Looking back, we've all believed some dumb stuff. But some people really take the gullible cake. Whether they were a kid who took an adult's words too seriously or a grown-up who really should have known better, these people prove that everyone has had at least one embarrassing dumb blonde moment.
Dumbest Moments
1. Don’t Drink Mountain Dew and Drive
We were driving late one night and a public service announcement came over the radio saying how dangerous it was too drink and drive. I couldn't understand why my dad was risking our lives or how Mountain Dew was dangerous.
2. Sleeping Side by Side by Side by Side
When I was about four years old, my older sister told me that since the population of Japan was so high, Japanese people slept sideways on their beds so they could fit more people on every bed. I believed it until I went to a sleepover and said the dumbest thing possible. I suggested that we sleep “Japanese-style” on the bed so everyone could fit. No one knew what I was talking about.
3. Training for the Olympics
For the longest time when I was young, I believed that getting new training shoes made you run faster. As soon as I got a new pair, I'd go outside and have my distance set between two lamp posts. I'd swear it felt like I was quicker with every new pair.
4. We’re Down a Man, Please Help!
I thought that whenever I saw a store with a “help wanted” sign in the window, they were asking for help because of an emergency going on inside the store.
5. The Marvel of Benjamin Button Clothes
When I was a kid, I had the dumbest theory for why people outgrew their clothes. Being a genius, I thought that the people weren't getting bigger. Instead, the clothes must be getting smaller and tighter all by themselves. To prove that I was right, I planned to keep a piece of my clothing and see how small it could get. I genuinely wondered whether it would vanish at the end.
6. Color Me Mine
When I was really little, I really thought that the world was in black and white and then suddenly became color at some point. I knew that the actors on TV were real people so they must have lived back when the world was grey. This was backed-up by evidence of black and white photos in the family album that also then turned to color photos as people got older.
7. Unleashing the Next Ice Age
When I was young my parents told me that if I kept leaving the fridge open then I would freeze the whole world and then no one would like me ????
8. Arrest Unwarranted
My friend believes, still to this day, that all bus stops are "sanctuaries" and that you can commit any crime and not be charged, as long as you are in the confines of the "bus stop." Mind you, we are both 27.
I have no idea where he got this from, but when pressed about it, his answer is always this, "dude, that’s why you see so many people at bus stops smoking crack. They can’t get in trouble there and if they OD, the ambulance knows right where to go." To which my response is, "you’re an idiot. Drugs aside, what if someone kills someone else at a bus stop? Are they still free to leave?"
Him: "Dude I’m not going to argue semantics over this, JUST LOOK IT UP. GOOGLE IT. BUS STOPS ARE SANCTUARIES!" Then googling it only reaffirms his belief because there’s not some very specific webpage that explicitly says that crimes are still crimes at a bus stop. So, then he says, "see man, I told you. If I was wrong, it would be on the front page of Google."
9. Friends Not Forever
I remember watching the series finale of Friends when I was 10 years old. My parents kept saying it was the last episode ever, and I watched it with them. My reaction made them really worried. After it was over, I went to bed and cried. I thought that once a TV show was over, it would never be shown again. I thought that I had just witnessed a part of history that would never be seen again in the future. My mom had to come into my bedroom and console me, telling me that it would play again in reruns.
I have told this story a few times before, and always said I was about 6 years old. Nope. I only just learned the horrible truth. After looking up the air date of the final episode, it turns out that I was actually 10 and a half. I'm an idiot.
Friends, Warner Bros. Television
10. Marie Kondo Your Sextuplets
I believed that when a woman was pregnant with anything more than twins, the babies weren't all in her stomach area because there was no way they would fit. At the time there was a news story about someone who had sextuplets and I thought the setup was two in the stomach, one in each calf, and one in the underside of each arm.
11. The "Melon”-Coly Truth
Once while I was eating watermelons, my brother and his "funny" friend said that watermelons will grow in your stomach if you swallow the seeds. And with me being very young at the time, I believed them and got really scared. For about a year, I thought that my private parts (I'm a boy) were two little watermelons growing inside of me.
