There’s something about the Family structure that encourages secrets. Husbands hiding things from wives, mothers from children, and generation from generation. No clan is left untouched, and even families that seem happy and normal on the outside will sometimes be hiding dark secrets behind closed doors.

These people on Reddit spilled the beans on the things that their families have tried to keep hidden. Whether it’s a forbidden affair, a long lost relative, or a chilling double life, these people prove that nothing—and we mean nothing—is ever as it seems.

1. Sister Swap

I found out that one of my aunts had an arranged marriage. She wasn’t actually the aunt who was supposed to be in the arranged marriage, but her sister was adamantly against marrying the guy.

I guess my grandma somehow persuaded my aunt into replacing her sister’s part of the marriage. My aunt and the guy got married, moved away, and had kids.

They lived far away so I barely ever saw them.

Only as I got older did I learn that the dude was abusive to my aunt, to the point where she still had some intense mental breakdowns long after he was gone. I guess her sister was right.

TemporalBreak

2. Ancient History

My grandpa doesn’t know that his dad’s passing was caused by a drunk driver. He was only two when his dad Passed, and can’t remember any of it. The only thing he said he knew was that he thought it involved a truck.

I found the newspaper article about my great-grandfather’s passing when I started digging into my grandpa’s family tree.

Klaudiapotter

3. Dark Deeds

My Uncle Joseph is probably a terrifying criminal. He was a major suspect for the West Mesa Bone Collector.

He has also been convicted of even worse crimes. One day, Uncle Joseph was just sort of out of the picture and no concrete explanation was given. At the time, I was young enough that I didn’t think to particularly wonder about the details.

vault13rev

4. Scandalous Great Grandma

Great-grandma ran a “hotel” in the late 1800s near a train depot and army fort in the Oklahoma territory. Turns out it was a brothel. Great-grandma was a madam! She must have been good at it, because she left a lot of money to my grandma.

Traitorius

5. Secret Sister

When I was a kid, I knew my grandfather was odd. He’d call me his grandson even when I was wearing a dress and clearly female, but my parents would tell me to ignore it.

Then I found out that when my dad was a kid, grandpa had sold my dad’s sister Barbara to someone, and kept my dad and his brother because he didn’t want a girl in the family.

My dad found his sister Barbara around the time I was in middle school, through making some calls and getting access to records. They were reunited, and she’s my favorite aunt now. No one liked grandpa.

Halleaon

6. Misdiagnosis

I’m not sure how my dad discovered this, but he found out he had a secret older brother, his parents’ oldest child (Ron, if I remember right, named after his dad). When Ron was preschool-aged, my grandparents were told he was mentally disabled.

Horrified, they turned him over to the state and never spoke of him again.

Years later, they learned the truth. Word got back to them that the kid was not, in fact, disabled; he had “auditory dyslexia”(now called auditory processing disorder).

He grew up to be a fully functioning, independent adult. He refused to have any contact with the family when my dad reached out. I don’t blame him at all.

John_Batman

7. When Forgiveness Doesn’t Seem Like a Good Idea

When they were grown, my dad and his younger brother learned that their father had assaulted their sister on multiple occasions and threatened her to keep her quiet.

She didn’t tell anyone until long after it all happened. Later, she reconnected with her father…and allowed him to meet and spend time with her children. She’s more forgiving than I am.

John_Batman

8. Turnaround

My uncle met his wife during the time he was using substances pretty heavily.

She was an, ahem, “lady of the evening”. They have two kids now and they’re great parents, nobody would ever guess that they have a rather dark past. They haven’t let it visibly affect them at all.

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9. Long-Lost Son

I was the family secret. My biological parents started having kids as teenagers. For context, when my biological mom found out she was pregnant with me, she was 21 and I was their fourth child.

They quickly realized they needed to get their act together. They were already struggling financially, had countless substance abuse issues, etc. They decided that they were going to put me up for adoption when I was a baby.

A loving family adopted me quite quickly, and we lived only about an hour’s drive from the city I was born in. Coincidentally, I ended up returning to that same city for college. During my sophomore year, I decided to seek out my biological family.

It turns out that my biological parents separated right after I was born. My biological mom is still in and out of jail to this day, but my biological dad was able to start a new chapter.

