Like any sensible adult, you know that the world is full of dangers. From gun violence to heart attacks, there are any number of ways that you could meet an untimely end. But you know how you’re probably not going to die today? Quicksand.

Which is vaguely disappointing. Growing up in a pre-internet age, when most of what we knew of the outside world came from pop culture and hearsay from friends, we were led to believe that the dangers facing us in adulthood would be a bit more colorful and zany.

Here are 10 of our favorite childhood misconceptions about the threats that awaited us when we left the security of home. What did we miss? Leave a comment below and tell us some of the crazy things you believed as a kid.

1. Quicksand

We can all thank The NeverEnding Story (RIP Artax, a beautiful horse who deserved better) for supplanting logic with this seemingly never-ending fear. But it’s time to let it go. You don’t just have to take our word for it — scientists at the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institutein Amsterdam studied quicksand in 2005 and found that it’s “impossible” for a human to be sucked completely under.

I have not seen “The NeverEnding Story,” but I vaguely recall a movie, possibly with Sherlock Holmes, with a character drowning in a bog.

2. Snakes

If snakes are terrifying to Indiana Jones, it’s more than understandable that they would bring most of us into a state of full-blown panic. They slither, bite and rattle, and those with a menacing hood even became synonymous with a highly problematic dojo, not to mention G.I. Joe’s main archnemesis. But despite the villainous rap we’ve bestowed on them, mosquitoes kill nearly 15 times more people a year than all snakes put together. Ssssssssomething to think about.

Sssssss?

I saw “Sssssss” on TV. The (spoiler alert!) metamorphosis sequence freaked me out.

3. The Bermuda Triangle

What has become a maritime Area 51 of sorts, the large body of water known as the Bermuda Triangle is infamously known as a location where numerous flights have disappeared without explanation. But, in actuality, no more flight accidents have occurred there than any other part of the world. Like the punk rocker who secretly loves Barry Manilow, the Bermuda Triangle is a bit of a poser.

Tell Leonard Nimoy that.

4. Escaping dangerous situations by dropping and rolling

Stop, drop and roll was the crisis management mantra of our youth. It started to fall by the wayside once we, as a society, stopped being so stingy with fire extinguishers.

5. Falling pianos

Once upon a time, it seemed people were at real risk of being crushed by a piano at any given moment, a phenomenon known as the Wile E. Coyote Effect.

6. Hidden satanic messages in music

“Have I become satanic yet?” you may have wondered, based on the public outcry and congressional hearings that took place in an effort to stymie popular music’s perceived penchant for the occult. Yet, no matter how hard we rebelliously rocked out, performing ritual sacrifices in our basements never became a thing.

This dates back to the suicides of two heavy metal fans in December 1985. Their families sued the band Judas Priest, claiming that subliminal messages in its Stained Class album. Ultimate Classic Rock takes the story from there:

The legal protection of lyrics as free speech had already been tested (perhaps most notably during a roughly concurrent trial accusing Ozzy Osbourne of driving a fan to suicide with his song “Suicide Solution”), but the Priest case proceeded thanks to a legal twist: Without commenting on whether or not the songs in question actually included subliminal messages, the presiding judge ruled that so-called “subliminals” don’t constitute actual speech – and are therefore not protected by the First Amendment.

“I don’t know what subliminals are, but I do know there’s nothing like that in this music,” band manager Bill Curbishley complained before the trial. “If we were going to do that, I’d be saying, ‘Buy seven copies,’ not telling a couple of screwed-up kids to kill themselves.”

That rather compelling argument notwithstanding, the case proceeded to trial, with the plaintiffs’ attorney penning an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that called the alleged messages (which were said to include the phrases “let’s be dead” and “do it”) an “invasion of privacy” and quoted Jimi Hendrix as saying, “You can hypnotize people with music and when they get at their weakest point, you can preach into their subconscious minds what you want to say.”

