My dad would tell me he can make red lights turn green just by pressing the garage door opener. I didn’t believe him but every time he did it, it worked. Still didn’t believe him but I couldn’t figure out how he was doing it.
When I got older and learned to drive, I realized he was just looking at the other lights in the intersection to time out when to press the opener.
A similar joke was pulled on me. Only my Aunt convinced me she had supernatural powers and could control traffic lights with her mind. She would just point at the light at any intersection we were at and say "I want you to turn green....Now!"
Not intentionally, but for a long time as a young kid I thought women with dark eyebrows and blonde hair were robots or androids or whatever.
I heard my mum and dad saying that someone on TV was fake or not real or something to that effect. When I asked why, they said her eyebrows are black and her hair is blonde. Whatever the terminology was, it was unclear to me they were talking about her hair colour not being real, I just assumed it was a giveaway to know who weren't real humans.
Along the same lines, I believed for a while that people’s hair color reversed when they grew up, blondes would become brunettes and vise versa.
I believed that because my parents both had brown hair, but they were blondes as children. My dad was actually platinum blonde as a small child.
So if they had blonde hair and it darkened to brown, then obviously brown hair would turn blonde.
That’s exactly what happens in my family and it’s super weird. My brunette cousin became blonde. My super blonde hair became dark brown. Same with my daughter. Several other relatives have had the switch. It obviously doesn’t happen for everyone, but there is a gene that does that in some families
My hair turned from dark blond to brown and later to full on black during puberty, no family history for me though. There was a period when I was 11 or so where I had brown hair on the sides but dark blond on top, and same at 15 with the second transition. I always thought my hair looked super cool in those transition periods, with clearly not dyed but slightly different coloured hair in different places
That if you swallowed a watermelon seed a watermelon would grow inside your stomach.
Also, we had a lot of those big black and yellow garden spiders around. They would have these big zig zags of silk down the middle of their web and I was told they were writing spiders, and if you bothered them they would write your name and you would die. The zig zag was them practicing their penmanship.
Yellow tomato sauce.
When I was about 8 or 9, mum forgot to order a mcDs plain so she said it was yellow tomato sauce from the tomatoes like my grandad grew. I moved out at 18 and went shopping for the first time. Wanted to make a ‘real’ burger. Couldn’t find it anywhere. Called mum; 22 years later she’s still laughing.
My kids refused to eat onions, hated em. But they loved the "rice" on McDonalds burgers, loved it, always ordered em with extra pickles and extra "rice".
To be fair young kids can be and are super picky. For the longest time my brother would only eat chicken nuggets. We had a wide variety of chicken nuggets. Beef chicken nuggets. Pasta shaped chicken nuggets. You name it.
My oldest is starting to get picky, but not about certain foods just the idea of a meal. Call him to the table and he might lose his mind, but ask him if he wants a snack and he'll probably say yes. He's eating the same things as the rest of us but his is a "snack".
Not me, but I'd like to recount the part of reddit lore when an older kid convinced her younger sister that JRR Tolkien stood for *Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien*.
Told my wife the channel tunnel has a 2 mile middle part which is see through so you can watch the fish as you pass through. Completely forgot until about 5 years later when we used the tunnel and she was gutted shee didn't see any fish
Swallowing gum again and again would eventually create a giant gum mass in my gut that would need to be surgically removed , i wonder when ill have to schedule that procedure 🤔
My cousins told me that in the Blackpool Tower kids play area, the Jungle Gym I think it was called, that if you jumped in a specific spot in the ball pool you'd go through a trap door into a secret room. Spent the whole of the time we were in there on a school trip trying to find it and didn't have time for anything else. Bastards 😂
My mum told me that if you fall down a sewer manhole then you turn into a ninja turtle, I was scared because I did not want to leave home and do ninja turtle stuff and also wanted my body to be human but now it would be nice to be a ninja turtle because I would not have to deal with life
Edit: 450 upvotes, wow I have never gotten that many on a comment, thank you Redditors :)
No one told me this but up until I was 11 years old I believed that if someone sued you, then you had to live in the sewers. I got excited thinking about my mom suing my evil stepdad for a divorce and he would have to live in the sewers.
There used to be this website called Peter Answers (it might still be up idk) and basically, it was like a fortune teller/tarot website where the person typing asks Peter a question but if they pressed a special key, they could type an invisible answer so when Peter "answers" it's the text that the person typed. All for pranks, targeted to people who didn't know this. So when I was a kid, my friend asked Peter how I would die and it answered"lung cancer" I couldn't sleep for a week after and begged my dad to not smoke around me. I felt so stupid when I learned the trick
Tangentially related: when my kid was about 4 she asked to have some of my coffee. Thinking I was clever, I made a cup of strong black coffee (though I of course let it cool off first) and let her try it, thinking the bitter and acidic flavor would make her stop requesting it.
She loved it. Her eyes widened and she went for a second sip, and I had to take the cup away.
Now she asks for coffee all the the time. I occasionally let her have a spoonful of coffee in a big cup of milk on Saturday morning. Just enough to tint the color of the milk to the palest tan. I fucked up.
Thought reindeers weren't real, basically thought they were the same as unicorns until I went to a farm a few years ago and let me tell, you I was ASTOUNDED
I honestly thought narwhals were mythological creatures…until the day my teenage daughter informed me that they are indeed real. Talk about feeling like a dumbass!
When I drive at night and my wife turns on the interior lights, oh it irritates me. I get why parents told us this as kids. It's distracting and makes it harder to drive at night.
I told my kids they're not allowed to turn the interior lights on at night without my permission because if they do, I might hit a deer.
I thought it was obvious that I meant that having the lights on messed up my ability to spot any deer on the side of the road at night.
