creepy crawlies

When I was little I asked my mom "what babies were before they were babies". She said ants. For the next few years, whenever i saw people stepping on ants, i'd scream.

golem

after being told that satan was once an angel but he was naughty so got sent to hell i used to believe that moths had once been butterflies but were naughty so had been to hell where they got burnt that's why they didn't have any colour and no-one seemed to like them.

gemma

when i was about 4 i once believed that when i got bitten by a spider i would die because the spider had sucked my soul out through my blood.

Olivia

When I was about 5 my aunt from arizona came out and visited us. She knew I had a fear of scorpians. So in order to ease my mind she told me that the only time that they come into your home is when it rains really hard. So later that year we went out to visit her. One night around 12 am I woke up and it was raining, very hard. I began to scream bloody murder at the top of my lungs waking the whole house up. Everyone came running to find out what had happened to me only to find out that I was positive that because it was raining hard scorpians would be swarming into the house!

Laura

When i was younger I found a bee on the window ledge, it wasn't moving much so I thought it must be dying. I didn't want it to die so I thought I'd try to revive it. I did this by scooping it up onto a leaf and putting it at the top of the garden on a rock with a big spoonful of honey next to it, thinking that it would eat the honey and feel better! When I came back to it later it was gone (probably eaten by a bird or somehitng), oblivious to the fact that I'd left a dying and virtually helpless creature in such an exposed place I was very pleased with myself for being so kind and helpful!

Jem, UK

as a child of a 'neat freak' my mother used to stress about crumbs on the counter because 'tomorrow we'll have ants'. i wish she had been more specific, for the longest time i thought crumbs turned into ants.

innocence lost

I had seen the movie Cleopatra and got the idea from that that cobras lived in bowls or boxes of berries because in the movie she pulled it from a box of dates and it bit her. I was always very, very careful when I was eating a box of blueberries, because i was scared that I'd be bitten by a snake.

Lyssa

When I worked at a children's camp in France, we told them that they had to tie a piece of string across the bottom of their tent door (about 20 cm above ground). This was to stop the scorpions walking into their tents - they would walk up to the tent, catch the string in their tails and turn around again. Worked well, and every week we got the kids tying string to their tents, until one bright spark asked "but what about the baby scorpions?!"

sorry we lied!

when i was little, i never liked bugs. my dad once told me that there were a lot of bigger bugs than what i have seen in the house. i started to think about it, and thought there were gigantic grasshoppers 20 feet high that would rampage down the freeway. i never liked going on the freeway.

kevin lam

I used to believe that when I slept, if my ears and nose weren't covered that a spider would crawl into my brain and mess with my brain and kill me. To this day I still can't sleep without my ears and nose being covered, but I'm not that scared of spiders.

girl

my grandpa used to tell me that "eye eating spiders" existed, so for a long time growing up I used to sleep with a pillow or a blanket over my eyes so they couldn't eat my eyes while I was a sleep.

brianna e

When I was 8, I grew up in a town where the main road ran through a swamp called "Rattlesnake Gulch". I hated when my father would drive through there because I always thought that rattlesnakes hung from the trees and would drop on the car.

Shelly Leonardo

When I was a kid my sister told me butterflies land on your head and lay eggs that turn into worms. I'm in my 40s and I still hate butterflies.

Rebecca