12. Strict Underage Drinking Laws
I thought that there was a legal age (13) for caffeine like the way there is one for alcohol. When I was in high school, I saw some small kid buy a coffee from McDonald's and remarked that it was illegal. My friends still make fun of me for it.
13. Braille Road Laws
My dad drove over a rumble strip when I was young and I asked what they were for. He said, "so blind drivers know that a stop sign is coming up." I believed that for like four straight years until it finally clicked.
14. No Parking Zone, Violators Will Be Chained
I grew up near the mountains. On major mountain roads there are pullouts with "no parking" signs that also say "30-minute chain up." Sometime in middle school I learned that those signs meant you could stop for 30 minutes to put snow chains on your car, not, as I thought, that you would be chained up for 30 minutes as punishment for parking there.
15. The Technicolor Fountain of Oz
There was a “lighty-uppy” fountain near where I lived when I was a kid. The lights changed color and everything. It was pretty awesome for a kid. My dad told me that a tiny little man was sitting in a tiny little room under the fountain, and he just sat there switching lights on and off. I believed him for years.
16. War Legends
My grandfather used to have three serving spoons with the German Luftwaffe emblem stamped on them. During World War 2, he was stationed out in the Middle East, and throughout my childhood, he used to tell me a story of how he and a small group of fellow soldiers came across a German tank. For two whole days, they played a game of cat and mouse, battling against the tank until finally, it ran out of ammo and they were able to overthrow it. Once they captured the crew, they searched the tank and my grandfather found the spoons inside so he kept them as trophies of the victory.
Fast forward years later and my grandfather passed away when I was in my thirties. Shortly after his funeral, I was talking to my grandmother and I mentioned the spoons and the victory that my grandfather had enjoyed so much. I’ll never forget her words:
“German tank? Don’t be bloody stupid. He bought those spoons in an end-of-war sale in Cardiff.”
17. A Few Measured Beliefs
I thought “a few” meant 13. My grandpa had given me “a few” sunflower seeds, so I counted them so I would know how many a few was. Later I couldn’t understand why my mom got so mad at me for taking 13 cookies when she said I could have a few ????.
18. You’re Either a Lincoln or a Kennedy
I thought that if you chose to be President of the U.S., it was understood (as in, part of the job description) that you would eventually be assassinated. Which made me wonder why anyone would even choose that career to begin with.
19. Be Better and Go Green
I couldn't tell you why but when I was young, I believed that the color green was “good for your eyes.” So, one time I sat in my bedroom and just stared at green construction paper for over 45 minutes. But that's not even the worst part. Thinking back, I was probably 10 at the time and definitely old enough to know better.
20. Do Not Disturb The Borrowers
My grandma used to live on the top floor of an apartment when I was like 4 or 5 and for me to stop jumping, she would tell me that people live underneath. Somehow in my mind that meant tiny people lived under her couch and chair and I would try to talk to them a lot.
21. Swallowing the Wrong Truth
I always heard people say “it went down the wrong hole” when they choked on something and little me automatically assumed that humans had separate “holes” for food and drink and when we swallow it just automatically sorts out. I believed that until I was like 12 when I swallowed a French fry wrong in the car with my mom. I said that it must of went down my drink hole and my mom was super confused and had to explain to me how swallowing food actually works.
22. Videogame Affirmations
I was fortunate enough to have a computer when I was growing up back in the early 90s. We had a few games on floppy disc that I played all the time but I always wanted more and couldn't convince my parents to buy them for me. One day my dumb self thought, "if I just scribble out the name of the game on the disc and write the name of the game that I want...that should do the trick!"
I told my dad about my idea and he just shook his head in silence. He was probably ashamed of the idiot he was raising. I wasn't discouraged though. I grabbed a pen and scribbled "Ghostbusters" on a copy of some flight simulator game, popped it in, and fired it up. I was very disappointed.