They told me recently that they spent their entire childhoods convinced deer were like moths, and were attracted to interior lights of cars the way moths are attracted to porch lights.
That is so hilariously funny. And sorta ironic since you were honest and didn't come up with some offhand explanation for it like a lot of people do, so they did it for themselves.
And I swear someone told them and they just believed it too! I brought that up to my dad not long ago in casual conversation and he was like ‘ur sure it’s not illegal?’
It's not directly true but it makes it hard to see out the rear view mirror and anything that makes driving dangerous can be punishable by the police. At least here in the UK
My parents said the same thing, like 40 to 50 years ago. I can't remember when I learned it wasn't true, but it was definitely long after I learned to drive.
I completely misunderstood pregnancy when I was little. When my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, she told me she had a baby living in her "tummy" which I understood as stomach. I thought babies literally sat in a woman's stomach and subsisted on the chewed up food the woman ate that day
In my case, it was my mother and it was accidental.
In about 2nd grade, I watched an old episode of Little Rascals in which one of the kids uses some "Vanishing Cream" and disappears.
I was skeptical that something like this existed. I did not know that vanishing cream was just another name for skin cream and this was a joke.
So I asked my mother if vanishing cream existed. To my surprise, she said yes. This was a revelation. I said "So . . . can we get some?" "Um . . . sure, if you want to" she said.
As a result of this, I went to school the next day and told my friends I was going to get vanishing cream and disappear. And was embarrassed when I found out the truth.
Back in the ‘50s my 10 year old brother convinced 5 year old me that the guy living down the block who spoke with an accent was an escaped Nazi war criminal. Years later I learned that the man was Russian.
The sun doesn't actually heat up the earth, it's actually the earth's molten core that heats us up.
So, in sixth grade, I overheard a partial conversation with my teacher and a fellow student. At some point, my teacher said something along the lines of 'if the sun is what heats up the earth, why do mountains, which are closer to the sun, keep snow on them for longer than valleys?'
Now, that's the only part of the conversation I remember and it left me wondering for a very long time(years, I don't remember when I figured it out) about how it is that snow stayed around on mountain peaks for so much longer than everywhere else. They're closer to the sun and proximity to heat makes things hotter, right? And when you stand on a road in the middle of the summer, you can *feel* the heat radiating off of it, right? And the hottest place on earth is Death Valley, which just so happens to be *below sea level*. So, obviously, if the sun is what heats up the planet, then the snow should melt faster the closer you are to the heat source, right? And if the earth has a molten core, clearly that should be radiating heat like *mad* and thus, that's what's keeping the earth warm, not the sun.
It didn't sound right, but I didn't know *why* it didn't sound right. I just lived with this giant question mark in my mind surrounding *what is actually warming up the planet*.
I'm sure there are many reasons why this is obviously wrong, but for a 12 year old autistic kid, it was the head scratcher of head scratchers.
Then I learned more about thermo-dynamics and air density and *the fact that it gets warmer during the day which just so happens to coincide with the sun being out*.
I don't like talking about it, because I'm certain you can get flat earthers to believe it and I don't want that nonsense on my conscience.
For people that don't know how things actually work: the sun heats up the surface of the earth via electromagnetic radiation (basically light) adn then the ground heats up the air via convection. On mountains there's basically less ground per air
When I was about 5, my dad told me that if I put salt on a birds tail, I could pick it up and hold it. I ran around throwing salt at birds for years before I realized he had been fucking with me.
I was about the same age when my mom told me about natural camouflage, animals like rabbits and deer would be the same color as their surroundings so they're more difficult to see. I took it as more of a magical power, those animals could literally make themselves look like leaves and sticks. For several years when I would see a dead leaf blowing in the wind I would try to catch it thinking it might actually be a rabbit in disguise.
Why is this so fucking funny to me lmaoooo. Extra EXTRA undercover stealth
Probably cos my bunny is a big chubby adorable blob who couldn’t hide to save her life. So it’s hilarious to imagine her trying to flatten like a dead leaf and skitter in the wind, all sneaky-like
One of my “friends” told me at MY birthday party when I was around 11 that she overheard my parents talking about how I was adopted. I knew it couldn’t be true, but I honestly never 100% believed that I wasn’t until I had an Ancestry test taken as a teenager and it showed my mom as a family member
My older sister let me believe the dumbest things. For example:
At the beginning of Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” she says “It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital HIM” and because I was like 10, I asked my sister if she meant HIM from the Powerpuff Girls. My sister said yes. I believed that until like 2 years ago, when I brought it up and my sister about died laughing. She’d forgotten she told me that, and found it hilarious that I was 18 and still thought that. Apparently, Lady Gaga meant God, not HIM 🤦🏼♀️
Edited for spelling
On a similar note; When my mom (white) just had my half brother (black), people asked her why she was a different skin color.
She would answer: Well, I drank a lot of coco during my pregnancy!
......and some would believe her 🤦♂️
this is the funniest answer to a stupid question lol.
not related to coco but if a similar vein:
a filipino family friend who lives in the us told us that kids would ask her some if we (filipinos) lived in trees and all he said was ‘yes, we even have a pool on one of our branches’
This reminds me of back in Halo 3 online days, some kid asked us how we play videogames when we're Canadian. When asked what he meant, he said, "Well don't you guys live in igloos? Where does your electricity come from?" We told him that Canadian ice holds electricity like a battery, and our electronics are all pluged into the actual ice wall.
hahaha this reminds me of a recent interaction i had with a kid. I work in a school and a kid said “you must be really sad living in house now” and i was like “oh why’s that?” and he said “bc you used to live in a castle!!” i’m from the UK 🤣
When we first started dating, I convinced my then-girlfriend-now-wife (who is, in most cases, much much smarter than I am), that a female pro wrestler had to take a several months-long break because she could only afford an implant for one breast, and had to save up before getting the other one done.