He got clean and sober, remarried, started going to church, and built a legitimate career for himself. He told his new wife about me when they first met, but didn’t tell any of his children.

My other siblings didn’t know I existed. Thanks to the internet, I ended up tracking down his work number and gave him a call. Later on, he said as soon as I said, “Hi, this might be really weird, but…” he knew it was me.

Apparently, ever since I turned 18, he and his wife were waiting anxiously for me to resurface. They knew the day would come eventually. That evening, they sat my siblings down and told them about me.

It was difficult at first, but now I’m 25 and he and I have a pretty solid relationship.

LilTreeHuger21

10. The Felon Granny

It’s disturbing in a way: My great grandmother went into the military after committing a crime, and in the military, she confessed to a judge.

He punished her by extending her military contract and forcing her to serve in the war. I never knew what happened until way after she passed when I asked my dad about it. My jaw dropped when I learned the truth.

There was a man in her neighborhood who was touching kids and going after boys. My grandma beat the snot out of him when she saw him try to lift two boys.

Relic_Of_Suns

11. Baby In The Cupboard

My dad tried to run out on my mum while she was pregnant with me, because he’d been embezzling money from a photography club at his workplace (a government institution) where he’d been treasurer. It was all about to come out because the club needed the money, so my dad decided to cut and run.

My mother’s brother and father caught him by pure accident as he was leaving the house, and my grandad, a burly Scottish coal miner, got him by the throat and told him if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, he’d be dead.

My dad, according to the story, wet himself right there.

My grandad paid the money back to the club so that no one found out, as not only would my dad have lost his job, he’d most likely have been jailed too. My mum could never trust him with money again, and so although they had a joint bank account, she had them limit his access and made a separate account to control the bills etc.

She went back to work so she could always support herself, which in those days, in rural Scotland, was really uncommon. In that area, most women were stay-at-home moms, so there was no such thing as childcare for kids under four.

Mum went back to her job as a primary school teacher and I spent the first few years of my life sleeping in a basket in the stationery cupboard in her classroom.

At mum’s funeral, some of her former colleagues were still coming up to me, saying, “Oh, it’s the baby in the cupboard”!

QuokkaMocha

12. The Victim

All the lies unraveled after my grandfather passed. My mom finally admitted that when she was a kid, he’d touch her.

I was pretty shocked, especially since my mom didn’t seem to carry any kind of baggage from it, though of course, I don’t know what went and still goes on in her head.

Something that made sense though was how she always made sure my brother and I always slept in her room whenever we stayed at Grandpa’s place, which wasn’t too often.

We were never alone with my grandfather, and we never had a warm or loving relationship with him.

He was cold to us and we never really got attached to him, and we visited him maybe once a year. I think my mom felt obligated to have a relationship with him for some reason, but she was always very protective of us and my brother and I were never victims of his.

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13. Bad Grandpa

My grandfather is a killer. His victim was one of his co-workers when they were installing power poles on roads in Alaska before it was a completed town. He was investigated but they couldn’t prove it.

I guess he did it because the guy wouldn’t pay a $5 debt owed for liquor brought in. My grandfather was a horrible human and he got away with everything.

Until he ended up with colon cancer that he didn’t get checked out and he passed of cancer weighing about 78 lbs.

Alone.

Alaskan_Lost

14. The Cheater

My sister’s fiancé passed very suddenly and very tragically from a heart attack. She was 20, and he was 23. It turned out that he had an underlying condition. In the months following his passing, she found out he had been cheating on her basically since the start of their three-year relationship.

Some women were long term and knew about her, others were just casual one-night stands that probably didn’t know.

She kind of went off the deep end a little, because now she was not only mourning a man she loved; she also had to deal with this fact without being able to ask him for answers.

Silver lining though; she ended up dating and marrying one of his good friends. They sort of bonded in the aftermath. He is the best thing that ever happened to her and vice versa.

They will be married for three years this summer.

Stayinschool-tty

15. Paranoid Delusions

I had a brother who had some paranoid delusions (FBI, CIA following him, spying on his apartment, etc).. My brothers and I tried to get him help and he would just have no part of it.

