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Hi Pandas! I was wondering if any of you in the BP community have some cool, interesting stories to share about your craziest belief as a child? Tell us, what is the craziest thing you believed in as a kid, aside from Santa Claus, of course (because the majority of us believed in Santa Claus—it's nothing to be considered crazy).

So please feel free to dig deep through your childhood memories and share some of the craziest beliefs you had as a child.

#1

I grew up in a very small town where everyone knew each other. People would often stop and ask our family how my (maternal) grandfather was doing and, "If you see him, tell him I said hi" sort of thing. This would happen almost daily. Sometimes they would say it to me directly. Thus, I grew up believing that my grandfather was one of the most famous people in the world and possibly the President of the World. I didn't realize until I was about 12 that I lived in a small town and my grandfather was not famous, but was a really nice guy and people just liked him because he was good to work for.

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#2

I thought the Easter bunny, theTooth Fairy, and Santa Claus all knew each other.

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#3

Because of the FBI warning at the beginning of VHS movies, I thought a person would go to jail if they spoiled the movie for someone else.

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#4

When I was younger, my friend had a concrete square with all of her family's handprints. When we were younger, we pretended they were spy levels. The larger our hands got, the higher rank we were.

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#5

I thought that every woman will automatically get a baby and that you have to have surgery to get them removed.

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#6

When I was very little in my toddler years I always thought that every single state had a wall/gate around it also when ever you were entering or leaving a state you had to go through gates

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#7

I really thought old photos in black and white, meant the world was in black and white! Yes, I know this is ridiculous but 5 yr old me is still adamant!

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#8

It may not be politically correct in today's climate, but when I was a wee nipper, I used to believe that if I had a suntan then I'd turn into a black man

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#9

I legitimately thought that those hay bales wrapped in white plastic were giant marshmallows and that the farmers would cut them up to make the normal sized marshmallows.

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#10

When I was little, I always had my feet covered by my blankets or have socks on when I am trying to go to sleep because I thought that there was some crazy foot-stealer that would take my feet during the night and I would wake up with stumps. No clue where I got this from.

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#11

When I was little I thought that your teeth turned black at night if you didn’t brush them before bed

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#12

That Santa was real. I regret telling that to Mom, because I started getting less gifts once she knew that I didn't believe.

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#13

That the tiles in a bathroom with the right touch-code, could send you to whatever planet you want. That I was a vampire ( a couple of my canines are really pointy). Thought that getting a period was a huge girl-spy mystery till I, you know, got it, and was SEVERELY disappointed. Hogwarts was just a cover - that there was a magic school, but not to disappoint non-magical kids, Hogwarts was formed. And a lot more "conspiracy" theories. Conclusion: I made up a LOT of stuff when I was younger.

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#14

There isn’t a dome over Michigan giving us bad weather. Moles aren’t giant furry leeches that attach themselves to your skin and make you look ugly. And no, chocolate milk does not come from black ladies.

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#15

Remember that scene in ATLA where Zuko and Iroh cut off their ponytails and float them down the river..? So...over the years I forgot the context of it...And thought everyone in china cut off their ponytails when they left the country. I was a dumb, dumb child...

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#16

La llorona...

And now I look back at those times and think:

"Why would some dead girl break into strangers homes to wash their dishes and cry?"

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#17

Similar to some of the baby things on here, I knew both a guy and a girl had to work together to make a child but I thought when they kissed something transferred and traveled down my moms body, so I was always so confused when my parents would kiss and I never got new baby siblings.

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#18

when I was 6 years old in the early 80's I was going to visit relatives overseas. I hadn't been on a plane since I was a baby so I didn't remember what it was like. At the time I was a big fan of the Care Bears and My Little Pony. As the characters of these cartoons lived in the sky and my older brother had me convinced that when I went above the clouds I would see them running over the clouds and playing with each other. I stupidly believed him and told all my friends what I would be seeing. Of course that didn't happen. There were no Care Bears and no My Little Pony dancing around the clouds when I got up there. I was devastated. My sadistic brother thought it was hilarious.

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#19

I believed my mother had eyes in the back of her head!
She told us that she sees it all! We’d comb or brush her hair and part it in the back to check, and she’d just say, they only open if we are not behaving!

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#20

When I was little, I thought that fainting would be a much greater problem than it actually was.

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#21

i used to believed that when people died in movies it actually happend and actors sacrificed their lives for our entertainment hunger games style lol

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#22

I thought mexico was the only place where people spoke Spanish ;-;

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#23

(this gets a little weird btw) I believed that when the parents got married and kissed at the end, an egg would go up the mans throat into the moms throat and boom! BABY! I can't believe I thought that.