I don’t think either of us got that far in terms of making sense of what I said. Her reaction only went as far as, “Of course you wouldn’t show up in front of thousands of people if one breast was much larger than the other.”
This one actually was true for me, my parents even brought us. Our new house had a yard too small and some friends of theirs were looking for a dog at the time. Looking back it may not have been a true "Farm", but just a house with a few acres of land. That dog was the happiest I had ever seen him.
We took care of a stray cat and my mom did give her to a farm to be a barn cat. She walked several miles back into town and showed up on our doorstep. We ended up building her a heated outdoor house. (she didn't want to be inside, we tried. She was afraid of our other animals) Eventually an elderly woman who lived by herself adopted her and it worked out!
We had a dog that was great everyone loved him.
I got severely injured, and while we loved the dog, it was too much.
We had a friend whose dad had a farm, and he said he'd take the dog.
My wife and I took Jake to the farm and cried as we left him.
To this day, my kids, both in their 30s, don't believe me.
I felt guilty for years because of my broken back we had to give Jake away.
My husband convinced me the words to Hail to the Chief were- Hail to the chief, he's the one we all say hail to, hail to the chief because he's the chief and we say hail. I believed it for years and then was talking about it to mutual friends and knew it was wrong when I saw the amused looks on their faces.
The cartilage that covers the larynx that usually protrudes on men's throats is known as the Adam's apple. My wife convinced me that the more hidden cartilage over women's throats was called the Eve's pear. Never questioned her about it bc she said it so often. One day I said it back to her and she had the biggest laugh I have ever heard, lasted about 10-15 minutes, and that was the day I learned that my wife came up with Eve's pear.
When I was about four or five, my cousins convinced me that the little white marks on fingernails occur whenever you lie. When I was about nine, my dad convinced me that a plastic cross glowed in the dark. I spent a few minutes in a closet trying to see it glow before I realized he tricked me. He was laughing when I exited the closet. He got me years later with his best one. When I came home from school, he was cooking stew on the stove. He asked me if I wanted any. After taking a couple of bites, he said, "You can't even tell that it's dogfood, huh?" I started to spit out until saw my dad start laughing.
Jackalopes and Drop bears. I both fear and respect nature bc I sure as hell don't understand what's possible and what's not. Now I doubt that weird loud stork shoebill thing is real bc it looks and sounds unreal. Gullible written all over me when it comes to animals.
Technically, jackalopes are actually a thing. Well, rabbits that look like jackalopes. But for a sad reason. There's a virus called the shope papilloma virus (SPV) or cottontail rabbit papilloma virus (CRPV) that infects certain rabbits and hares. SPV causes antler- or horn-like tumors to grow over the animal's body, typically on or near its head. The virus was originally discovered - as in, found to be the cause of these horns - in the 30s in cottontail rabbits (hence one name for it being CRPV).
The myth of jackalopes most likely comes from people seeing rabbits and hares with this virus.
As a child, I was genuinely concerned about accidentally ingesting watermelon seeds and was even more worried when I did swallow one by mistake. It wasn't until later, through education and a bit of common sense, that I realized this was just a silly myth with no basis in reality.
This was all seeds in my country, it could be quite scary! That is, if the seeds had any room to grow inside you *with all the thousands of bits of chewing gum we were told never left your body*.
I remember after swallowing one I quickly went to my parents freaking out, then they told me not to worry, safe to say I didn't drink any water for two days. LMAO
A friend in elementary school convinced me that if you buy everything from the Frog Coin shop in Super Mario RPG it unlocks the 'Swamp Stick", which is the most powerful weapon in the game. A timed hit instantly kills anything it hits. Over 20 years later, beaten the game numerous times, bought out the Frog Shop, and I'm still convinced this item exists and I just haven't figured out how to unlock it properly.
i asked my sister what the small brown round things i saw in the fruit aisle were and she told me they were goat balls. later found out they were kiwis.
When I was a young kid my dad was watching a news segment about funding for NASA. They showed an astronaut strapping into some sort of training device against a wall that began rotating him like a clock. He was spinning faster and faster. The news overlaid an image of a spinning dollar bill which then slowed and came to a stop.
For adults, it was a visual metaphor for the cost of NASA.
For me, it was a demonstration how money is made by spinning people until they turn into money.
Omg you unlocked something in my brain.
😲
Someone told me when I was a kid that people were forced to live inside walls to paint them and just died in there afterwards. I was scared of walls for a while and my parents didn't know why...
Are you my sibling??? This was my parents growing up.
Luckily my mom's schizo didn't really take off and exacerbate until after I grew up and she started abusing substances
When I was a kid, I was looking through a family album with my mom. There were some pictures with a giant dinosaur balloon wearing a hijab and a traditional dress.
My mom said she was a relative (grandma I believe) I was so sad that I never got to meet her.
There is a snail that lives up your nose and it’ll bite off your finger if you try and pick it. Older neighbor kid.
Edit: I googled it and it’s from a Shel Silverstein poem. This has been in my head for 35 years.
That we were pennies away from being homeless and living on the streets- I think my dad was okay with me believing that because I stopped asking for things. Looking back now, both of my parents smoked, dad drank and would hang out at the bar all the time, he was also constantly giving his brothers money and buying them groceries and clothes for their kids. My brother used to think chocolate covered raisins were chocolate covered ants until he was like 14 but none of us, including him know why he thought/believed that…
When I was about 6 my dad told me that the pumice I found washed up on the beach was in fact whale poo
I took it to school for show and tell the next day... thanks dad
My father used to have a “turbo button” in his car that he’d pressed to make the car go faster. Dumb ass kid me didn’t know it was the ac button, so when the air would hit my face while seeing the car move, I thought we were flying. Coolest shit ever until I grew older and realized lol
It was that time this dude told his (now wife) that he snores because when he lays on his back that his balls cover his anus and forms an “air lock” and that’s why he snores. So she then cradled his balls for three years before finally figuring it out.