That Hendrix quote has elsewhere been attributed to Charles Manson’s brother Eddy, and the lawyer’s apparent misquote seems to reflect an overall loose approach to substantiating its claims. In an article for the Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. Timothy E. Moore – who served as a witness for the defense – rather drolly recalled one of the prosecution’s experts by suggesting, “It is possible that he undermined his own credibility with the court by opining that subliminal messages could be found on Ritz crackers, the Sistine Chapel, Sears catalogues, and the NBC evening news. He also asserted that ‘science is pretty much what you can get away with at any point in time.’”

In fact, the band’s management coordinator Jayne Andrews later incredulously noted that the plaintiffs had at first planned to hinge their case on lyrics from the album – lyrics that didn’t exist. “It was originally about the track ‘Heroes End,’” Andrews recalled. “They tried to say the band were saying you could only be a hero if you killed yourself, till I had to give them the correct lyrics which is ‘why do heroes have to die?’… Then they changed their plea to subliminal messages on the album!”

Guitarist Glenn Tipton later conceded, “It’s a fact that if you play speech backwards, some of it will seem to make sense. So, I asked permission to go into a studio and find some perfectly innocent phonetic flukes. The lawyers didn’t want to do it, but I insisted. We bought a copy of the Stained Class album in a local record shop, went into the studio, recorded it to tape, turned it over and played it backwards. Right away we found ‘Hey ma, my chair’s broken’ and ‘Give me a peppermint’ and ‘Help me keep a job.’”

More damning was testimony from Vance himself, who told attorneys that he and Belknap were listening to Judas Priest when “all of a sudden we got a suicide message, and we got tired of life.” In a letter to Belknap’s mother, he later wrote, “I believe that alcohol and heavy-metal music such as Judas Priest led us to be mesmerized.” The Belknaps’ attorney argued that “Judas Priest and CBS pander this stuff to alienated teenagers. The members of the chess club, the math and science majors don’t listen to this stuff. It’s the dropouts, the drug and alcohol abusers. So, our argument is you have a duty to be more cautious when you’re dealing with a population susceptible to this stuff.”

The label’s lawyers didn’t try to deny that Vance and Belknap led what they deemed “sad and miserable lives” – but they pointed the finger at the boys’ overall environment, upbringing, and life choices, going over how difficult it had been for both men to hold steady jobs or stay out of trouble with the law. The defense also attacked what White referred to as “junk science” in his article, with attorney Suellen Fulstone arguing, “The courtroom is no place for reveries about the unknown capacity of the human mind.”

Despite the apparently flimsy nature of the case, the trial went on for more than a month. “We had to sit in this courtroom in Reno for six weeks,” singer Rob Halford would subsequently lament. “It was like Disney World. We had no idea what a subliminal message was – it was just a combination of some weird guitar sounds, and the way I exhaled between lyrics. I had to sing ‘Better by You, Better Than Me’ in court, a cappella. I think that was when the judge thought, ‘What am I doing here? No band goes out of its way to kill its fans.’”

Now, back to the list:

7. Dysentery 

“Can everyone please stop getting dysentery?!” you may have one day shouted from your school’s computer lab. The Oregon Trail led to a great amount of dysentery hysteria as wagon mate after wagon mate succumbed to the deadly infection. Thankfully, those dastardly days are over, and we can all put that unpleasant mess in the, well, rear.

8. Piranhas

As it turns out, the chance of being slowly lowered into a tank of piranhas by a nefarious criminal mastermind is quite low. And, unless they’re starving, piranhas don’t actually like to eat people. Now I simply feel sorry for all the piranhas whose owners don’t feed them a proper diet.

9. Acid rain

“It’s rain! And it’s acid! And it’s falling on all of us!” seemed like declarations we were all destined to make. But this is something we actually fixed with the passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and other regulatory measures. It’s still hard to reconcile because we’ve been so well trained to believe that things will keep getting worse.

What an illiberal thought.

10. Chloroform

I still don’t know where one even gets chloroform but, growing up, it sure seemed widely available to anyone looking to kidnap and shove someone into the trunk of a car. Now, if chloroform crosses your path, it’s probably just what the kids have dubbed their latest strain of weed.