If you ever believed yoghurt pot lids were poisonous or your legs would fall off if you unscrewed your belly button, you're in good company.

Thousands of people across the world have been sharing wacky childhood beliefs thanks to a web site set up in Brighton.

The site, called iusedtobelieve.com, was the brainchild of internet developer Mat Connolley and, like most good ideas, the inspiration came in the pub.

Mat, 27, said: "I was out drinking with a friend and he told me when he was young he thought he had baked beans for blood and if he cut himself baked beans came out of his body.

"I thought this was strange but started thinking. I remembered when I was young I thought there was a vampire round the s-bend of our toilet and if I took too long, he would bite me on the bum.

"I thought there must be millions of other stories like these. So I got an old fashioned pen and paper and got maybe 150 people to write down their own beliefs.

"I thought of it as an art project and we held an open house to show it at Brighton Festival. Shortly after, in June, it went on the web."

The site has gathered huge momentum since then and last month was voted one of the sites of the year by internet portal Yahoo!

Mat, who lives with wife Kat at Springfield Road, Brighton, said: "It was a complete surprise to find I had won. Ever since we have been featured on Yahoo it has gone crazy.

"We have about 9,000 submissions and are probably getting a couple of hundred a day.

"They are from all around the world, although there are a lot of Americans and we have recently started getting a lot of Norwegians.

"I have started playing a little game to guess where they are from by the language they use and I'm getting quite good at it.

"For the moment it is just run as a hobby. I am quite against advertising on the internet."

Mat said one of the funniest anecdotes was the man who believed cough medicine had a toggle effect and would give you a cold if you did not have one.

Another favourite was the person who thought the quaker's scarf on a popular brand of oats was actually a torrent of semi-digested porridge pouring from his face.

Paul Smith, a spokesman for Yahoo! UK and Ireland, said: "Yahoo! has a team of researchers whose job it is to check out links and promote activities.

"They have a site of the day, a site of the week and a site of the month.

"The 12 winners of the year were all sites of the month winners and get to put an award on their site and have a link on the front page of yahoo.co.uk."

Other gems entered on to the site include:

"When I was a young, only child, and jealous that all my friends had brothers and sisters, my mum told me I did have a brother but he was a monkey in a zoo. I believed this until I was about seven."

"I used to think people on the telly could see me. I hated getting my pyjamas on in front of Gordon Honeycomb."

"My brother believed there was a family that lived in the sponge in our bathroom called the Smiffs and they all had upturned, piggie noses."

"I used to think I could control the weather. One year when I was nine I said I want snow for Christmas. We got so much snow that year that everyone was practically trapped in their homes ... I swore never to use my powers again."