After a few years, it seemed like it had gotten better. He stopped bringing it up and we felt like it must have just passed. After he passed, we found his journal and it was just horrifying.

Right up until the night he passed, he detailed all of the abuse that they were inflicting on him.

I can’t go into much detail—it’s hard for me to write about. Briefly, he believed that they were using some type of focused energy beam. They focused on different parts of his body at different times.

Every noise that an appliance made was proof of electronic surveillance. Every bump on the wall or person walking in an adjacent apartment was a message from either the “bad” FBI agents or the “good” FBI agents.

It was just incredibly disturbing to read what an awful life he was living inside his mind while acting relatively normal outside.

emejim

16. Hidden Truths

My mom was raised by her mom and her stepfather, who touched her inappropriately.

Where was dad? He passed when she was 11, or at least that’s what my grandmother said. This would have been around 1961. Flash forward to 2015 and my sister is doing genealogy work on the family.

She finds out my biological grandfather not die in 1961, he passed in 2005. But it gets worse.

He had five more daughters, one of which he gave the same name as my mom. So, my mom got cheated out of a potential relationship with her dad by her liar of a mom (who moved and remained hidden from her ex, my mom’s real dad).

My grandmother moved down to Texas from Virginia to stay in a nursing home and to basically make my mom and dad’s life terrible.

We went to visit one weekend and she came over for dinner.

I dropped the facts on her that we’d figured out she’d been lying for 50 years. She then had the nerve to act offended. My dad told her to shut up.

txwildcard12

17. The Siblings

I have nine siblings.

We all share the same father. I only knew about seven of them until my dad passed. I found out that two of my “cousins” were actually my brother and sister. My father had cheated on his then-wife with her sister.

So those kids were born out of wedlock. When my mother passed, I figured out that my sister (whom I thought we shared the same parents with) was fathered way before they met.

My only full-blood sibling is my twin.

I’m only close to him and my sister. The other half-siblings get along well with us but we are not close.

myfriendinsfromYORE

18. A Mother’s Greed

My friend’s mom got rid of her husband. She had taken a $200k life insurance policy out on him six months before he passed, and he passed from not taking his medication that he’d taken no problem all of his life.

My buddy was away for the weekend so he wasn’t home when it happened. After his mom passed, we found out even more: She’d taken a life insurance policy out on my buddy at some point too, and she’d also forged his signature to sign over $100k my buddy’s dad had left to him.

She robbed my buddy blind and he had no clue. She took his inheritance from his grandma too that he’d had no clue about and gave a big chunk of it to her friends/his godparents who used it to buy a beach house… She also faked illnesses to get prescription pills and had little books filled with info on what she’d sold and how much she’d made from selling them.

rebel_nature

19. The Spy

I went through a nasty break up with my oldest kid’s mom that lasted several years. We were never married and she was crazy as heck, so she told the hospital she didn’t know our kid’s father just so she could have leverage over me.

You know, like a sane person does. Years later and after several investigations into child abuse, she lost custody.

Over the next several years, we kept getting oddly specific complaints about things going on in my house and my daughter and her step mom specifically.

Dumb stuff like matching clothes or details about how we do time out. Then my mom passed. When we switched her Facebook to memorial mode, I saw that she had been talking bad about me for years to my ex and was essentially spying on me for her and twisting information.

I’m guessing it’s because she felt bad for a mother that lost her kid, but it was still a jerk move. It’s been two years and I still refuse to visit her grave with my siblings; I haven’t shed a tear for her since.

SketchesFromMidgard

20. The Patriarch

My grandfather passed last spring.

I found out he’d been verbally and sometimes physically abusive to his four sons, and horrible to my grandmother their whole marriage. My grandmother had been making plans to leave him with my father and uncles’ help when he fell and broke his back, so she stayed with him until he passed a few months later.

All of this was hidden from myself and the rest of the grandkids. My mom quietly told me a few days after the funeral. I’m concerned she only told me because my father may be doing the same to her, but she denied it when I asked.

millafarrodor

21. The Gift of Debt

After my father passed a few years ago, we learned that he had taken out about $40k of loans in my name.