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#24

Kissing gets you preggers. Males and Females are treated equally. Eating watermelon seeds grew a baby watermelon inside your stomach. I once buried a painted-gold rock in my backyard, thinking someone would find it. Now its covered by tarp, rocks, pebbles, and dirt. I had long canines so I was a vampire. I licked blood off of my bleeding injuries in kindergarten. I thought preschool was hard. I crawled under a table and kissed a boy on the cheek in Pre-K. I thought my cat wasn't fat. I thought I was normal. Sorry for the length, I was a weird kid.

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#25

Thought that you got pregnant after you got married. Like something in your wedding ring made you pregnant. And that I came from a twinkle in my daddy's eye

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#26

I believed that gay meant happy

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#27

My grandma told me that if I drank water from a well and there were snake eggs in the water, I might swallow them and then snakes will roam my stomach and eventually kill me. I believed that until my late teens, even though we lived in a place where we didn't have wells...

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#28

Hearing my parents' stories of WWII, I believed planes flying over our house were going to drop bombs. And we lived where planes descended to a large airport regularly. Also a Bela Lugosi movie on TV convinced me Frankenstein lived in the woods by my house. Yeah, I was scared a lot back then.

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#29

That when a call went to voicemail, there was literally a woman waiting there to give you the message that you've reached voicemail!

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#30

i wanted to have 6 children with 6 different woman when i was three

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#31

That if I talked too much during long car rides I would grow a mustache (mom lies...). But instead of talking less, I just checked my upper lip more frequently. Was always relieved when nothing had grown.

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#32

I thought that women pooped, peed, and gave birth all out of their butt.

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#33

Cars were all out to run us over, but if you ran across the street very quickly, you'd be okay. I watched far too many cartoons as a kid where characters were constantly getting run over by cars and trains.

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#34

In a case of mistaken identity I was convinced that Ronald Reagan (POTUS at the time) was a man I’d seen on TV and had intense debates with my parents to stop calling the real RR the President when we all know it’s Sidney Poitier...

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#35

I believed that if I sat on the toilet to long, a snake would bite my ass

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#36

That Captain Cook and Captain Hook were the same person.
That Australia was the Oz in the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard was whoever is the Prime Minister of Aussie at the time
FYI I grew up in New Zealand.

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#37

As a child I thought cats & dogs were the same animal, that cats were the girls & dogs were the boys — like the boys & girls at school, I guess: all the same (human) animal but girls different from boys.

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#38

I believed that once I fell asleep I wouldn't wake and once I did my parents would be gone... Yeah, I know weird right, but why I thought this was because my ONLY fear was not having my parents around. Dad always said he would be there for me to save the day. ( my superman ) Mom said she would too be there always, (My wonder woman) not to save the day but to be there for me when I needed her the most. But yet I got bullied for 4 years STRAIGHT and I'm still alone... dad I got beat up every day, where were you then, huh??

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#39

I thought because my eyes are Blue that's the only color i could see.... yea i know makes no sense but i was like 6. I also thought dinosaurs were still alive ( i just love them so much)

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#40

I remember thinking that shadows could talk and I have very long conversations with my room shadows before sleeping.

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#41

Up until the age of six, I thought that royalty didn't go to the toilet, because uh, they were royal.

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#42

I thought that all adults could do whatever they wanted (watch TV all night, eat ice cream, had all the money) and that since I had a WONDERFUL family life as a kid that when I grew up my life would be just like my parents and my own loving family. HAH!

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#43

When I was little, we used to walk to the market through these narrow country lanes. In the middle of one of these lanes was 2 little houses covered by overgrown trees. My nan told me that Mickey mouse and Donald duck lived there. And I absolutely believed it. Every time we would walk passed, I would stand on my tippy toes trying to see them through the windows. As I grew up, we didn't walk passed as often. Until I was walking passed there by myself as a teenager one day, looked at the houses and burst out laughing. My Nan is no longer with us but the memory of her silly stories always makes me smile.

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#44

Not myself, but my younger sister believed that if you wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and looked in the mirror, your "evil twin" would climb out, and live your life, but do everything bad (i.e. won't eat vegetables, won't do homework, etc.). She still shuts her eyes when she passes a mirror at night 😁

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#45

I thought that there was a secret door in my school's bathroom and if you touch the tiles correctly it would reveal a secret doo ha ha me 😋 i am 16 now thought that since like when i was in 3rd grade

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#46

i always thought when y cast got sighned it would sink into my skin

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#47

I thought there were only 2 countries in the world: American and Cuba. I guess Cuba must have been in the news a lot when I was little? (I'm 44 now).

