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.
The rumor that existed in every single school that Marilyn Manson had a rib removed so he could suck his own penis
You could somehow make a legal and illegal version of a ninja throwing star with popsicle sticks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the swedish word for “dibs” is “pax”. which, i only realized much later, is latin for “peace”. always thought that was neat.
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.
Soo… Does that mean you’re gonna give birth by coughing or vomiting up the baby?
I don’t think the kids thought that far. I certainly didn’t.
On another kid’s hand: “Circle, circle, dot, dot. Now you have your cooties shot.”
That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with
Circle circle, square square,
Now you have it everywhereNo cootie insurance though
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.
Could it be an onomatopoeia of the ringing/shimmering sounds sometimes used? Like an alternate of “ding”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blowing in the Nintendo cartridge. Miss Mary Mack.
It’s gotta be The Cool S.
So the cool s has no verified origin ans has occured in childlore functionally spontaneously across every demographic. It occurs in every nation with very little variation, regardless of language, and as far as symbols go, it’s remarkably complex to be appearing so consistently with 14 distinct lines.
For this reason, my silly theory is actually that it’s the yellow sign. The symbol of the eldrich elder god of manipupations of the cthulhu mythos, the king in yellow, Hastur. Thus, among his mind warping eldritch knowledge is the true secret to writing your full name in the cool S font.
Step on a crack…
This band puts on legendary shows. I got to see Saxquatch open for them.
