110

Childlore is folklore passed directly between children, without the input of adults.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childlore

Stuff I can think of off the top of my head are paper fortune tellers, summoning Bloody Mary/the candyman, the cool S, parody songs like "Jingle bells Batman Smells" and "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead" etc.

This stuff has intrigued me since, well since I was a kid. I always wondered where they came from. I never saw adults doing that stuff, so I figured another kid had to have come up with it.

top 39 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 days ago

Hold B+Down to increase your chances of catching a pokemon.

[-] GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone 28 points 2 days ago

The rumor that existed in every single school that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he could suck his own penis

[-] MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

That rumor came up in his autobiography and he wrote -

"If I really got my ribs removed, I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper. Plus, who really has time to be killing puppies when you can be sucking your own dick? I think I'm gonna call the surgeon in the morning."

Side note: Marilyn Manson is a peice of shit.

[-] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

I'm out of the loop on that one, why is he a piece of shit?

[-] Geobloke@aussie.zone 5 points 2 days ago

A bunch of women accused him of sexual violence, but nothing is showing up on his wiki.

He also seems to have been a bit of a dick to bandmates

[-] Quadhammer@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

He... he was on the wonder years?

[-] rosco385@lemmy.wtf 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

No, but there was a rumour back in the day that he was the kid who played Kevin's best friend.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wondering-about-marilyn/

[-] essell@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

For my generation this was about Prince

[-] KuromiGirl04@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The version of the Little Einsteins theme song i would sing in middle school and high-school everytime we went on a field trip on a school bus

We're going on a trip, in our favorite piece of shit! Doin' 95, we'll probably fucking die!

The teachers hated it but a bunch of the other kids thought it was funny and would sing along

But really though, have you ever ridden on the highway in a schoolbus during a fieldtrip? This is absolutely what it felt like, that you were going 95 mph with no seatbelts and you were gonna die

[-] jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Not necessarily my favorite nor something widespread, but it was always the legend/meme that my middle/high schools had a pool on the roof (it was a one story building lmfao)

[-] 5too@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

I remember kids would try to sell each other a pass to get to the second floor of one of our one-story buildings; I wonder if the pool rumor started as a similar joke/scam

[-] LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

I middle/high school the best sub was rumored to live out of the back of his station wagon and had cardboard boxes to extend the back of it for extra shelter. It didn't help that the man embraced the rumor.

He once shared some pie with me when I was having a small breakdown in an empty room senior year due to my severe depression and from being bullied severely. He just offered me pie and we sat in silence and each ate a piece and then went on our way. It was nice.

[-] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 3 days ago

Going way way back to the 1980s... there was a rumour around my school that there was a secret chocolate factory hidden in Super Mario Bros 1. We didn't really think there would be much to it, but we'd all been to the minus world and we saw the palette swap in some worlds (like I think world 6). The more reasonable or computer/code minded of us just figured it was a glitch that palette swapped everything to browns, so "chocolate factory" became the name for it, where it didn't officially have one.

Nintendo must have heard this rumour, because Super Mario World featured a "Chocolate Island." But this was before SMB2 was ever a thing.

[-] early_riser@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I've heard of this (way after the fact). IIRC it was part of some player's guide, and may have been included either as a joke by the author or a copyright trap by the publisher.

Seems I was right. Per this wiki article Apologies for linking to Fandom.

[-] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

Wow, I never heard it was written down anywhere. I never bought unofficial guides, either, though I did subscribe (rather, my parents subscribed me to) Nintendo Power. Not sure if they wrote it in an article in a magazine, or if I just heard it on the playground.

Either way, that's pretty common with maps. Map makers will invent towns that do not exist, and if they see other map makers using it, they know their work was stolen.

[-] ToffeeIsForClosers@piefed.ca 20 points 3 days ago

On another kid’s hand: “Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your cooties shot.”

[-] TAG@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with

Circle circle, square square,
Now you have it everywhere

[-] early_riser@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

No cootie insurance though

[-] barkybeak@lemmy.zip 20 points 3 days ago

So many gaming ones.

When mortal kombat was released for consoles, the kids passed the “blood code” for the genesis

When mortal kombat 2 came out, their were so many myths about super fatalities and weird stuff about how street fighter was in it.