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#48

When I was about 4yo our tv broke (it was the bulky old type, google "orion tv 1990" to get an idea)
Well, the repairman came home to fix it and at some point - I don't know where he found it - he gave me a little plastic figurine that was milky white and looked like a boy. So I was convinced that this figurine was sitting inside the tv and was broadcasting whatever we saw. my parents mostly watched the news so I thought it was the guy saying the news. I even asked the repairman how the tv will work if he doesn't put it back 😂😂

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#49

I thought that everyone else was just mean because whenever we did group scavenger hunts for vocabulary words I read the whole word in like a second and everyone else had to do it letter by letter, but I didn't believe them and told the teacher and then got mad when she said they weren't lying, same with my parents and everyone else. I'm still not sure if this story means I'm smart or not.

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#50

When I was about 4 or 5 years old, my mom's best friend used to come over together with her husband. She always called him darling. So did I because I thought that was his name.

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#51

Being Catholic. What a load of silliness

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#52

I thought that birds would attack people and I was scared of birds until I was like 8.

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#53

You know when you keep open the refrigerator for too long, it starts beeping telling you to close it? Well, I believed that the police would actually come and arrest me if the fridge started beeping. I believed that for over five years.

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#54

When I was very small, I thought that when a tv station advertised a program but didn't give the date and time it was on another station. You had to find when and where on your own. No idea why I thought this.

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#55

When I was little, we lived in a place with lots of earthquakes. The only ones I experienced were at night, so I thought it was just my sister shaking the bunk bed. It would usually stop by the time I said stop. And so when I found out it wasn’t her, I thought I could control earth itself.

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#56

During the summer when I was 5, the 17-year cicadas came out. They were everywhere. One day I saw the empty pupal husk of one clinging to a telephone pole, so I decided that the cicadas came out of the gouge marks that you see in the poles. This seemed so logical to me that it became part of my world view until one day, when I was about 20 or so (!!) I actually saw a lineman climbing a pole, and realized that the gouge marks were from the cleat things on his boots. So I guess what I believed wasn't as crazy as the amount of time it took me to figure out the truth.

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#57

That my mom had eyes in the back of her head! Believed that u til I was about 13! She always knew everything we did! The mom grapevine is real and alive !

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#58

When I was small, I heard a sort of tinkling one night (it was from a movie my mum was watching next door) and I thought it was a unicorn. Every night until I was seven I would stay up as late as I possibly could to see if I could catch the unicorn. I was a dumb child.

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#59

I believed that pregnant women had swallowed a watermelon seed.

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#60

My friend when she was very little used to think that our bodies were hollow. When we drink our insides fill up slowly, and when the levels reach the groin area we need to pee. So when she felt the urge she would run to her mommy and ask her to quickly make a tea for her because she would need to "top up" her levels so they reach the proper level and finally she would be able to pee. She'd do her little desperate dance at the brink of peeing herself while she was waiting for the tea to brew, and then quickly run to the toilet with the mug, hop on the toilet and take a sip, and haaaa-lllle-luyah...

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#61

I thought you squeezed out elbow grease

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#62

I used to think that whenever a woman wanted children, if she just thought about it really hard or wanted them had enough, within a few days, she'd be pregnant. I also thought it came out of her belly button. I was really scared of just thinking about the words, "I want a baby", so I tried my hardest never to think of that until I was old enough to have children. XD

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#63

I thought that there was a secret door in my school's bathroom and if you touch the tiles correctly it would reveal a secret door ha ha me 😋 i am 16 now thought that since like when i was in 3rd grade

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#64

i used to never ever use or touch bug spray because i believed that when you use it you suck up the souls and they are stored in the bottle. Why? The bug spray bottle had a picture of a dead bug with its soul coming out. i believed this for pretty long

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#65

I thought that my dad cut the grass with scissors...

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#66

I used to believe that if you sat on the toilet too long, you would grow warts on your butt.

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#67

When I was younger, about 11, I really thought that the Chick-fil-a logo was a smiley face with a weird horn and swirl around it. I also thought that the Washington state Cougars sign was a smiling fish, and I still view those things like I did at first glance, even though I know what it actually is now. Well, at least it was all smiles.

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#68

I believed ventriloquists actually spoke with there belly. So when we saw someone drinking a glass of milk while speaking during his act, I didn't think much of it.

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#69

I have a hearing impairment since I was a kid, and so I had a lot of tinnitus. I thought everyone knows that silence had a sound, right up to middle school actually. I use to do show and tell/science projects to explain to everyone why or how. Eventually i figured out it was just tinnitus.

