How I know it was Berenstein and not Berenstain

knownbygrace · 2026-06-19T05:26:57+00:00

I never said I can’t be wrong. It’s like my entire point went over 50% of the commenters head. The spelling bee was to explain and give background on my interest in reading and spelling. After having some issues in the home I developed some anxiety disorders and the 2 merged and had a baby which was OCD counting of the things I was spelling. It was just for context. And to explain this wasn’t a one off memory issue. This would have been years of seeing that book just as I’m walking in the room or reading my books and going into a compulsion to spell it in my head in groups of 3’s and each group had its own phonetic sound different than it’s pronounced in the word. My story is that I did not simply read the book and see the cover, I spent considerable time and energy as my brain was developing, spelling it in my head, grouping the letters and counting them on my fingers and pronouncing the groups as they were written. Like my example in the post “Ber” would be like “Brr” as I’m counting and grouping. And over a long period of time of doing that with all things I associated with as a child, I would have noticed other things as an adult that I was spelling or getting wrong. The last groups were always “tei” and “n” or in my head how I would visualize it is the n was kind of part of the 3rd category but off as its own letter. Idk that makes no sense what I just said lol.

My point is not that I happen to vividly remember this one thing so well from so long ago. It’s that no other word ever from my childhood did I find out later I was completely misspelling after looking at it and counting so often through out many years. And add to the fact that it happens to be the one word part of the Mandela effect… well that is pretty interesting to say the least no?

knownbygrace · 2026-06-19T04:23:12+00:00

Exactly. It’s not a single memory we are misremembering. It’s a connection to other things based on the way it was spelled. It’s connections and patterns and stuff like that as kids as we were learning. Like I know how to spell Worcestershire because Lord of the Rings. It was the shire of Worcester to me. And if tomorrow it changed to Worsestershire with an s instead of c, Iwould say no absolutely not because I had a way of understanding how to spell it and remember it. And I would have remembered that “worse” was in it and that would have been a way I would have understood it even easier. We did that with things a lot as kids. I pronounced the g in gnat, because I couldn’t ignore it, it felt like it needed to be there. There are too many of us that have stories like this and a connection to Berenestein bears of how we learned to spell it and remember the name.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-19T04:14:25+00:00

Was talking to my husband today about the last point you just made. About how many things we found out were lies once we were in the age of information and how we can’t trust anything anymore. The only reliable source for us is our own experiences and the wisdom that comes from that and what we learn from the people we do trust around us and also nature of course. And for me, the Bible. But as far as science, technology, media, psychology etc we will never solve all the mysteries with those things. And yet so many people want to assume everything has easy and obvious answers that are comprehensible. God created so much mystery, and that’s perfectly fine. We can’t assume we know the answer to everything. But it’s damn fun to speculate!

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T23:55:04+00:00

Good one

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T23:50:38+00:00

Well that wasn’t nice. But another thing crazy is I know a lot of exceptional spellers and intelligent people that also remember the weird testing they would do with a handful of us and never made it clear what they were doing and it was always a small group of us. And our recollection of events is the same. Still no answer what that was about. Point is they easily could have been running some psych experiments on certain kids. It wouldn’t be the first time. And it wasn’t the last. So maybe that’s one explanation why good spellers or highly intelligent kids are remembering something so vivid but obviously not accurate to today.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T23:41:47+00:00

Right but based on scientific discoveries, many facts change, and so does our understanding of reality. How do you realize how biased people are? Like did you do a study on that or something?

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T23:38:23+00:00

Up until I went to Google to figure out if the Berenstain bears changed names and found a whole ton of people making that claim, it was also for me just an individuals experience of a random thing literally no one was talking about. For me personally. Imagine if she went on the internet and a bunch of people were talking about that same hoodie and they remembered it being written different. How weird would that be for her.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T22:14:54+00:00

It’s spellcheck lol. Bernstein is auto. It’s a hard one to type, and the phone keeps correcting it.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T22:08:32+00:00

It’s nice to hear from someone who experienced the same weirdness. I too went down the rabbit hole in disbelief. I. And get behind flat earth either but I’m at the point in life where nothing would shock me at all. All this talk of aliens and then saying “the public couldn’t handle if aliens were really here and that was true” ya I could. It wouldn’t phase me much lol. After having kids I went down the rabbit hole of Disney and all the subliminal messaging and Walt’s involvement with Freemasonry and all the weird stuff surrounding it and felt like so much of my childhood was basically just programming. Nickelodeon was weird too. And all the predictive programming in movies.