We share the same initials (and surname obviously). He forged my signature, and kept on applying for loans and credit, got approved and never paid a single dime back. Seeing as he was the main contact, no-one ever called me to ask me why I wasn’t paying my debt… so only after he passed, we got contacted by institutions informing us that my father owes them money, just to find out it was actually on my name…

So now my credit record is screwed due to years of payments not being made and I need to pay back all of these loans. Fun times, right?

xXDubXx

22. The OG Hot Priest

My grandfather had an entirely different last name than we thought, and he was actually a bad boy Catholic priest! After he shacked up with my grandmother and had a bunch of children with her, he just never told the rest of his family.

They thought he was living the chaste life. Um, nope. 

mechperson

23. The Journal

My mom passed 15 years ago, but I only found her rehab journal a few months ago. In it, she talked about how she was in love not with my dad, but some guy she met at a gastric bypass support group.

I’m not sure if my dad ever read the journal and found out, but him and his husband are living the life now and I’m definitely not going to bring it up.

mjzim9022

24. The Linguist

My grandma passed last year, and after the funeral, the family congregated at my grandpa’s house to spend time together.

My aunt asked me about my studies and I talked about some research I was doing on the Gaelic language. My grandpa, sitting in the same room, piped in, “Oh, I spoke that with Grandma and Grandpa [his parent’s names] back in the day” and I just kind of stopped and asked him if he was serious.

He was, and apparently none of my aunts or uncles had known either and were just as flabbergasted.

He’d never spoken a word of it around them for 60+ years. Apparently, he didn’t speak it because my grandma worried that if they knew he wasn’t totally integrated to American life (AKA English), they might not have let them adopt my mom, aunts, and uncles.

sealionparade

25. The Matriarch

We always thought something was up with my nan. She always kind of shunned any females in the family. Her sons and grandsons were like gold to her. Wives and granddaughters were treated like rubbish.

Wasn’t until she passed a few years back that it came out that she had been abusing her sons and possibly some of her grandsons.

One of my uncles ended up going to prison for assaulting all three of his children, two sons and a daughter.

Tore his family apart. When my nan was dying, our uncle never left her side; he organized the funeral and seemed more cut up over it than anyone else. He was the favorite son. Totally gives me the creeps.

SavannahStrange

26. The Betrayal

She had been cheating on me all throughout our marriage. When the shock subsided, it was replaced by rage and betrayal. I lost it and I just started destroying and trashing everything of hers.

The only thing I didn’t destroy or throw away was her urn. I gave that to her parents. I seriously thought about flushing her ashes down the toilet, but I decided not to.

I completely got over her in record time.

DippityBoa8313

27. The Grandparents

I recently found out that my grandfather did not treat my grandmother very kindly. He passed about 18 years ago, and my grandmother passed about seven years ago. Recently, I was talking to my dad (who always knew about how his dad treated his mom) and found out that he always put her down.

On top of that, he always insulted her and my aunt.

I guess he wanted a son but was not too pleased when their first child was a daughter and their second child who was a boy was stillborn.

I guess he blamed my grandma for that as well. 

thedude386

28. The Lazy Step-Dad

My stepfather was getting more and more tired, falling asleep during the middle of the day, sneaking off for a nap… really ticked off my mother and I.

We were helping him renovate a house at the time and we didn’t appreciate him always dozing off. A while later, he got diagnosed with bladder and kidney cancer, which had already spread too far to be treatable.

We only really realized after his passing last spring that he was tired all the time because his cancer was already slowly killing him.

I didn’t always get along with him, and I regret a lot of things I said to him.

I just thought he was being lazy, I never thought he’d be dead within three years.

FamousSquash

29. The Second Eldest Aunt

After my grandad passed, my great aunt told me that he was responsible for the passing of their baby sister.

She said that when he was young, he picked the baby up, but because he was so small, he dropped her and she hit her head. When we went to clear out the house, we found a ton of family documentation, including birth and death certificates for the family.

It turns out the little girl passed as a result of whooping cough. I was like, what? It turns out that my aunt let my grandad go to his grave believing he was responsible for the passing of his baby sister.

I can just never get my head around why. 

can_u_tell_its_me

30. Disturbia

A neighbor was a somewhat off guy who nobody really liked, but he was not hated either. He passed well into his 70s of natural causes.