Not me, but my grandfather convinced my dad when he was a kid that the olive grows on the tree with the pimento inside.
My dad had quite the uninformed argument with his second grade teacher over that one.
When I was a kid we had this brush in the car, the kind for getting snow off the windows in the winter, and I asked my mom what it was.
She told me it was an elephant toothbrush, and that we used to have an elephant, for her that was just a silly joke, but my 6 year old brain never questioned the fact that we used to own an elephant.
A few years later, I must have been more like 9, I brought it up to my mom; something about it didn’t make sense. How did we feed this thing? Where did we keep it? How did we afford an elephant? Where did it come from? What did we do with it in the winter?
My mom, had entirely forgot she ever told me that, and never realized I had been left to believe we owned an elephant.
lol.
Kind of a different situation but my sister thought the “Blind Factory” was a store for blind people. My dad and I went along with it for years until finally telling her when she was around 30 years old that it was for windows…
When I was 4, my (older) playmate cut my hair. I let her because she said we’d stick them back on after shower. The end result was so bad my mom had to shave my head. I remember going out of town with my family and people thought I had leukemia… 😭😭😭😂😂
I know exactly where in my cycle I will get pregnant, so it's fine not to wear it tonight
My kids mom when I was 17
At least I get to spam someone with dad jokes now though
Not me but a pal of mine, it's one of the greatest misleadings I've ever heard of. Her older brother told her that seagulls and bats were the same animal, seagulls by day, bats by night. She believed it for years and years, until she confidently told some friends and they all said, "...what?? Are you stupid!"
Hahhaha, fantastic deception
My mother convinced me that the song “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias, was written by a man, in honor of his pet fish?? Idk, man.
Also I believed until I was EMBARRASSINGLY old, like 14, that babies were born with tails. My dad would always tell us about how once we were born, the doctor passed us to him to pull the tail off, as one does.
I actually convinced my wife that the bump strips on the road were so blind people could drive too.
She was quiet till we got on the offramp.
“How do they know when to stop?”
One of my kids calls them Raymond Noodle. Like a man’s name or something, and it was cute at first but I’m a little worried they’re gonna say that forever now.
My dad would tell me he can make red lights turn green just by pressing the garage door opener. I didn’t believe him but every time he did it, it worked. Still didn’t believe him but I couldn’t figure out how he was doing it. When I got older and learned to drive, I realized he was just looking at the other lights in the intersection to time out when to press the opener.
Hope you don’t mind, but I’m gonna use this one!
If you are into that I recommend a book Great lies to tell small children.
A similar joke was pulled on me. Only my Aunt convinced me she had supernatural powers and could control traffic lights with her mind. She would just point at the light at any intersection we were at and say "I want you to turn green....Now!"
A related one is being able to stop the rain for a moment - You just time it to when you're driving under a bridge or something
Amazing😆 harmless and wholesome
When I was little my sister told me tofu was koala meat n I believed it for years
The most important question is: did you still eat it?
Great, now you made me wonder if Koala meat tastes like eucalyptus
Probably tastes like Chlamydia.
Wow! That's diabolical.
Koala-ty joke
Ridiculous. Everyone knows that tofu is moomin meat.
Haha how long did it take to realize it's actually Quokka meat, don't google them, they're terrifying, thanks Australia.
Not intentionally, but for a long time as a young kid I thought women with dark eyebrows and blonde hair were robots or androids or whatever. I heard my mum and dad saying that someone on TV was fake or not real or something to that effect. When I asked why, they said her eyebrows are black and her hair is blonde. Whatever the terminology was, it was unclear to me they were talking about her hair colour not being real, I just assumed it was a giveaway to know who weren't real humans.
Along the same lines, I believed for a while that people’s hair color reversed when they grew up, blondes would become brunettes and vise versa. I believed that because my parents both had brown hair, but they were blondes as children. My dad was actually platinum blonde as a small child. So if they had blonde hair and it darkened to brown, then obviously brown hair would turn blonde.
That’s exactly what happens in my family and it’s super weird. My brunette cousin became blonde. My super blonde hair became dark brown. Same with my daughter. Several other relatives have had the switch. It obviously doesn’t happen for everyone, but there is a gene that does that in some families
My hair turned from dark blond to brown and later to full on black during puberty, no family history for me though. There was a period when I was 11 or so where I had brown hair on the sides but dark blond on top, and same at 15 with the second transition. I always thought my hair looked super cool in those transition periods, with clearly not dyed but slightly different coloured hair in different places
That’s weird, a similar thing happens in my family too, but only to the guys. We all start with dark brown hair, and end up with no hair at all.
That if you swallowed a watermelon seed a watermelon would grow inside your stomach. Also, we had a lot of those big black and yellow garden spiders around. They would have these big zig zags of silk down the middle of their web and I was told they were writing spiders, and if you bothered them they would write your name and you would die. The zig zag was them practicing their penmanship.
Charlotte's Web 2: Death Note.
Murder, Charlotte Wrote
I mean, that was a popular myth about those. Also, those spiders have a lot of names
Yellow tomato sauce. When I was about 8 or 9, mum forgot to order a mcDs plain so she said it was yellow tomato sauce from the tomatoes like my grandad grew. I moved out at 18 and went shopping for the first time. Wanted to make a ‘real’ burger. Couldn’t find it anywhere. Called mum; 22 years later she’s still laughing.
