People Reveal The Worst Things They Regret Doing As Kids

From Redditor u/Outrageous_Claims:

My friend and I ding dong ditched this old lady. Except we didn't ditch. We just hid. Then when she opened the door, I threw a dead bird at her.

From Redditor u/-Rewind:

When I was about 16, a couple of friends and I stole a box of flyers of some HIV/AIDS charity organization. We then spent the whole day going door to door collecting money for this "charity." We received 500+ EUR in one afternoon. We did not donate any of the money, but used all of it to buy cigarettes, weed, and alcohol. This was a decade ago, but the feeling of guilt keeps coming back to me. Recently, I donated 500 EUR to that specific charity, but for some reason I still feel terrible about it.

From Redditor u/watsee:

My friends and I were going through our 'firestarter' phase. This came to an abrupt and sobering end when, whilst out on a bike ride, my friend produced some stuff to burn. We used to use deodorant as a fuel, sprayed liberally onto scrap paper.

Anyway, we were riding our bikes along a farm track near to where we live, and my friend said to pull over. We looked around and, finding nobody in sight nor no sound of anyone approaching, produced the things to burn. The fire got way out of hand and quickly spread to a large, very dry and dead, bush. The flames were incredible.

We heard some people coming and panicked and rode off as fast as possible, both petrified of what had just happened. I didn't sleep for days. The next weekend, we summoned up the courage to ride back up there and the [negative effects] we had caused was horrible. A good portion of the unused field was burnt to a crisp, we were lucky that the only casualties were dry plants and grass.

That was the last time we ever played with fire.

From Redditor u/NumberJ5:

Worst or dumbest? 'Cause I think mine's a combo of both.

Stole mail when I was eight. Started with a Nintendo Power magazine. After that, I figured all mail could be that cool. My friend Charles and I would just snag a bunch of random mail on the way home, open it looking for something cool, then move on.

One day, we found a check for $160 and thought we hit it rich. We walked for about a half hour to the bank to cash it. My friend Charles said, "Go cash it, I'll be over here," and went to a kids table in the lobby.

I walk up to the teller and say, "My parents told me to cash this..." and handed her the "check."

She looks at the "check."

She looks back at me.

And then back at the "check" and says, "...This is a water bill from the city."

I said the first thing that came to my head which was, "Well, I don't know about that, but my parents told me to cash it."

She called her supervisor and showed him, and he just looked at me with this "WTF is wrong with you?" face and handed it back to me saying they can't cash a bill.

Charles and I head out, back to his house, defeated. I thought, "Wow, this day can't get any worse..." aaaaand then the cop car rolled up slowly.

We ended up getting put in the back of the cop car. I lived right down the way from where we got picked up, so I was brought home first. The way my dad told it, my stepmom told him a cop was out front, when they saw me run full speed towards the door... trying to explain my side of the story before the cop could say anything.

It didn't work.

Worst part was, it was my neighbor's water bill. After participating in a summer of complete lockdown by my dad (like with a [disciplined] routine of sh*t to do every day), he took me to the neighbors to apologize. The wife was really sweet saying "Ohhh, it's okay! We all make mistakes." But the husband was a real hard-a** about it, basically lecturing me about the whys and hows of slippery slopes and all that... I was terrified to walk by their house from that moment on.

HOWEVER, apparently they both really weren't upset, but my dad came over and asked them to really lay into me about it. I found this out years later and cant help but laugh about it, because after that, I realized why it seemed so forced.

Two lessons I learned from this though were:

1. Don't [take] mail.

2. If you do [take] mail, then try to cash a water bill, don't be black. 'Cause I got off with a warning, and my friend Charles got 50 hours community service... at age eight.

From Redditor u/Huck_bonebulge:

Neighborhood kid who I was mad at was riding by on his bike. Without even thinking, I grabbed a plunger from our garage and threw it at him javelin-style. He fell off and broke his arm. I don't even remember what my beef with him was.

From Redditor u/Absolute_cretin:

My back garden leads into a school field, the school I went to at the time. A friend and I were hitting some golf balls around one weekend and accidentally drove one through one of the school windows (the front of the school is essentially all windows). Instead of leaving, we, for some reason, decided that since we had done one, we may as well do some more. I can't remember who convinced who it was a good idea. It ended up being 23 windows, and because I was such a quiet kid, the school believed our story that some older guys had come into the field and done it. Never got caught. This was around 14 or 15 years ago now, I forget how much of a little tw*t I used to be sometimes.

We also managed to get a computer monitor through one of the windows