First!

[Denise]

Alright, sorry. Anyhow, anyone fond of childhood stories? Then, suddenly, one day really analize the stories and decide it was highly implausible? There are some stories I would repeat to people over and over and then one day realize- hey, that's too bizarre to be really true.

I guess I need a for instance in this post. So here goes...
When I was little I split a bobby pin and put it in an outlet. I remember the incident. But my mom's tall tale had me shooting across the room. I repeated this incident happily until one day I realized that such a small amount of electricity would not shoot me backwards 15 feet. I realized that even my own mother exagerates- don't tell her I said that. Anyone else have tales from childhood that they realize were highly embellished at a later age?

[Lisa Simpson]

My mom liked to tell a similar story about me. Except it was that I slugged a bully and sent him flying across the room. I do remember the bully (a nasty little boy who liked to lift up my skirts), but I didn't slug him, I just grabbed the hand that was headed for my skirt and pulled hard. He lost his balance and went face first to the floor. Her story sounded better. Made me more like Supergirl. But as I got older, I realized it wasn't the truth.

[Nyarlathotep]

I remember being told that cherries and milk were poisonous when mixed together. I just took it as a given when I was a kid, and I think one of the first steps I took as a skeptic was questioning why they would be poisonous together if they weren't poisonous seperately.

[Kilted_Canuck]

I always heard the story of a kid jumping off the highest tower diving board at our local athletic pool and doing a belly flop, which ripped his guts open and splattered him all over the pool area. I wasn't sure if it was true of not until I heard a friend from another city tell the same story about a pool where he grew up.

[Ceinwyn]

I always heard the story of a kid jumping off the highest tower diving board at our local athletic pool and doing a belly flop, which ripped his guts open and splattered him all over the pool area. I wasn't sure if it was true of not until I heard a friend from another city tell the same story about a pool where he grew up.

Wow, I heard that one long ago too , from my local pool that has a cement high diving tower. Guts ripped out and everything. Freaky.

[xouper]

Might as well post a link to Snopes:
www.snopes.com

If you hadn't, someone would have. :)

So instead I'll post a link to yet another debunking site, the alt.folklore.urban faq:

http://www.tafkac.org

and include a shameless plug for one of my debinkings archived there:

http://www.tafkac.org/movies/back_to_th ... tions.html

[Doctor X]

Denise:

Funny, I had the same experience. It was a "Snoopy Nightlight" which Mum told me not to touch, because it was broken.

What do mothers do?

So, I tried to remove it and felt a shock. "This is hot" thought my tiny pre-school brain. So I grabed a wet-cold face cloth and tried again.

In reality, I felt like someone punched up through my entire arm. Of course, when I tell the story now, I have to extricate myself from the opposite wall.

--J.D.

[xouper]

And this: http://www.urbanlegends.com/

That's where the alt.folklore.urban legends faq used to be before they moved to tafkac.org. I don't know the whole story behind that move, but I don't find urbanlegends.com at all useful compared to the other sites.

As always, Your Mileage May Vary™.

[xouper]

These sites sometimes have a different take on various myths and whatnot:

http://www.truthorfiction.com
http://www.breakthechain.org

[DrMatt]

The true part:

I was 4, and my sister was 8. My sister watched over me as I played in a sandbox out back of my parents house in Deerfield, IL. We came in to find my parents at the top landing of the split level. The parents were throwing a fit, demanding to know who had eaten half of a two-pound Sara Lee German chocolate cake which my mother allegedly had set on the kitchen counter to defrost. My parents' German shepherd slunk down the lower set of stairs to the downstairs den with her tail between her legs, and hid under the sofa.

The mythological part: My parents claimed for decades thereafter that the dog had eaten half of a two-pound Sara Lee German Chocolate Cake that had been left on a countertop to defrost. According to them, so cunning was the dog that it had bit the cake perfectly, making it appear to have been expertly sliced in half.

Various problems with the myth: I cannot verify that the cake ever existed, as at the time I was too short to see over the countertop, and I never saw the cake in question. The claim of perfect halving of the cake sounds spurious, as does the claim that it looked sliced--a German shepherd's snoot is long and narrow, and its teeth tend to leave toothmarks. Finally, dogs do not have livers capable of processing massive influxes of chocolate, but the dog was never ill after the incident.

Most probable explanation: My mother set out half a chocolate cake to defrost, then forgot about it. The dog was afraid of the yelling.