[-] early_riser@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

Man oh man I could probably have a whole thread just for video game urban legends from the late 90s. That's when some of your friends had internet, but maybe you didn't, so there was just enough legit info to make the fake stuff seem believable (looking at you, MissingNo). Luigi in SM64, all sorts of secret Smash 64 characters, literally the entirety of Pokemon.

[-] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

I wonder if Luigi in SM64 and other games was also a product of memory constraints as some of these games did omit him for that reason specifically and thus presumably had initially been intended to include him before the memory issues came up. If that's true he may have shown up in very early marketing material and spawned the legends.

[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago

presumably had initially been intended to include him

Fun fact: In one of the many leaks of Nintendo internal files in the past decade, early source code and the model was found for Luigi in SM64. His inclusion was abandoned very early on in development.

[-] GlenRambo@jlai.lu 6 points 2 days ago

You could somehow make a legal and illegal version of a ninja throwing star with popsicle sticks.

[-] fizzle@quokk.au 9 points 3 days ago

You can make yourself wake up at 6am tomorrow by hitting yourself on the head 6 times, you need to do it really hard though.

[-] lime@feddit.nu 9 points 3 days ago

the swedish word for "dibs" is "pax". which, i only realized much later, is latin for "peace". always thought that was neat.

[-] Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 days ago

This might be local but "Deem!" as the sound of magical transformation. As an adult I think some child heard/read something like "I deem you Sir Galahad, Knight of the Round Table" and mixed it up with cartoon magic sounds, but in our neighborhood any kid with a good stick could wave it and say "Deem! You're a horse!" or "Deem! You're a frog!" and the other kid would act the part for awhile. You could even deem yourself, like "Deem! I'm a wizard!" Which is redundant now that I think of it.

[-] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Could it be an onomatopoeia of the ringing/shimmering sounds sometimes used? Like an alternate of "ding"?

[-] Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yes to that, but also I remember, if I was the fairy or the witch I might say "I'm gonna deem you a princess, okay?" Or even "what do you want me to deem you?" if I wasn't feeling bossy.

[-] Waldelfe@feddit.org 6 points 3 days ago

In my elementary school there was a rumour that kissing someone on the mouth makes a baby in the throat. I've heard it still being spread years later. There are also parodies of famous German poems that you have or had to memorize in school, although I some kids learnt them from their parents. I know parody versions of Die Glocke and Die Bürgschaft.

[-] hungryphrog 3 points 3 days ago

Soo... Does that mean you're gonna give birth by coughing or vomiting up the baby?

[-] Waldelfe@feddit.org 8 points 3 days ago

I don't think the kids thought that far. I certainly didn't.

[-] logos@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 days ago

Blowing in the Nintendo cartridge. Miss Mary Mack.

[-] olafurp@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I have a child monitor that only charges if I blow in it before plugging it. It's legit

[-] emb@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

It's gotta be The Cool S.

[-] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

These video game ones now have me wondering if anyone else was told they could unlock extra characters in Super Smash Bros (N64) by clicking certain names in the credits.

We had various rules about how to do a "snow dance". Something about wearing pajamas and walking around a pillow to get school canceled.

[-] early_riser@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago

These video game ones now have me wondering if anyone else was told they could unlock extra characters in Super Smash Bros (N64) by clicking certain names in the credits.

The methods for unlocking these supposed secret characters were always ridiculously convoluted, so if it didn't work you were probably doing it wrong. Like beating the game 10 times on level 9 difficulty with 1 stock with Pikachu would unlock Mewtwo, etc.

But like I said above, the stuff that was legit was often so weird and seemingly arbitrary that the fake stuff sounded more plausible. Talk to a specific NPC, fly to a specific area and surf up and down a specific coast, and you'll encounter a glitched pokemon that will duplicate the sixth item in your inventory. Yeah it was all about memory registers or whatever, but I didn't know about that stuff at the time.

[-] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago
[-] MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

You heard about that guy that took too much acid and couldn't sit down because he thought he was a glass of orange juice and he would spill?

[-] LORDSMEGMA@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Ours was a kid on a band trip to Disneyland. Wouldn't get off the teacups be wise he didn't want to spill

this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
110 points (100.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

38469 readers
1301 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS