after I crossed a street, I had to hurry past a certain point on the sidewalk (like the next crack or a mailbox) before I heard a car pass behind me on the street, else the speeding car would chop off my foot at the ankle.

When I was little my mom convinced me that little people worked under the road and they change the lightbulbs in the reflectors that look like lights. She said that they live under bridges. I was so scared of going under any type of bridge(over too).

I was told the ice cream truck was a "music truck" so I wouldn't waste my parents' money on ice cream. I believed this for a REAL long time and my family still uses it on the little ones.

Well when I was a little kid, the coin slot on a parking meter looked like the one on a slot machone to me. So I thought that people putting money in a slot machine were playing for time, never knowing how much time each coin would buy them.