A young couple bought his house and every item in it, because his relatives did not want to clean it up. They discovered surveillance cameras everywhere, watching the whole street—which is highly illegal in Germany. And that was just the beginning.

Finally, they found a room which was hidden behind a concealed door. This room contained lots of surveillance documents and loads of Reichsbürger propaganda, basically a far-right conspiracy. He was one of them; prepared to retake Germany from the usurpers of the German Reich.

HDs1984

31. Ignorance is Bliss

I had the best grandpa growing up. Like the typical movie grandpa. He was perfect. He spoiled us like crazy; great corny jokes and he always had crazy silly stories. He always saved the day.

Just the best man I knew. After he passed, one of my aunts told me and my little sister he had cheated on my grandma with her own sister multiple times. We never knew.

I wish she never told us.

shawwnalorraine

32. The Second Life

My grandfather was Polish. He fought in WWII in the Allied forces after escaping to occupied Italy. Later, he came to the UK and met my grandmother, with whom he had an unbelievably troubled relationship, and five kids.

He passed when my dad was 14. My dad and his brothers found some old projector films in the attic. One of them changed everything. 

It was a slideshow that appeared to depict my grandfather in a suit, next to a woman in a wedding dress, standing at an altar. The guy had been married already, in Poland.

We don’t know what happened to his first wife, but now we know why he was estranged from his Polish family.

weedandsteak

33. The Mother-in-Law

My grandma passed when I was 10 years old. It took a decade but my mother and my other grandma (my mom’s mom) have started opening up for the first time about what a terrible jerk my grandma was. She was apparently the worst mother-in-law for my mom.

My mom and dad got married at 21 years old because my mother got unexpectedly pregnant with me.

Apparently, my grandma visited my mother before the wedding and asked her to please not marry my father in church, because if you get married in church, that marriage is before God and you can only do that once.

My grandma wanted her son to keep that marriage before God “for when he finds the real love of his life”.

There are many more stories like this about her and I was baffled.

finilain

34. Psycho Granny, Qu’Est-Ce-Que C’est?

When I was about 31 years old, I found out my maternal grandmother, who practically raised me, offed my grandfather.

I was doing research trying to build out a family tree and wanted to find out about my grandfather who passed about four years before I was born. We never really talked about him. I found an article about his passing in 1978 and had found a corresponding police report number for an arrest of my grandmother in the same year.

I didn’t immediately put the two together, but once I did, I put in a FOIA request for the case file. Apparently, my grandfather was in ill health, had a few strokes and needed A LOT of assistance; assistance my grandmother grew tired of.

One day, he was sitting in his chair and she just snapped and stabbed him numerous times, killing him.

She was apprehended, tried, and eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent some time in an institution, only to be let out in 1981, the year before I was born, to move in with my family.

As she lived in our home, she basically raised me from a child. She was the sweetest lady in the world and this SHOOK me.

When I asked my dad if it was true and how he could let her alone in our home with me as a child, his response was, “Oh, you didn’t know that? Well, you turned out alright”.

LordDumperz

35. No Love Lost

My father passed in the fall of ‘09. The day after the funeral while singing his praises, it turns out he completely disowned my siblings and myself in his will.

Imagine being three children, paraded around by your uncles, telling stories about the “good times,” to then be told that he didn’t love you and you would receive no financial support. We were devastated.

Our mother was there, as she always has been. She is our rock. At that point, that’s when my sister and I decide to completely cut off our father’s manipulative side of the family. 

SolarStar93

36. Grandma’s Good Graces

After my mother passed, at the wake, her oldest sister screamed at their father (my grandpa), “It should’ve been you”! Granted, she was grief-stricken and he’d been ill, so she could be forgiven. But then my grandma said something even worse.

She went, “Thank God it wasn’t Mary”. Mary is my mom’s second oldest sister, who was the favored child of all my grandma’s other children.

SuperMommyCat

37. Back from the Dead

My grandmother had three brothers fight on the Eastern Front in WWII.

 A fourth brother was 13 years old, and a mandatory member of the Hitler Youth. He was conscripted to fight in Berlin against the Soviets. They gave him a gun, put him in an apartment building to fight, and a few hours later one of those Soviet rocket trucks came down the street and unloaded rockets.

