in the street

When I was little I thought street lights were homes for little gnomes and that they came on when the gnome needed more light. I was always really upset when I saw a street light not working - the little gnome had died!

Clare

I used to think that when you posted a letter in a post box. It would arrive through the door of the person who it was sent to

Anon

I used to believe there really were "Goonies" living under ground catching change as it fell when people put it into parking meters.

kja

Just down the road from our house, there used to be a depot where they made, sold and hired out scaffolding. This company had an advert on the side of the adjacent bridge which carried the railway line over the main road. To allow double decker buses to pass under this bridge, the road dips to a lower level. The advert on this bridge used to read “Sale+hire”, indicating that you could buy or hire scaffolding from this depot. I thought it was an instruction to motorists to “sail higher”, i.e. return to the normal height when you reach the other side of this bridge where the dip in the road level comes to an end.

Alan, Sheffield

When I was little, my grandmother babysat me during the day while my parents worked. She warned me never to stand in the driveway while I was playing in her front yard because cars used the driveway to turn around and she didn't want me getting run over. I took this to mean that if I made any contact with the driveway at all, a car would zoom in (because cars could "sense" when people were in driveways) and run over me. Sometimes I would feel brave and try to test her theory, so I would stand next to the driveway and carefully stick my toe out far enough so that it touched the cement. Nothing happened. So I would step further into the driveway each time until eventually I was actually standing in it. Still nothing happened, and I remember being disappointed because that wasn't very dangerous and here I thought I was being so brave!

Kate

When I was young I lived in an area (in the UK)where lots of new roads were being built. As the building was taking place these markers were used for some reason and they were usually a straight piece of wood with another piece across - like a crucifix shaped piece of wood a couple of feet high.

I used to think that these were the graves of people who had died while working on the new road - it made me feel that building roads must be a very dangerous job to have!

Lara

When I was young i used to believe the pay tolls in the miidle of were just built so you could get money and any1 could make them to get rich.

Sam

I used to believe green houses were made of icicles, because that is what they looked like from the road.

Anon

I used to believed that the sign on houses 'to let' was a toliet and that there was lots of them!

Grace Lyon New Addington

when i was young i believed that when u moved house the house would come with you !!!
just like a turtle

Anon

At the end of my childhood neighborhood, there was a house where an old lady lived. For some reason, a bunch of us kids got the idea that she was a witch! Maybe because she lived alone with her cats, or something, who knows? There was also a slab of sidewalk where someone had put their shoe prints before the cement dried, and one kid said that the witch had caused another boy to disappear, leaving only his footprints behind.

Vivienne

When my wife was a kid, she used to think that highway speed bumps were for the blind.

Anon

I used to believe that houses were alive. The windows were eyes and the front door the mouth. The house had feelings, ie happy when the family living inside had events like a new baby, a birthday party, a holiday, a wedding, etc. Sad when there was sickness, injury, arguments or death to someone in the family. If a house was empty, it was unloved; if it was torn down, it was murdered.

personifying gal

have you ever seen the signs about neighbourhood watch with a guy on it in a trenchcoat with a hat on that was completely black(not African American black) and you could only see his eyes?I used to think there was a guy like that in our neighbourhood.

Logan

If you step on the cracks in tiles when walking through a street, fairies will die.

Maddie

Shop windows and walls from time to time have signs up saying 'BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED' - i.e. people who illegaly stick up thingemajigs on these properties - and I was told (and believed) that there actually was a man called Bill Posters, who everybody seemed to dislike and want to prosecute. My heart went out to him. I mean these were up all over the country!

dylis

Up until I was about nine or ten, I believed the shady man on the "Neighborhood Watch" signs really existed! So did my friends! We would 'see' him hide behind a telephone pole out the corner of our eyes. And he could stand at the exact angle to hide his shadow too. What's even funnier is that since he reminded me so much of the Spy vs. Spy character I thought he'd leave booby-traps everywhere to catch kids. *LOL*

Jenny

i used to think that throwing letters in the letterbox at the same time they would arrive at the same address so i always put them in seperately...

natalie

when i was younger i thought that when you moved house your house moved with you!!

chrissy

Up until very recently, and I am now 22 years old, I always thought that the reason some people's lawns were a kind of teal or light bluish-green color rather than regular green was because they had their lawns painted so that they would stay a pretty color all year long. I was driving with my husband one day and saw a lawn like that and I actually said out loud, "I wonder why people paint their lawns?" and he said, "that's not paint, it's pesticide". And laughed.

Shanna