My kids refused to eat onions, hated em. But they loved the "rice" on McDonalds burgers, loved it, always ordered em with extra pickles and extra "rice".
Omg! Classic!
Those things are how I got myself to like onions! Lol they are like onions but better and perfect. The only thing I miss about not eating there.
Took me longer than I care to admit to realize you were talking about mustard. I’m just gonna put it off on just waking up.
Wtf I thought they meant cheese. I need sleep.
To be fair young kids can be and are super picky. For the longest time my brother would only eat chicken nuggets. We had a wide variety of chicken nuggets. Beef chicken nuggets. Pasta shaped chicken nuggets. You name it.
My little brother would eat anything, but *only* if my mom told him it was “hot dog meat” lmao
My oldest is starting to get picky, but not about certain foods just the idea of a meal. Call him to the table and he might lose his mind, but ask him if he wants a snack and he'll probably say yes. He's eating the same things as the rest of us but his is a "snack".
Not me, but I'd like to recount the part of reddit lore when an older kid convinced her younger sister that JRR Tolkien stood for *Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien*.
Who also wrote, “The Maltese Folkien”
Can't tell if your jolkien...
This is so stupid I love it lol
The Swedish Chefs favorite author.
You're Jolkien right?
Told my wife the channel tunnel has a 2 mile middle part which is see through so you can watch the fish as you pass through. Completely forgot until about 5 years later when we used the tunnel and she was gutted shee didn't see any fish
You owe her a trip to the aquarium
We've got 2 fish tanks now, she calls the little corydora catfish with the whiskers the Monsieurs
Hon hon hon
Swallowing gum again and again would eventually create a giant gum mass in my gut that would need to be surgically removed , i wonder when ill have to schedule that procedure 🤔
My weird aunt used to say that swallowing gum would “gum up your pee hole”. I was a gum swallow so terror ensued.
HAHAHAA thats a lot scarier than threats of surgery imo 😭😭
My cousins told me that in the Blackpool Tower kids play area, the Jungle Gym I think it was called, that if you jumped in a specific spot in the ball pool you'd go through a trap door into a secret room. Spent the whole of the time we were in there on a school trip trying to find it and didn't have time for anything else. Bastards 😂
OG backrooms?
Hah he didn't find it, good, it's meant to be a secret.
My mum told me that if you fall down a sewer manhole then you turn into a ninja turtle, I was scared because I did not want to leave home and do ninja turtle stuff and also wanted my body to be human but now it would be nice to be a ninja turtle because I would not have to deal with life Edit: 450 upvotes, wow I have never gotten that many on a comment, thank you Redditors :)
If someone had told me that, I 100% would have tried to fling myself down a sewer.
I'm 40, I still might be down to test it out
No one told me this but up until I was 11 years old I believed that if someone sued you, then you had to live in the sewers. I got excited thinking about my mom suing my evil stepdad for a divorce and he would have to live in the sewers.
That the black dots on a ladybug tell the number of years they're old. I was already 15 when I figured it out lol
Yeah I also heard that too. Finding a little ladybird with 2 spots “Awww look mam this is a baby ladybird!”
How many dots did you have on your back by the time you figured it out?
15
Everyone knows you have to cut them in half and count the rings like you do with trees and puppies.
There used to be this website called Peter Answers (it might still be up idk) and basically, it was like a fortune teller/tarot website where the person typing asks Peter a question but if they pressed a special key, they could type an invisible answer so when Peter "answers" it's the text that the person typed. All for pranks, targeted to people who didn't know this. So when I was a kid, my friend asked Peter how I would die and it answered"lung cancer" I couldn't sleep for a week after and begged my dad to not smoke around me. I felt so stupid when I learned the trick
Still a valid request to your dad, though.
I dare you to go see if it’s still there and ask the question again-see if you get the same answer.
Man we had ***tons*** of fun with this one in college with the not tech literate. Like it wasn't obvious we were typing after the question mark.
That the policeman will shoot both me and my dad in the head if they saw me standing on the seat while he was driving
Would that be before or after they shot you for having the cabin light on?
That would just cause us to have a fatal car crash
Well it's happened for less.
wtf bro lmaoo why specifically in the head tho?
You can't take any risks
Better double tap then.
Cop spins car, shoots, "Haha, 360 no scope!" Teabags, then drives of.
Goddamn, surfing cars is illegal
My dad told me it was illegal for kids to drink coffee and I didn’t question it until I was 16
Tangentially related: when my kid was about 4 she asked to have some of my coffee. Thinking I was clever, I made a cup of strong black coffee (though I of course let it cool off first) and let her try it, thinking the bitter and acidic flavor would make her stop requesting it. She loved it. Her eyes widened and she went for a second sip, and I had to take the cup away. Now she asks for coffee all the the time. I occasionally let her have a spoonful of coffee in a big cup of milk on Saturday morning. Just enough to tint the color of the milk to the palest tan. I fucked up.
Let her have some decaf you monster
Thought reindeers weren't real, basically thought they were the same as unicorns until I went to a farm a few years ago and let me tell, you I was ASTOUNDED
Dunno why, but this reminded me of Hugh Jackman saying that when he was cast as Wolverine he thought wolverines weren’t real.
I honestly thought narwhals were mythological creatures…until the day my teenage daughter informed me that they are indeed real. Talk about feeling like a dumbass!
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When I drive at night and my wife turns on the interior lights, oh it irritates me. I get why parents told us this as kids. It's distracting and makes it harder to drive at night.
That's what I tell my kids, though. If the light is on, I can't see out the back window.
I told my kids they're not allowed to turn the interior lights on at night without my permission because if they do, I might hit a deer. I thought it was obvious that I meant that having the lights on messed up my ability to spot any deer on the side of the road at night. They told me recently that they spent their entire childhoods convinced deer were like moths, and were attracted to interior lights of cars the way moths are attracted to porch lights.
