This is kind of depressing…but when I was a kid my mom used to talk about her first baby. My parents had a girl, born premature, who lived for one week. I remember asking my mom how the baby died, and my mom told me this whole story about how she put the baby down for a nap, but she never woke up. It was such a sad and beautiful story, the way my mom told it, but it freaked me out a bit. For a long time I was scared to go to sleep (I was maybe 5 when she told me this).
Then, when I was maybe 10 or 11, I overheard my mom talking to a neighbor about how the baby had been born early, had never been able to leave the hospital, and had died when she was only a week old. I was shocked, but never confronted my mom about why she’d told me that other version of the story. Maybe she didn’t even remember telling it to me that way, because she never referred to it again, but stuck to the truth whenever she did talk about the baby.
I just remembered a funny one. My dad used to tell my brother and me that he had money between his toes. If we looked hard enough, we could find the money and keep it. I can just picture us now, spreading my dad’s hairy toes apart and trying to find some money. We never found so much as a penny, the bastard. ;)