around the house

I used to think that dishwashers would fill completely up with water. Imagine my surprise one day when my Mom opened the dishwasher to add another dish! I braced myself for quite a torrent.

Matt C.

I was told as a child that the window key used to open all the windows in my house was infact a gun, hence giving me deep psycological problems reguarding guns. Whatsmore one of these keys hung one the wall above my bed....oh the nightmares!

Alex

Every time I would put my mouth directly on the faucet to get a drink of water, my Grandmother would warn me I was going to swallow a fish someday! I would dream for years a fish got stuck in my throat.

Anon

My house was pretty old, and we got a lot of those noises you hear in older houses. My friend was sleeping over one night, and she told me that there were rabbits in my air conditioning tubes (or whatever a.c. goes through) and that is what made those noises. I believed this until I was 9, and I fell off a chair when I looking through the slats in a vent trying to see the rabbits. I really wasn't the brightest kid around.

Mrs.JS

If anything was broken in our house like the telly or the washing machine our mam would say she would 'have to get the man out' to fix it. Because repair men always came while we were at school, us kids thought it was always the same man. Years later my sister was watching television with her husband and family when the telly went wrong. Without thinking she said 'we'll have to get the man out'. After five minutes puzzled silence her husband said 'What man?' My sister had to admit she didn't know.

Carol

I thought there were 2 guys who lived under my stairs, and they'd grab your legs and pull you in the staircase if you stepped on the 3rd step. For some reason it was a tall guy and a short guy with no hair in a lab coat.

EmAufder

I used to think that panthers lived in our cupboard.

entertainer

When i was little I didn't know what being grounded was... well my next door neighbor who is like 4 years older than me (i was like 7 or 8) got grounded for a week and her sister had told me that and i was like oh... ok(not knowing what she meant by that) then i juss kinda left... i had thought katie's parents had buried her in the ground in between our houses... so the next day i was eating an apple and walked past where katie was "buried" so i kneeled on the ground and knocked on the ground "katie? are you there? hello?!" then i took the seeds of my apple and buried them in the ground thinking katie wasnt being fed(after all i hadnt seen her parents out there feeding her) and i thought the seeds would grow right where she was and she would eat the apples that came out of the seed

Christy from NC

When I was little my mom told me that if you look into a microwave when it was on, you would grow a third eye in the middle of your head. I tried to tell myself she was joking, but to this day I still don't look for too long into the microwave. The sad part is that I'm 22.

Smitty

Remember the Mr. Clean commercial where the woman mops the floor and then the Mr. Clean guy appears? I thought he was actually living in my kitchen floor, and I was always very careful when I walked around and if I was wearing a skirt I wrapped it around tightly so he couldn't look up it. I was scared to death of him but I always pressured my mom to buy the stuff so I could see if it was real.

Babette

When I was little I used to help my Grandma clean, she used to tell me to "put some elbow grease into it", so I used to rub the duster on my elbow in the belief that there was some magic grease that would help me clean better!!

Kelly

When I was real little(5?), I had a ceiling fan in my room. I always had it on, winter spring, summer, or fall.. Mainely for two reasons
I was too short to turn it off
and I beleived that a man wasin the attic srewing in my fan eternely, and if I turned off the fan, he would lose he's job

Qwertsy

When I was four or five, I used to believe that there was a little mani nthe toaster. This little man would light a match and toast the bread. That was his job.

Anon

I used to feel sorry for inanimate object like floors and couches for always being stepped/sat on. When I told my aunt, she asked me if they talked to me. I never told anyone ever again, and eventually it went away. I grew up to be an extraordinarily empathetic person, and sometimes, I might still wonder how the walls feel. :)

Mandy

I used to believe that if I put my arm in the washing machine while it was going that it would rip off.

Hannah

I was staying at my grandparents' place and their spare bedroom has a large window leading to a huge (like the size of a room) abandoned aviary.
Well, I woke up in the night, looked up, and saw my reflection in the window. Being half asleep, I thought it was another person and shouted, "Ah! There's a girl in the aviary!".

Anon

When I was a kid, there was a smoke detector in my room, and most of the time the light was green but sometimes it would flash red for a second.

I believed that if I saw it flash red three times in the same night I would die. No idea why I thought that.

Cassiopeia

My grandmother would watch us when my parents wanted to go out, and often we would stay at her house. She told us that she had a tape recorder hidden and would play the tape back for our parents if we misbehaved. My cousin and I tore her house apart looking for the tape recorder. I even fell from a high shelf I had climbed looking for it. I didn't realize it was a scam for years.

jeff

I used to believe that the word for vaccum was "sonofabitch" because my mom used to say that when carting our huge ass vaccum out of the closet.

Anon

I used to believe that when you moved house, you also obtained all the possessions in that house, and the people who moved into your old house got your possessions and so on. I remember thinking how lucky it was that my cousins had moved into a house that had toys in it rather than that it was a house belonging to people with no children.

Alice