23. The Teletubbies Philosophy
I had been a diehard fan of Teletubbies until I was 5 years old. You know those moments when they showed some videos of kids doing stuff on their "tummy TVs"? Well, I used to believe that the kids were real beings INSIDE the Teletubbies and that basically the whole universe we live in was situated in the tummy of a Teletubby. I sometimes think back about that, I cringe a little and say to myself "Boy I was an idiot."
SamuDrummer
24. Where Babies Actually Come From
My dad used to tell us this very elaborate story of how we were born. He told us he had to cut off a piece of his flesh to implant into our mom’s stomach, and how excruciatingly painful it was for him, and why we should therefore be grateful for his sacrifice. He did this in front of our mother who naturally birthed four children without epidurals. I’m still amazed that she stood by and let him take the credit without saying a thing.
25. Uncle Helios
I was 4 and my uncle walked me to and from school every day. He was 20 years old. He’d meet me on the stoop of my building with juice. One day I asked, “how come you’re always up so early?” He said, “Because I have to wake up and turn on the sun or else it won’t be warm. That’s my morning job.” Couple weeks later we went to the beach. My uncle said he’d be right back and he disappears. Then sundown comes. I see him walking in the horizon and I was convinced.
It was winter and cold one morning. Around 6ish, it’s dark and I’m waiting inside the front entrance of my building and my uncle shows up and waves. “Tio! The SUN! You didn’t turn it on this morning!! I’m cold,” I said while pouting. He said, “It needs to charge. It’s kind of like your VCR, you have to rewind it so it works again.” I’ll just say I was in for a rude awakening at school when I learned the orbits of the planets.
I confronted him lying to me when he picked me up from school. He rubbed my hair and told me I was a smart one & took me to Toys’R’Us in Union Square and got me Wario Land.
I miss the 90s....
26. Kids Say the Darndest Things
I believed:
- That babies came out of the belly button.
- That everyone died when they reached 100 years old.
- That a dad planted a seed in the mom's tummy, which had a 50/50 chance of being born a baby or a fruit/vegetable.
- That anyone who crossed the center line while driving was a vampire.
- That pee was only water, so it didn't matter if I peed on the couch. It would dry!
- That the ship painting in my bedroom had a face in it that watched me all night long.
- That an alien spaceship would hang out by my window at night. It was the moon.
27. Mother Knows Best Even in Death
When I was a preschooler, my mom told me that you weren't allowed to ride a motorcycle or get tattoos unless your mother was dead. One day, outside the grocery store I saw a big, tough looking dude covered in tats, straddling the loudest motorcycle ever. Little five-year-old me went up to him and asked the most inappropriate question: "Hey, is your mom dead?"
Dude looked at me and said, "yeah."
And I was shocked that my mom was right.
28. The “Farm” Where Pets Eventually Go
I used to believe that the dog who bit me when I was 6 was actually sent to a farm. It wasn't until I was watching Friends years later when Ross and Monica are talking about an old dog that found a great place on a farm to grow old. It hit me right then. I hated that dog. I am fearful of dogs because of it. But never did I want it “to live the rest of its life at a farm!!!”
29. Thanksgiving Cancels Sesame Street
During Thanksgiving, my sister's ex-boyfriend told me that my mom was cooking Big Bird in the oven. I stomped into the kitchen with a mad face and crossed arms and with great disapproval I asked, "are you really cooking Big Bird??" I was like 3.
30. Fake News College
In my freshman year of college, we convinced a girl that after private time, the guy’s part falls off and that is what becomes the baby. Of course, the guy's part grows back like a lizard’s tail. We didn't actually think she'd believe us and just did it to poke fun. (She was an incredibly sheltered girl, sweet, but very sheltered.) She believed it, unknown to any of us, for 3 months until she went home and asked her parents if it was true.
31. Marshmallow Farms
My dad told me that marshmallow farms were real. Do you ever drive by hay fields during harvest and see those big, plastic covered rolls of hay? That’s the marshmallow farm. I grew up in a small farming community and believed it for years even getting in tearful arguments with kids at recess about (kids whose parents likely own the farms).
