criminals

I have 4 older brother who were always in trouble one way or another, one time when I was little I heard my mom say my one brother was arrested last night for Jay-walking. I couldnt get the picture out if my head. I didnt understand what it meant. I pictured him walking down the street naked, because I associated the term Jay-walking with the term "Naked as a Jay-bird!" I know better now. :)

Heather in Florida

I used to believe when a criminal got out of jail and was on probation that he had to go see an officer (or counsilor) once a week AND pass drug tests - or go back to jail. My sister's ex-boyfriend proved the movies and tv shows lied.

no one

I used to think that every night, if I got up there would be a murderer out there that had already hung my parents up on the wall and would kill me. That's one of the reasons I started sleeping with my door closed

Anon

I used to believe if I am naughty, a policeman would come get me and throw me to jail!

Melody

I was told at a young age that rape meant killed by a knife. So on the news once, I heard that a lady was raped and then hours later shot to death. I was SO confused, and asked my parents to explain. That means I learned about Rape and Sex at the same time, in fifth grade!

Nocturnal Lucidity

When I was really young, like 4 yrs, there was a lot of talk about child abductors, and I must have seen things on TV about poison candy. Also, my parents always used to say to me that I wasn't allowed to talk to strangers. All this really impressed me. On my fifth birthday we had been to a theme park, and on the bus home, an elderly woman tried to offer me a roll of candy, which I, of course stubbornly refused to accept, saying that I couldn't take candy from strangers because it was poisoned, and this woman was going to abduct me.

Sietse Logger

When I was a little girl I used to believe that, if any parts of my body stuck out from under the blankets it woul be HACKED OFF. I believed this for so long that I still, even in summer, keep myself completely covered in bed.

Yvonne Welling

In the USA it is illegal to possess or use brass knuckles. I used (and still do) believe that the reason is because the constitution said that you could bear "ARMS" not "knuckles". They must think its OK to blow people's heads off but not to gore their guts.

Amendment 28: The Right To Bear Knuckles

I used to believe that if I wasn't good a man would come in the night and take me from my family.
I was petrified of the "man" until I was about 14 years old.

Harri

well you know how things will move in the night cuz someone in another part of the house may have jumped or what not? well that would always happen and i would hear my money move, so i thought that there was a bank robber hiding under my bed and whenever i went to bed and turned off the lights, he would take some of my money, not all of it, but enough so that he got plenty but didn't make it look n e one took anything

chelsea

when i was 5-9 yrs old i thought everytime i saw a white van the person drvingg it was a child rapist, killer. just because they were driving a "white van" .... weird.

melissa

This one was not believed by me, but by my brother.

When he was in elementary school, he either believed or had been told that bankers had this red button that they could press if there was a robber. The button would eject their seat and have them fly through the roof. He admitted that flying through the roof would not be so useful- but he still said it was present.

Scandia

I used to believe that I was going to jail for tearing the tag of pillow.

Jeff

Ok I moved from my home town to a new town when I was 9 years old and into a trailer park and my bedroom was at the back of the house. My window faced this railroad track that was RIGHT outside our home. All day I thought it was kind of cool that I lived right by a train track, but that night I'm watching the news on my tv cause I couldn't find anything else to watch and I saw this news report about a "train man". Who they said jumped off trains and killed someone and jumped back on the train to the next town. I started crying!!! I bawled all night and couldn't sleep cause I was so sure that the train man would come to our house and kill me since I was right by the tracks. Even after they caught him I thought that there were a whole bunch of "train men" and still had a hard time getting to sleep in that trailer till I was atleast 13 years old!!

Jessica

I thought that mass murderers were murderers kills someone in the Catholic church.

"mass (something to do with church)"

Anon

When I was little, I thought rape was when a man would approach a woman on the street and tear off all her clothes. (No sex, just ripping off her clothes. I didn't know that sex was something that anyone other than mommies and daddies did together.)

Anon

When I was a kid, I used to beleive that "There is always a law against doing anything interesting." .... and still today, i cant resist beleiving it..

Asim Qadri, Karachi

when i was in about pre-school,my dad used to take me to jury duty (or at least i think it was jury duty)with him after pre-school because there was no one to watch me. well one time i remeber i was sitting on a hard wooden bench and looking up at the terrifying judge. my dad's approach to make sure i was quiet was to tell me that if i had talked at all,that judge would throw me in jail. true to that approach,i hadnt said a word...

anastacia beeverhousen

I first heard of a woman being raped When i saw Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" and Brian's mom said something and he was like "u were raped?!" and i thought it meant a guy ripped her clothes and ran away so I'd be playing with Barbies and i'd rip one of their clothes and she'd say "You raped me!" Wasn't i brilliant?

Ashley

I was about five years old when Nickelodeon started showing the cartoon Doug. One of the first episodes had Doug thinking he was responsible for a fire in the science lab or something like that, and he felt guilty and ran away to become a bandit. Now, I'd known how to read since I was two, so it wasn't like I was a dumb kid. But I thought that being a bandit was a good thing; that it was like being a secret agent or something. I used to go around telling people I wanted to be a bandit and I didn't know why they'd give me weird looks when I said it, until I saw Home Alone and realized that bandits were BAD people. Um, yeah.

Laine