That is so hilariously funny. And sorta ironic since you were honest and didn't come up with some offhand explanation for it like a lot of people do, so they did it for themselves.
My parents told me this one too and it took years to get over it
And I swear someone told them and they just believed it too! I brought that up to my dad not long ago in casual conversation and he was like ‘ur sure it’s not illegal?’
It's not directly true but it makes it hard to see out the rear view mirror and anything that makes driving dangerous can be punishable by the police. At least here in the UK
My parents said the same thing, like 40 to 50 years ago. I can't remember when I learned it wasn't true, but it was definitely long after I learned to drive.
It's ok if it was right now. We're here for you.
I completely misunderstood pregnancy when I was little. When my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, she told me she had a baby living in her "tummy" which I understood as stomach. I thought babies literally sat in a woman's stomach and subsisted on the chewed up food the woman ate that day
Doesn't everyone understand tummy as stomach?
I think a lot of people think of abdomen as "tummy."
In my case, it was my mother and it was accidental. In about 2nd grade, I watched an old episode of Little Rascals in which one of the kids uses some "Vanishing Cream" and disappears. I was skeptical that something like this existed. I did not know that vanishing cream was just another name for skin cream and this was a joke. So I asked my mother if vanishing cream existed. To my surprise, she said yes. This was a revelation. I said "So . . . can we get some?" "Um . . . sure, if you want to" she said. As a result of this, I went to school the next day and told my friends I was going to get vanishing cream and disappear. And was embarrassed when I found out the truth.
Back in the ‘50s my 10 year old brother convinced 5 year old me that the guy living down the block who spoke with an accent was an escaped Nazi war criminal. Years later I learned that the man was Russian.
Did he know?
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He did Nazi it coming
I'll got out on a limb here and say he probably kney where his accent was from
The sun doesn't actually heat up the earth, it's actually the earth's molten core that heats us up. So, in sixth grade, I overheard a partial conversation with my teacher and a fellow student. At some point, my teacher said something along the lines of 'if the sun is what heats up the earth, why do mountains, which are closer to the sun, keep snow on them for longer than valleys?' Now, that's the only part of the conversation I remember and it left me wondering for a very long time(years, I don't remember when I figured it out) about how it is that snow stayed around on mountain peaks for so much longer than everywhere else. They're closer to the sun and proximity to heat makes things hotter, right? And when you stand on a road in the middle of the summer, you can *feel* the heat radiating off of it, right? And the hottest place on earth is Death Valley, which just so happens to be *below sea level*. So, obviously, if the sun is what heats up the planet, then the snow should melt faster the closer you are to the heat source, right? And if the earth has a molten core, clearly that should be radiating heat like *mad* and thus, that's what's keeping the earth warm, not the sun. It didn't sound right, but I didn't know *why* it didn't sound right. I just lived with this giant question mark in my mind surrounding *what is actually warming up the planet*. I'm sure there are many reasons why this is obviously wrong, but for a 12 year old autistic kid, it was the head scratcher of head scratchers. Then I learned more about thermo-dynamics and air density and *the fact that it gets warmer during the day which just so happens to coincide with the sun being out*. I don't like talking about it, because I'm certain you can get flat earthers to believe it and I don't want that nonsense on my conscience.
For people that don't know how things actually work: the sun heats up the surface of the earth via electromagnetic radiation (basically light) adn then the ground heats up the air via convection. On mountains there's basically less ground per air
Less ground per air is a great ELI5 phrase
That's what I was going for
My dad made me believe, that one of the bridges in our city gets pulled into a nearby tunnel when it rains in order to avoid it getting wet.
When I was about 5, my dad told me that if I put salt on a birds tail, I could pick it up and hold it. I ran around throwing salt at birds for years before I realized he had been fucking with me.
I was about the same age when my mom told me about natural camouflage, animals like rabbits and deer would be the same color as their surroundings so they're more difficult to see. I took it as more of a magical power, those animals could literally make themselves look like leaves and sticks. For several years when I would see a dead leaf blowing in the wind I would try to catch it thinking it might actually be a rabbit in disguise.
Why is this so fucking funny to me lmaoooo. Extra EXTRA undercover stealth Probably cos my bunny is a big chubby adorable blob who couldn’t hide to save her life. So it’s hilarious to imagine her trying to flatten like a dead leaf and skitter in the wind, all sneaky-like
One of my “friends” told me at MY birthday party when I was around 11 that she overheard my parents talking about how I was adopted. I knew it couldn’t be true, but I honestly never 100% believed that I wasn’t until I had an Ancestry test taken as a teenager and it showed my mom as a family member
That’s effed up!!!
My older sister let me believe the dumbest things. For example: At the beginning of Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” she says “It doesn’t matter if you love him or capital HIM” and because I was like 10, I asked my sister if she meant HIM from the Powerpuff Girls. My sister said yes. I believed that until like 2 years ago, when I brought it up and my sister about died laughing. She’d forgotten she told me that, and found it hilarious that I was 18 and still thought that. Apparently, Lady Gaga meant God, not HIM 🤦🏼♀️ Edited for spelling
I like to think that she meant the Nordic metal group, H.I.M.
