around the house

when i was young i used to believe that the vaccum cleaner would suck me up. if i stood in front of it i would get pulled in. whenever my mom said she would vaccum the floor, i would either stand up on the couch or go into my room and lock the door. think about it, a big scary machine that makes loud noises while sucking up helpless pieces of trash...it still freaks me out to this day.

Anon

Once when I was little I licked my mother's deoderant because it smelled good. When my tongue began to dry up I thought that I was being punished and had forever lost my power of speech.

Talia

My mom still believes that the dryer eats stray socks, and then gives them up years later. She found a black sock in the dryer and thought it was her ex-husbands', and he had died years ago!

me

my mean cousin told me that candles had yummy flavors. i sat it the basment licking candles trying to find a flavored one.

wacko zacho

My mother used to tell me not to leave the bathroom light on at night and leave the room, as it would burn the house down. (and might also make her get out of bed to turn it off herself, whichever works.) I never told her because i didn't want her to feel dumb, but we would have all been safe. We slept in waterbeds.

Kelsi

The backyard of my old house was spooky enough: It smells funny and very much resembles a giant covered tunnel that twists to the right when you're standing by the kitchen door. It's pitch-black at night. If you need to go there then, you need to walk right in and fumble around on the walls for the switch.

There was a horror story about a boy who was attacked by giant earthworms. In the illustration of the scene of the attack, I realized that it looked just like our backyard.

Thereafter, I solidly refused to go there alone.

Yubi

I used to tell my little sister (around 5 at the time) that there were sharks in the carpet. I would pick her up and hold her down against it...she would FREAK out. She would jump over furniture to avoid the "sharks"

Kinda mean

Under my friends sink there were these holes just big enough to stick dry spaghetti in. So of course we did. I believed these spaghetti strands would travel down miles of pipe and enter the ocean, and I thought of hundreds of possibilities. A few years later, I found they just dropped right into the cupboard's interior...

Jacob

I used to believe that when I turned off the light in my room, my floor would fill with what I'd call "gremlins" that would suddenly zip off and hide whenever I turned on the light. I used to step carefully towards my bed and was fairly convinced all the gremlins were watching me and avoiding my feet. There were hundreds of them, all with huge eyes and grinning faces, all knowing they were tricking me.

I used to try and trick them by spinning and suddenly putting my foot down, or flipping the light back on suddenly.

I never saw them.

Matthew McMahon

When I was little, we had an answering machine which was supposed to tell the time someone called before you hear the message. This didn't actually work, I guess the machine was broken, because before every message it would always say the same time: “Sunday, 12AM”.
I kept wondering why people always called us at the same exact time every week.

yan

When I was small I thought people were actually inside the TV and that we could take them out.

Anon

When I was a child I used to believe that if some shoe was upside down, someone in my family could die.

Camila C.

When I was young I saw all those colorful bottles in the kitchen sink cabinet and being the curious toddler I was, I wanted to drink them. My parents kept saying you can't drink them they're poison. I guessed they were some kind of "grown-up" drink like alcohol or beer because they weren't for kids. I also thought my parents secretly drank them when I wasn't looking.

e

My mom used to aways say if I lost something it would "turn up sometime". I never seached for anything I couldn't find because I figured when it was ready to be found it would turn up out of the carpet in our living room.

raceystacyUS

When I was little my favorite game was candyland and one day when my dad was in the attic my sisters had me stand at the bottom of the steps to the attic and told me that there was a real candyland in the attic but I was to young to see it I had to be 4 years old and every year that I got older they said oh you have to be 5 or you have to be 6 but for year I thought that there was a candyland in the attic.

Candyland

I took everything literally. When my mom mentioned she was going to "clean the lintcatcher", I pictured a butterfly net she must have used to run around the house with to catch lint. I wondered why I never saw it.

LHW

We lived in a victorian house with a 3rd floor attic with a catwalk around the outside of the house. My mother didn't want me on the roof so she told me if I fell off the roof I would turn into guacamole dip. How twisted is that? Pretty twisted since I believed that all my childhood.

Joe

When I was about 4, I was frightened of a pillow case with weird looking flowers on it, the flowers looked like little aliens...

I was special.....

Shauna

I used to believe that the brackets that held up the mirror on the wall in my aunts bathroom were spiders. My cousin and I used to go in there to look at them and then run out screaming. We must have done this a thousand times.

Anon

I used to believe that the "teeth" on the piano would bite me whenever I touched it...I hated it so much that one day i scratched a huge X and a sad face on the front of my mother's grandmothers piano from the early 1900's. I don't remember what she did to me, but the scrathces are still there!

Dave