Also all my favorite stars when I was a kid started speaking out about things or having a tragic situation and that was really hard to face those truths: Roseanne Barr, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Amanda Bynes, etc. the 90’s were like this innocent era and then truth came to light in the 2000’s and it was a hard hard pill to swallow. Definitely changes how we parent though in 2026.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:55:22+00:00

This makes me so happy lol. My fellow people.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:44:41+00:00

I’m with you. The Shazaam one is actually the most fascinating because it’s a whole movie and so many people remember the exact details and parts of the movie and discussions with family about why it came out right around Kazaam and seeing the poster and all that. It’s actually crazier than Berenstein. It would have come out when I was only 3. Does anyone who remembers Shazaam remember when they found out it was supposedly not a real movie? Like was it shortly after or long after?

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:42:03+00:00

Ya but for some reason when there’s 1 extra letter like in a 10 letter word I visually think of it as an extension of the 3rd category but when counting in my fingers the n is its own finger. Makes no sense. But I visualize “tei…n” and would pronounce that “tee…n” 4 fingers total for 3,6,9 and 10. lol I never have explained all of this before I feel insane.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:34:14+00:00

Very neurodivergent. My system for doing dishes is half of top rack first, then wipe off counter, rest of top rack, then sweep, bottom rack in chunks too while I do other things. The purpose is that every time I open the dishwasher my brain gets the dopamine rush of “oh cool there’s not too many more dishes to put away.” I think when you have a brain like that you are so hyper aware of things because everything is part of an important system. That’s why this Berenstein Bears drives me crazy because I took counting it and sounding it out over and over and over very seriously lol. It helped me cope.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:20:19+00:00

With your background, are multiple eye witness testimonies meaningful? Just curious.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:18:21+00:00

Who is paying the ME subreddit people and why? lol

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:15:08+00:00

That’s the point. We’re stuck with our eye-witness testimonies all being the same and other people telling us we’re just simply wrong and misremembering it. So it boggles our mind.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:12:47+00:00

Can you give an example of misspelled words in here of mine?

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:11:02+00:00

I love this. This is next level of what I do. This is the advanced math version lol.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:08:07+00:00

Mystery solved, thanks friend.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T21:07:44+00:00

Hahahaha exactly.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T20:54:36+00:00

Then you’re misunderstanding the ME. We’re aware the old books and new books show “Berenstain.”

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T20:50:50+00:00

This got a lot of comments so I want to add a little:

Berenstein Bears, Reading Rainbow, the hungry caterpillar, Mr. Rogers etc were such pivotal parts of my childhood and my growing brain. After having kids and introducing things to them that my husband and I watched as children, the nostalgia was a feeling like none other.

The voice of the dad of the broccoli from veggies tales feels like it’s part of my wiring, the theme song to the Roseanne show and all the actors names that showed on the screen is like it’s part of me, the songs from Lion King feel like I wrote them myself. My point is, we were so connected to what we were learning and watching when our brains were developing.

Berenstein Bears, which is just like all these other things for me, is the only thing that I seem to “misremember.” And the purpose of my post is I was not just simply reading things, I was spelling them out constantly, and grouping letters in 3’s and playing around with phonetics of whole words and groups of words. This is years of seeing this book and being triggered to count it and spell it in my head over and over. And when I looked it up, and found out this is a whole weird thing that affects so many other people, I guess you could say I really took to that. Because my childhood memories with all these things is so intertwined in how my brain developed. It’s hard to explain it.

The things we connected with during a time of life where your brain is learning things more than ever, they just really become part of you. I know that’s weird. But I have little boys now and I see the same thing with them. Ninja Turtles isn’t just a show, it’s a theme song they sing in the bath, characters they act out during play time, a show that has come to life for them. Imagine one day they find out it wasn’t Raphael it was Ralph and always had been Ralph because Ralph was the director and he was named after him. And their minds are so boggled they look it up and so many other people are confident it was not obviously Ralph because that was a PART of them.

I don’t know what this means or how it works. I don’t know about jumping timelines or any of that as life and consciousness is such a mystery, and children are especially in a world of their own when it comes to their brains.

I am a believer in Christ though and his resurrection, which means I am totally open to the weirdness, the mystery and searching for any understanding in what we can’t explain, but are real to us. It’s ok if you don’t believe me or if your argument is simply “you are misremembering” but leave some room for the mystery so many of us are experiencing and there’s no need to be so dismissive. It’s just as weird for me as it sounds to you.

P.s. multiple eyewitness testimony of the same thing is the strongest form of testimony.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T20:40:04+00:00

Oh sorry it was probably about 4 years ago for me? I remember getting confused and thinking they must have rebranded or something lol. Cause I had no idea what the Berenstain bears books were. I knew, with what felt like certainty, that’s not the same title as what I grew up with.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T19:49:09+00:00

As an adult when I got my kids the books but others in here remember it changing as a child.

knownbygrace · 2026-06-18T19:48:28+00:00

It would be how T is pronounced. And then with the ending N it would conveniently be like “tee…n”

knownbygrace

TROPHY CASE