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Having access to the Web has brought me many things in recent years. One of them is the discovery that some people will believe anything.

I have received countless e-mails warning me about all sorts of dangers lurking everywhere from my own kitchen cabinet to the local McDonald’s ball pit. Luckily, I quickly found a Web site that is supposed to separate the fact from fiction and keep me from wasting my time worrying.

Almost all of the dire warnings have turned out to be urban myths, stories that might have once had a grain of truth in them but somehow got blown all out of proportion as they were passed from ear to ear or inbox to inbox.

After so many military moves, my children have been exposed to a whole slew of such myths. I’m not sure if their friends and classmates tell the boys such whopper-sized lies to see how gullible they are or if the local kids actually believe the stuff coming out of their own mouths.

With Halloween just a few weeks away, I have decided to share a couple of their strangest stories with you.

Although I am highly skeptical of every story I’m about to tell, I have no way to prove them untrue. That’s because Jimmy, Tommy and Ronnie wait until we move to a new home before sharing the wild rumors from our last one.

For example, they waited until we moved to Pennsylvania to inform me that the ice cream man in our old neighborhood in California had been packing heat … At least, that’s what the kids down the block told Jimmy and Tommy.

Jimmy insists the smiling man with treats in his truck had a shotgun tucked underneath those confections. How can I argue with his claim that "P.J. saw it one time," when P.J. still lives on the West Coast?

By the time we arrived in Pennsylvania, my eldest had learned to think twice before believing whatever his new friends told him. The boys in his fifth-grade class did their best to convince Jimmy that one of the urinals in the bathroom was haunted. I’m not sure what they meant by "haunted," but Jimmy didn’t fall for that one. Instead, he did what any brave boy would do when faced with the challenge of proving there are no such things as haunted urinals. He peed in it.

The biggest whoppers kids tell are about teachers and other school employees. For whatever reason, lunchroom ladies take the brunt of the abuse.

All three boys claim one cafeteria worker at their elementary school in Pennsylvania wore a pair of scissors around her neck so she could bop unsuspecting students on the head while they ate lunch.

The tallest tale I have heard so far involves yet another school employee who, according to Jimmy and Tommy, was slowly becoming a woman.

Jimmy matter-of-factly informed me, "He was saving up for a sex change, but didn’t have all the money yet."

Tommy eagerly added, "He had long fingernails, and one time was wearing a slip." I’m not even sure Tommy knows what a slip is!

More than likely, the slip-wearing janitor with the long fingernails is a fictional character from the boys’ imaginations — someone who might seem real now that they have moved on to new schools.

Even though I don’t believe any of their nonsense, it is hard to get the image out of my mind. In a sense, I am haunted by him, the armed ice cream man and the lunch lady with her scissors.

However, I’m not intimidated one bit at the idea of a haunted urinal.

Pam Zich has been married to a Marine for 17 years and currently lives in Springfield, Va. You may e-mail her at homefront@stripes.osd.mil or visit her Web site, www.lifeonthehomefront.com.

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