My world was shattered when I was fifteen and discovered my dad lied to me and my siblings as kids because it was funny.
I hope to be that parent someday.
32. Our Camel Ancestors
When I was a kid, my teacher said humans were mammals. I wasn’t paying much attention that day, which was a big mistake. I thought she said that humans were actually camels. So, being the lover of fun facts that I am, I told everyone I knew that humans were actually camels. No one ever corrected me. This went on for years until one day I heard that humans were mammals again and it all clicked.
33. Hamster Transformation
When I was 7, a hamster bit me and my dad told me that I would turn in a hamster slowly. The hamster owner (a 10-year-old) got the joke and went with it. I was terrified for about 2 hours.
34. Operation Sonic
I slept over at a friend's house once and he told me his dad's security system was motion sensor machine gun turrets that would drop from the ceiling if it detected an intruder. I spent the entire night perfectly still trying to hold in my pee until I couldn't anymore and sprinted for the toilet. I'm still alive so I guess I was too fast for ‘em.
35. Explosive Hazard: Child May Explode
My mother always told horror stories to me as kid to get me to stop doing certain things. They always involved a student exploding in school when she was a little girl. So, things like one time a girl had to go to the bathroom but she didn’t and held it for so long that her bladder exploded during class or a girl swallowed her gum once and every time she took a breath it blew a bubble in her stomach until her stomach exploded in class one day. I believed them all.
36. The Puppy/Baby Conspiracy
I believed I was born a puppy.
Now, before you think I'm just some gullible human let me fill you in. My parents took down every single baby picture of me and replaced them with beagle pictures to prove it to me. So, for the first like 8 years of my life I believed I was born a beagle puppy and I left suspicious puddles and smelled funny when I was wet, so mom had god’s cell phone number and asked him to turn me into a little girl when I turned 2.
Which in kid brain, is pretty logical. I mean, I didn't remember before I was 2, did you?? So yeah. Spent a while believing I was a beagle.
37. What Actually Happens After You Say “I Do”
I thought ladies became pregnant as soon as they got married. Like, right after the "I do." I was significantly disappointed when I announced that my cats got married and my cat didn't become pregnant, haha.
38. Cleanliness Is Next To Pe---
When I was a little boy, my parents told me that my private part would fall off if I didn't wash it every day. I thought it was a lie until one fateful day. I saw my mom naked. Then I got scared.
Piqsels
39. Let’s Go See the Man with Many Noses
My dad used to make this lame joke on New Year’s Eve: there's a man standing on the market place who has just as many noses on his face as there are days left in the year. I got that it was a joke because there was only one day left, but I still thought there was a man that you could go see. I imagined he would be like a street performer who is only in business one day each year. I always wanted to go see him, but we never did.
40. Impulsively Polite
I felt the need to personally thank the driver of the subway train every time we took it. I thought it would be rude and impolite to not do so. It must have been so embarrassing for my mom. The driver cabin had tinted windows and I demanded the driver lowered them so I could thank him. I was like 5 or 6. Similarly, I was taught to give my seat to the elderly or pregnant women. One time, as soon as the door opened and an old looking man entered the wagon, I bolted from my seat and ran to him, grabbed him by the hand and brought him to the empty seat.
Thank god I didn't do that to a fat lady or my mom would have died from embarrassment.
41. Real Virtual Reality
When I was perhaps 6, I thought that for every computer on the face of the earth, there was a person whose job was to do your mathematical calculations and play against you if you're playing "against the computer."
42. Just Add Salt
My dad told me that I could have a pet chipmunk or squirrel if I caught one. He told me the key to catching one, and his words were utterly insane. He said to shake salt on their tail, they would always stop to lick the salt off and then I'd be able to catch it. Not hard to figure out why he told us that, because my brother and I would spend hours a day running around the yard with a bucket and a salt shaker.
I think the last time I tried was when I was like 9. I never really thought about it again until I was like 15 and it was mind blowing to realize it was all just to keep us busy outside.