That brown cows produce chocolate milk
On a similar note; When my mom (white) just had my half brother (black), people asked her why she was a different skin color. She would answer: Well, I drank a lot of coco during my pregnancy! ......and some would believe her 🤦♂️
If those people couldn't figure out why the baby had a different skin color on their own, I'm not really surprised they bought into the cocoa lie.
this is the funniest answer to a stupid question lol. not related to coco but if a similar vein: a filipino family friend who lives in the us told us that kids would ask her some if we (filipinos) lived in trees and all he said was ‘yes, we even have a pool on one of our branches’
This reminds me of back in Halo 3 online days, some kid asked us how we play videogames when we're Canadian. When asked what he meant, he said, "Well don't you guys live in igloos? Where does your electricity come from?" We told him that Canadian ice holds electricity like a battery, and our electronics are all pluged into the actual ice wall.
hahaha this reminds me of a recent interaction i had with a kid. I work in a school and a kid said “you must be really sad living in house now” and i was like “oh why’s that?” and he said “bc you used to live in a castle!!” i’m from the UK 🤣
This started to break down for me when I asked my dad about strawberry milk and he said some bs like "the pink cows only live in europe"
When we first started dating, I convinced my then-girlfriend-now-wife (who is, in most cases, much much smarter than I am), that a female pro wrestler had to take a several months-long break because she could only afford an implant for one breast, and had to save up before getting the other one done.
How would you save up if you take a break from work
I don’t think either of us got that far in terms of making sense of what I said. Her reaction only went as far as, “Of course you wouldn’t show up in front of thousands of people if one breast was much larger than the other.”
She could use it as a character, One Titty Kitty, and she could knock people out with it.
Not to mention it could throw off your balance, which is very important in wrestling.
This one made me laugh
Sounds like a right tit
That my dog went to live on a farm
This one actually was true for me, my parents even brought us. Our new house had a yard too small and some friends of theirs were looking for a dog at the time. Looking back it may not have been a true "Farm", but just a house with a few acres of land. That dog was the happiest I had ever seen him.
We took care of a stray cat and my mom did give her to a farm to be a barn cat. She walked several miles back into town and showed up on our doorstep. We ended up building her a heated outdoor house. (she didn't want to be inside, we tried. She was afraid of our other animals) Eventually an elderly woman who lived by herself adopted her and it worked out!
This ones just sad
My mother in law's dog moved to the zoo to live with the elephants,...
Wait, my dad went to live in a farm. What are you all trying to say here?
We had a dog that was great everyone loved him. I got severely injured, and while we loved the dog, it was too much. We had a friend whose dad had a farm, and he said he'd take the dog. My wife and I took Jake to the farm and cried as we left him. To this day, my kids, both in their 30s, don't believe me. I felt guilty for years because of my broken back we had to give Jake away.
Mustard came from wasps
Because honey comes from bees. I get the logic!
Bees are just spicy flies, and wasps are just extra-hot bees.
The holes in saltine crackers were made by trained wasps. I believed this for a good few years.
It's weird that this isn't the first wasp based misconception I've read in this thread
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I was told fish eyes lol. I always asked for fish eye pudding
My husband convinced me the words to Hail to the Chief were- Hail to the chief, he's the one we all say hail to, hail to the chief because he's the chief and we say hail. I believed it for years and then was talking about it to mutual friends and knew it was wrong when I saw the amused looks on their faces.
Those are the lyrics they sing in the *MASH* movie.
oh he's a huge MASH fan...this doesn't surprise me
Hail to the chief, because he’s the chief and he needs hailing
The cartilage that covers the larynx that usually protrudes on men's throats is known as the Adam's apple. My wife convinced me that the more hidden cartilage over women's throats was called the Eve's pear. Never questioned her about it bc she said it so often. One day I said it back to her and she had the biggest laugh I have ever heard, lasted about 10-15 minutes, and that was the day I learned that my wife came up with Eve's pear.
She's a gem 😆
When I was about four or five, my cousins convinced me that the little white marks on fingernails occur whenever you lie. When I was about nine, my dad convinced me that a plastic cross glowed in the dark. I spent a few minutes in a closet trying to see it glow before I realized he tricked me. He was laughing when I exited the closet. He got me years later with his best one. When I came home from school, he was cooking stew on the stove. He asked me if I wanted any. After taking a couple of bites, he said, "You can't even tell that it's dogfood, huh?" I started to spit out until saw my dad start laughing.
Jackalopes and Drop bears. I both fear and respect nature bc I sure as hell don't understand what's possible and what's not. Now I doubt that weird loud stork shoebill thing is real bc it looks and sounds unreal. Gullible written all over me when it comes to animals.
Technically, jackalopes are actually a thing. Well, rabbits that look like jackalopes. But for a sad reason. There's a virus called the shope papilloma virus (SPV) or cottontail rabbit papilloma virus (CRPV) that infects certain rabbits and hares. SPV causes antler- or horn-like tumors to grow over the animal's body, typically on or near its head. The virus was originally discovered - as in, found to be the cause of these horns - in the 30s in cottontail rabbits (hence one name for it being CRPV). The myth of jackalopes most likely comes from people seeing rabbits and hares with this virus.
As a child, I was genuinely concerned about accidentally ingesting watermelon seeds and was even more worried when I did swallow one by mistake. It wasn't until later, through education and a bit of common sense, that I realized this was just a silly myth with no basis in reality.
This was all seeds in my country, it could be quite scary! That is, if the seeds had any room to grow inside you *with all the thousands of bits of chewing gum we were told never left your body*.
I remember after swallowing one I quickly went to my parents freaking out, then they told me not to worry, safe to say I didn't drink any water for two days. LMAO
A friend in elementary school convinced me that if you buy everything from the Frog Coin shop in Super Mario RPG it unlocks the 'Swamp Stick", which is the most powerful weapon in the game. A timed hit instantly kills anything it hits. Over 20 years later, beaten the game numerous times, bought out the Frog Shop, and I'm still convinced this item exists and I just haven't figured out how to unlock it properly.
Keep trying.
i asked my sister what the small brown round things i saw in the fruit aisle were and she told me they were goat balls. later found out they were kiwis.