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#70

I thought push pins were called pokees. Like Poke-Eeys. See my mom is Arab and in Arabic the letter P isn’t a sound so it always came out as bush bins. We didn’t know what bush bins were, so my mom used pokees or bokees, b/c, ya know, they poke. So imagine my teachers reaction when I told her with a straight face that I found a pokee on the ground. One of the most embarrassing things of my life

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#71

When I was young, my cousin had us believing that he was spiderman and had the power to give us superpowers. He made us run his errands instead and fooled us for months. Evil guy..

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#72

I used to think that I was older than my older brother... just coz I was born in September and he, in December.
He also told me that when we both were younger I was older than him but I didn't eat vegetables so he outgrew me.
Go figure out.

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#73

After getting the where do babies come from speech when I was young, my mother was very specific in a couple areas. My little mind heard intercourse and thought it had something to do with goofy golf. Also, I believed that mommy's and daddy's got pregnant when they were asleep because the parts would wake on their own and do the deed, maybe while they were cuddled close sleeping. Like a sneaky 🐍

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#74

when i was 5-6 ish i seriously thought that when someone died, all you had to do to make them alive again was open their eyes, and boom, they would be alive again. I used to cover my ears with my blanket at night because i thought that monsters would come and bite my ears off if i didn't cover them. I also used to be really scared of those microfibre green dusting cloths with bumps on them because i thought they were moving and they were tentacles

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#75

As a toddler I thought pine cones are small animals or insects and didn't want to walk over them. I started screaming and had to be carried over forrest tracks covered in pine.

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#76

When I was little I was scared of the dark. I thought that if I got up at night and reached over the side of my bed over the "void" that it would swallow my arm up. And if I didn't turn my light on before I touched the ground the "void" would swallow my feet! I thought the presidents were always amazing. *cough* not.

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#77

Icecream truck? No... That's the "Music Truck"

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#78

This one is quite short and I may do another but when I was very little I was scared of those new/blooming pinecones. I thought I could get sucked into them!

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#79

I thought horses were the escape to all of life’s problems and now I’m older I realised that couldn’t have truer.

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#80

Ok so I know this is weird but I used to think that my dad changed the stoplights. He always told me he did too, so that made me believe even more. I remember one night after going out somewhere, he stoped at a stoplight turned to me and said “watch this, I’m going to make the light change!” He waited a few seconds the said “Green!” and the light turned green. I didn’t realize then that he just waited for the countdown. This went on for a few years until I asked him again and he denied ever doing this!

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#81

when i was about 6 i always thought:
In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute, a non-profit dedicated to “increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge,” asked the world to solve seven math problems and offered $1,000,000 to anybody who could crack even one. Today, they’re all still unsolved, except for the Poincaré conjecture.

Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician who, around the turn of the 20th century, did foundational work in what we now call topology. Here’s the idea: Topologists want mathematical tools for distinguishing abstract shapes. For shapes in 3-D space, like a ball or a donut, it wasn’t very hard to classify them all. In some significant sense, a ball is the simplest of these shapes.

Poincaré then went up to 4-dimensional stuff, and asked an equivalent question. After some revisions and developments, the conjecture took the form of “Every simply-connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to S^3,” which essentially says “the simplest 4-D shape is the 4-D equivalent of a sphere.”

Still with us?

A century later, in 2003, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a proof of Poincaré’s conjecture on the modern open math forum arXiv. Perelman’s proof had some small gaps, and drew directly from research by American mathematician Richard Hamilton. It was groundbreaking, yet modest.

After the math world spent a few years verifying the details of Perelman’s work, the awards began. Perelman was offered the million-dollar Millennium Prize, as well as the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of Math. Perelman rejected both. He said his work was for the benefit of mathematics, not personal gain, and also that Hamilton, who laid the foundations for his proof, was at least as deserving of the prizes.

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#82

My mum never lied to me.... 😶 I feel bad for everyone else who got tricked by someone. 😓

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#83

I was so afraid of getting water up my nose because my dad told me one time that you could drown if there's water in your like lungs or something like that and it scared me so bad

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#84

When I was seven I thought Dunkaroos were made of kangaroo and people would bring them to school and I'd knock them out of their hands and tell them that they were made of kangaroo.

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#85

I think the craziest thing I ever believed when I was little was that the bare patch in the grass next to the playground held "the ancient" an bunch of gears from an alien spaceship that turned into a live map of the whole world. A lot of the kids at the elementary school also believed that there were a number of basilisks and leprechauns lurking on the other side of the fence....

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#86

I used to think i would die every time i got nosebleed, which happened quite often and in my child opinion i would run out of blood. Since it often happened during or after swimming lessons i hated to attend to those!

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#87

As a toddler I thought pine cones are small animals or insects and didn't want to walk over them. I started screaming and had to be carried over forrest tracks covered in pine.

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