43. Alien Purple Potatoes
My mother bought purple potatoes once and I was 5 or 6 and asked her where she got them. She told me that those are potatoes from Mars. Guess who believed it and talked about it all day at class?
44. The National Honeymoon Foundation Subsidy
My dad told me I could only push the crosswalk button once because each additional push would take $1.00 off of my college fund. He also told me that when you get married, the National Honeymoon Foundation paid for your honeymoon. My dad likes to mess with people.
45. Exclusive Tattoo Book for Suvivors
When my dad was young, he got into a really bad accident where he fell off of a cliff when he was riding his motorcycle (true story). He also has a giant tribal tattoo on his arm. He made me believe that you needed to go off a cliff to get that tattoo and that there was a whole secret book filled with tattoos that you could only get if you did cool stunts or almost died.
46. My Dad, The Rain Man
I believed my parents could stop the rain. Whenever it was raining and we were in the car my dad used to say, "I'm going to stop the rain in a sec but I can only do it for a second because it hurts." We'd drive a little further and then the rain would stop! It took forever for me to figure out how he did it. He'd just drive under a bridge and then close his eyes and pretend to concentrate. I believed him for years.
47. Limited Clearance: Employees Only
I didn't really understand how jobs worked. Everywhere I went there were employees, but I had never in my life noticed an employee entering or leaving their workplace. I assumed that every business had a secret entrance that employees always used, and was so convinced in the obviousness of this that I never asked anyone whether or not it was true.
I was very, very confused by where to go when I got my first job.
Public Domain Pictures
48. Long-Necked Animal Island
I believed that giraffes are long necked deer and because of that, there's a secret island somewhere where there is a long-necked version of everything and the long-necked deer is the only one that we know about.
49. Paralympic Lawyer
I grew up with a grandmother who was in a diving accident as a young girl. As such, she was relegated to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Long story short, I had a paralyzed grandmother.
When I was old enough to ask what she did for work, I was told she was a paralegal. This being around the time I was learning how prefixes worked in words I heard para, and legal. Thus, my young brain made the brilliant connection and all the way until I was 14 years old, I lived believing that a paralegal was a lawyer in a wheelchair.
Pexels
50. (Lack Of) Knowledge is Power
We lived in my great aunt's house for a while when I was a kid and my parents were getting back onto their feet and there was this heater in the living room. It had a little window where you could see the pilot light in there and I was fascinated by it. I thought that because the flame was blue that it would be cold to the touch. It kind of made sense, but it was incredibly stupid considering this flame was keeping a heater going. One day I decided to stick my fingers through this little chip in the glass to test my dumb idea. The flame was not cold. It was very hot like regular fire and burned me. Luckily, it wasn't too bad.
When I found out that the little thing at the end when you pluck out a hair is called a root, I thought that maybe I would be able to plant it anywhere on my body. For a long time, I tried very hard to grow hairs on my fingertips. I don't know why exactly. It just seemed like a cool place at that age and I could use freak people out. Although I eventually found out in theory that method does work and is used, the way I was doing it by letting it sit there on my fingertips does not.
Do you remember the commercial where they planted Skittles in the ground and a rainbow grew? Well, when I was a kid my parents convinced me it was true, but took longer than the commercial showed. For about a month or two I tried very hard to grow a rainbow in my backyard, watering it when I would get home from school. Eventually they told me the truth and now as an adult I feel like I would find that petty to do to my kid too.
51. All the Same on the “Down Inside”
I believed that planets all had a “down inside.” Like, they had their regular surfaces that you see in photographs, but if you land there, you could go down inside the planet and see the real thing - like the people who lived there and cities and stuff. Earth looks green and blue in pictures but here we all are! So obviously we exist “down inside” the planet. And if you go land on Saturn or something, the surface will look like the pictures until you go down inside and you can see what the world of Saturn is really like. When people talked about space travel, I used to say that I’d never want to unless you got to go down inside the planets you visited.
The whole “we’re the only planet with intelligent life” thing didn’t really register with me right away.