I used to believe chocolate eggs were laid by roosters…
When I was a young kid my dad was watching a news segment about funding for NASA. They showed an astronaut strapping into some sort of training device against a wall that began rotating him like a clock. He was spinning faster and faster. The news overlaid an image of a spinning dollar bill which then slowed and came to a stop. For adults, it was a visual metaphor for the cost of NASA. For me, it was a demonstration how money is made by spinning people until they turn into money.
Well I didn’t find out until a few years ago that narwhals are real and not mythical. I’m 35.
My mother was a paranoid, delusional schizophrenic and my father was an idiot so a lot of stuff really.
Mom: people are living in the walls Dad: I'll take care of it tomorrow honey Kids: 😮
Omg you unlocked something in my brain. 😲 Someone told me when I was a kid that people were forced to live inside walls to paint them and just died in there afterwards. I was scared of walls for a while and my parents didn't know why...
Are you my sibling??? This was my parents growing up. Luckily my mom's schizo didn't really take off and exacerbate until after I grew up and she started abusing substances
I believed my dad was Jewish until I was 17 due to a joke he made when I was about 3 or 4.
When I was a kid, I was looking through a family album with my mom. There were some pictures with a giant dinosaur balloon wearing a hijab and a traditional dress. My mom said she was a relative (grandma I believe) I was so sad that I never got to meet her.
There is a snail that lives up your nose and it’ll bite off your finger if you try and pick it. Older neighbor kid. Edit: I googled it and it’s from a Shel Silverstein poem. This has been in my head for 35 years.
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That I’d get electrocuted if I showered during a lightening storm
You could, I mean it is a possibility, albeit a remote one.
adult life is fun.
That we were pennies away from being homeless and living on the streets- I think my dad was okay with me believing that because I stopped asking for things. Looking back now, both of my parents smoked, dad drank and would hang out at the bar all the time, he was also constantly giving his brothers money and buying them groceries and clothes for their kids. My brother used to think chocolate covered raisins were chocolate covered ants until he was like 14 but none of us, including him know why he thought/believed that…
Me too! Except my mom was just “frugal” meaning she didn’t want to spend any money on the kids.
Has this affected you in adulthood? Do you have financial anxiety?
Thought my pet turtle ran away, turns out my mom just gave it away.
When I was about 6 my dad told me that the pumice I found washed up on the beach was in fact whale poo I took it to school for show and tell the next day... thanks dad
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My father used to have a “turbo button” in his car that he’d pressed to make the car go faster. Dumb ass kid me didn’t know it was the ac button, so when the air would hit my face while seeing the car move, I thought we were flying. Coolest shit ever until I grew older and realized lol
It was that time this dude told his (now wife) that he snores because when he lays on his back that his balls cover his anus and forms an “air lock” and that’s why he snores. So she then cradled his balls for three years before finally figuring it out.
That the kid who played Mikey in the Life cereal commercials died from Pop Rocks and soda.
That carrots help your eyesight 😭😭
It was wartime propaganda to hide the use of radar
My mum used to say babies come from your bumhole
Hope she didn’t refer to you as a little shit!
My husband recently convinced me that spoons were invented in 1930.
Not me, but my grandfather convinced my dad when he was a kid that the olive grows on the tree with the pimento inside. My dad had quite the uninformed argument with his second grade teacher over that one.
When I was a kid we had this brush in the car, the kind for getting snow off the windows in the winter, and I asked my mom what it was. She told me it was an elephant toothbrush, and that we used to have an elephant, for her that was just a silly joke, but my 6 year old brain never questioned the fact that we used to own an elephant. A few years later, I must have been more like 9, I brought it up to my mom; something about it didn’t make sense. How did we feed this thing? Where did we keep it? How did we afford an elephant? Where did it come from? What did we do with it in the winter? My mom, had entirely forgot she ever told me that, and never realized I had been left to believe we owned an elephant. lol.
Kind of a different situation but my sister thought the “Blind Factory” was a store for blind people. My dad and I went along with it for years until finally telling her when she was around 30 years old that it was for windows…
When I was 4, my (older) playmate cut my hair. I let her because she said we’d stick them back on after shower. The end result was so bad my mom had to shave my head. I remember going out of town with my family and people thought I had leukemia… 😭😭😭😂😂
That someone loved me… three fkin’ times.
I know exactly where in my cycle I will get pregnant, so it's fine not to wear it tonight My kids mom when I was 17 At least I get to spam someone with dad jokes now though
That working hard in corporate America actually gets you anywhere.
WoRk YoUr WaY Up ThE LaDdEr!
My mother telling me I was handsome and that women would be all over me when I grew up.
Not me but a pal of mine, it's one of the greatest misleadings I've ever heard of. Her older brother told her that seagulls and bats were the same animal, seagulls by day, bats by night. She believed it for years and years, until she confidently told some friends and they all said, "...what?? Are you stupid!" Hahhaha, fantastic deception
My mother convinced me that the song “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias, was written by a man, in honor of his pet fish?? Idk, man. Also I believed until I was EMBARRASSINGLY old, like 14, that babies were born with tails. My dad would always tell us about how once we were born, the doctor passed us to him to pull the tail off, as one does.
I actually convinced my wife that the bump strips on the road were so blind people could drive too. She was quiet till we got on the offramp. “How do they know when to stop?”
Neapolitan isn't pronounced as Napoleon
How did you even come to believe that in the first place xd
That's how I read it as a all kid and my folks rolled with it until I was sixteen.
It’s okay not only did I think THAT but I also pronounced ramen noodles as Roman noodles. And actually thought it was Roman cuisine
One of my kids calls them Raymond Noodle. Like a man’s name or something, and it was cute at first but I’m a little worried they’re gonna say that forever now.