creepy crawlies

I got word definitions mixed up a lot as a child. I remember mixing up "ancestors" and "maggots". I'd lift rocks in the yards and point at all the little white buggies and tell the neighbor kids they were my ancestors.

Maria

I used to believe that ants did work thanks to very very tiny batteries. I didn't dare to kill them, but, when I did discover an ants corpse, I tried to open it carefully to try to find the batteries, and show them to mom and dad

Carlos Sicilia

My mom used to always tell me, "You are what you eat." So I thought that if I ever ate a bug, or something still alive, I would turn into it.

Railegh

When my daughter was very small, she used to be afraid of spiders. One night when I was putting her to bed, she complained that she couldn't go to sleep because there might be spiders in her bedroom. To reassure her, I said, "There are no spiders in here."
"NOSE SPIDERS?" she cried, leaping up and looking terrified. It took a while to subdue her fears after she imagined an eight-legged creature that would climb up her nose while she slept.

Penny

My eldest brother convinced me that as bees made honey, wasps made jam conserves - I still 30 years later have a sneaking suspicion that it's true

Ian Martin

one day at school, we found a huge spider and stabbed it with a stick, making a green and white fluid come out. as such, i believed for quite a while that all spiders were filled with toothpaste

Anon

I would come home every day in the spring after school and catch japanese beetles and go around the yard, feeding them to the spiders! After awhile, they got used to me and would come prancing out in the middle of the webs as soon as I walked up to them, so I felt sure they recognized me and knew they were about to receive a meal! I felt I had established a meaningful relationship with the spiders in my yard!

Dreamy

When my son was about 7 he killed a frog, and I told him that he shouldn't have done that cause the mother frog would be mad and come looking for him. Well the next morning when we got up it had been raining and there were about 50 frogs on our walk way and he just knew they were ther to get him for killing the frog.

Jennifer Hopper

I noticed as a child that those little black ants that suddenly invade your kitchen during the spring all came around the same time of the year. When I asked a friend about it, she told me it was because 'Ant Day' was the day after Mother's Day. So from that point on, on Mother's Day, I would say things like "Enjoy your day, Mom. Tomorrow is Ant Day." and "The ants are going to try to take over our house tomorrow!" and so on. It seemed logical.. and I still (I'm 18 now) refer to the day after Mother's Day as 'Ant Day'!

Watch out for Ant Day!

The year before I started school, my mother was reading some kind of a magazine which had something about headlice- maybe an ad for a headlice shampoo or something- anyway, the point of this thing was to alert people that headlice should be taken seriously. Anyway, the intelligent advertising technique that they chose to get their message across, was to show a little school boy, with a louse on his head. However, the louse was magnified millions of times, so that it was big enough to cover the whole top of his head. Once I saw it, I was terrified to go to school because I believed that headlice were really that big.

Anon

when i was a little girl i took a broken fly to the vets and said it had a broken wing. the vet took it and placed it in his hands and said abrakadrabra and chucked it in the air. he said it was mended and that it had flown away. i belived this for a long time.

Elmo crew

When I was about 5 or 6, my parents bought me a ZooBook magazine.The issue was about butterflies. There was an article in it: How to become a butterfly! Being only 5 or 6 I believed it and crawled into a sleeping bag, waited a few minutes, and jumped out (like the directions said)expecting to be a butterfly.

Suzuki Girl

You know how in cartoons when someone is about to eat, they rub their hands together? Well, once when I was 3 I watched a fly up close and he did the same thing! I screamed and ran away because I thought it was going to eat me!

Pop Tart

When I was little I lived in a cozy little neighbourhood, but in the spring, we'd got tons of fuzzy caterpillars. Now I love bugs, but I noticed that every time a kid steped on one of the poor things, that the caterpillar would gush out red and yellow guts. This looked an awful lot like ketchup and mustard, and I took this for true. I boasted to everyone that caterpillars were the ones who made ketchup and mustard. Despite the weird looks I got from people, I was sure I was right.

Now, my mother made hotdogs for lunch one day, but lo and behold, she didn't check for condements! But that was OK, because I had all the ketchup and mustard I needed... outside. While the hotdogs were still sitting out, I got a bunch of caterpillars, held them over the hot wieeners, and squeezed their guts out. When mom came into the room, she was quite pleased to find that her little girl had found some condments. When she took that first bite, I don't think I ever heard anyone scream so loud in my life when mom saw the dead, de-gutted caterpillars. After I explained my "brilliant" idea, she tanned my butt and I was forced to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while the rest of the family had pizza.

Sub. Condements- Loren

I guess a lot of gnats flew into my eyes when I was a kid, because I eventually came to believe that they were good for your eyes and were suppossed to do that. So I would just kind of rub them in so my eye would benefit from all the nutrients they had to offer.

Emily

I'm terrified of spiders because when i was about 7 a friend of mine told me that there was a kind of spider that would spit on you and make all your skin fall off.

Laura

One time in the colorado countryside, i saw two grasshoppers mating, but not knowing what mating was, i ran to my mom told her that "i saw a two-headed, eight- legged giant grasshopper!"

Anon

When I was very young, I saw my grandmother preparing a package for mailing. She was using the kind of tape that must be moistened to make it stick, and that must be the first time I'd ever seen that kind of tape (at least knowingly). She was licking the tape. When I saw her do that, I got very scared and cried out, "Don't lick the tape!" "Why not?" she asked. "You could catch tapeworms!" I replied. She and several other relatives got a good laugh at my expense. Turns out, ever since I'd heard of tapeworms, I thought one caught them from tape. So for quite some time, I'd been washing my hands thoroughly after every time I'd used or handled any kind of tape. And yes, that included audio and video tapes, as well as all kinds of sticking tape.

Carla

I used to believe that the dead worms that surfaced after a heavy rain were in fact baby rattlesnakes. Thanks for that, Uncle Barry.

Colin

I used to believe that the bumps that mosquito bites gave you were because the mosquitos crawled under your skin and curled up in a little ball. I hated to itch them because I could just imagine them very happy that I was scratching their backs, and I only wanted them gone.

Anon