52. Shopping for a Sibling
When my sister and I were younger, my parents told us that we had an older brother named Zachary that was in college that we had never met. When my observant, younger self asked why we didn't have any pictures of him my parents said he was a Sears catalog model so that's why we never threw any of them out.
My sister the next day went and told all of her friends about her new older brother while our parents were having a laugh.
53. I Believe I Can Snow
In Denmark a "snowsuit" is basically called a "flying suit." So, 5-year-old me was like, "haha, no way this will actually make me fly. If it worked like that, I'd already have done it by now." That's not the stupid part though. The stupid part was right after thinking that, I thought, "but I bet it could make me float through the air though."
So, I climbed a small tower on the playground (I was probably only 1 meter off the ground, but it felt high enough for a test run) and jumped off looking like the worlds stupidest flying squirrel in a snow suit. I belly flopped right on top of a bunch of frozen sand and got the air knocked out of me.
54. Don’t Be So Sag About It
When I was 5 or so, I accidentally stabbed my balls (via jumping) with a sharpened pencil. Luckily, it didn't break any skin and all I had to do was put ointment on them for a period of time. One day, I was rowdy and wouldn't let my mom put the ointment on, so she said, "if you keep jumping up and down like this with that ointment on, your balls will drop and sag."
When puberty came along and my body began changing, I felt so ashamed of my body because I thought I had done this to myself by being such a bad kid and not listening to my mom. I literally believed I was a freak of nature. It wasn't until I was around 16 when I fully realized that she only said that to me to get me to stop being so rambunctious.
55. Too Much of a Good Syrup
When I was little my family used to make chocolate milk with milk and Hershey syrup. To avoid us kids putting in too much chocolate syrup, she told me something both ingenious and cruel. She said that if you put TOO much syrup in, it will start to get less chocolatey - like there was a limit to the chocolate strength and then it would start to turn into white milk again.
Fast forward, I'm 18 and making chocolate milk with my 12-year-old sister and I tell her this little tip. Then it just hits me, WHY would adding more chocolate make it less chocolatey!?! I guess when you're little you just take everything mom says as a fact.
56. Need an Extra Pair of Stomach Hands?
I thought that there were these hands in your stomach (I pictured classic white gloved cartoonish hands) holding a poop colored garbage bag and all the food you ate went into the bag and would get dropped down for you to poop out. Diarrhea happened when the hands dropped the bag and it exploded at the bottom. I also thought there was a small man digging for boogers in your nose with a pick axe and nose bleeds happened when he dug too far.
57. The Eye of Tony the Tiger
At one of those drive-through safari parks, my brother told me to not, under any circumstances, look a tiger in its eye because it will take it as a threat and attack you. I, being a curious child, didn't want to miss out on seeing any of the animals and whilst looking around, I accidentally caught the gaze of a tiger. I freaked out and proceeded to cry, thinking I had sealed my family's fate.
I find it funny now but Frosted Flakes will never taste the same.
58. Be Proud of Your Love Pits
I'm not sure if this is some sort of common cute little story kids are told in other parts of the world, but I always had a ton of freckles as a kid and was told that freckles were angel kisses. This is innocent enough until one day while exploring my body I noticed I had one freckle on my private parts. I became horrified as a young boy wondering why angels were kissing me down there.
59. Just Shy of a Quarter Foot
When I was a kid, I thought that little people (like Peter Dinklage) were small because of a truly dumb reason. I figured they all must be born on February 29th. Since their birthdays only came around once every four years, then it only made sense that they would grow to be a quarter of the size of a regular human, right? Wrong. So, so wrong.
60. The Most Powerful Fart of All
When I was small, I lived in a small town by an oil refinery. My parents convinced me that if you fart on site, it would explode. I was in kindergarten.
We went on a class field trip there once (not much else to do in the middle of nowhere), and I felt the gas building in my gut. I didn't want to harm everyone, so I grew quite stressed. I realized that I would need to take extraordinary measures to prevent catastrophe. So, I spent an embarrassingly long amount of time with my hand down my pants, blocking my fart.
Sources: Reddit,