Seeing this, without firing a shot, he dropped his gun, walked outside and surrendered. 20 years later, after my grandmother’s family had already had a funeral for him, he showed up back in town unexpectedly.

Somehow (he has not explained to anyone how he did this) he escaped from a gulag in Kazakhstan and came back to West Germany.

He’s still alive, and he didn’t let the town take up his gravestone.

His stone says 1932-1945 because, as he put it, “Werner went away in 1945, the man I am now was born in 1945”.

barnegatsailor

38. The Certificate

I lost my father when I was 10 years old, and I was told he had a heart attack.

Fast forward eight years; I was applying for a passport and needed parental documents. My mother was out of town so I went through the documents cabinet to get his death certificate. As I read it, I burst into tears.

He passed due to HIV. It broke my heart, but my mother has always been kind to me so I decided to not tell her that I knew.

This was ten years ago and she still doesn’t know that I know.

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39. Dad’s Secret Life

Before he went into the army, my dad was, um, kind of wild.

He was bi and secretly dated men, and he blew thousands of dollars 0n Hustlers-esque nights out. But the biggest revelation was that he had an affair with a married woman who was separated from her husband.

When he came back on leave, she had their illegitimate son. He decided not to pursue anything with it since he was young and enlisted, and she had reconciled with her husband.

So, I’ve got a much older half-brother out there.

Shamelessfox

40. Past Friends

For this story to work, it’s important that you know my name’s Alice. So when my father passed, I was sitting around at the wake, just kind of thinking to myself out loud.

I told my mother, “It sucks that I never got a chance to meet the other Alice”. My mother was like “What are you talking about”? So, I told her that our father, her husband for the past several decades, named all three of his daughters after three of his ex-girlfriends.

All I know about the ex I’m named after is that she had red hair. My sister confirmed this and said she knew about it too. My mother just sat there dumbfounded, but she found it amusing in the end and was not hurt by it at all.

It was just my father’s way of being kind to past friends.

vampedvixen

41. The Ally

After my nana’s passing, I found out that her marriage to my papa was a complete lie. It turns out that she only married my papa and had three kids with him all as a cover story for him being gay.

This was during a time of LGBT violence in America. The kicker is, they really pulled off the married couple routine and I think they were genuinely compatible and happy together. 

Brelalanana

42. The Hypocrite

I found out that my father (at least in part encouraged by my stepmom) had been fraudulently using my social security number on a variety of loans and credit cards.

I’m a junior, so nothing was red-flagged for most of this stuff, apparently. I still am trying to clean up a certain amount of the messes he made, though things have tailed off since he’s been dead for over a decade.

I still struggle with the fact that the man who preached honesty and integrity to me as a child, and who beat the ever-loving heck out of me when I transgressed even slightly, would do something like this.

I realized after his passing that he was both a narcissist and a bit of a sociopath, but still… it’s hard to reconcile at points.

TheOneTrueChuck

43. The Missing Magazines

My brother passed in a car accident when he was 16 years old.

My mom shut the door to his bedroom after his funeral and no one could bear to pack up his belongings. After about a year my dad decided it was time to clean up the room, donate some stuff and decide what to keep.

Me and our oldest brother were asked to do it, my parents just couldn’t. 

I had been going in his room throughout the year, dusting and vacuuming and sometimes watching TV on his bed (not going to lie, I would talk to him in there) so I was ok with it. So, we get started cleaning up; it’s a slow process because we are looking at everything, talking etc. We get to cleaning out the closet, and my brother is pulling down books, and starts busting out laughing and crying.

He starts pulling down a bunch of hidden playboy magazines that our brother had been stealing from him. Not a huge bombshell, but our brother was pretty shy and quiet, not the sneaky kind that would steal.

So, when my big brother’s playboys went missing, he assumed it was his idiot friends. It provided some comic relief we needed.

skippystew

44. Missed Moments

My father talked about how he was there with my mom for her last dying breath.

It wasn’t true. My brother-in-law (who was abusive and crazy) was searching for his wife (my sister) because she had been away from the house too long. He called my father in a freak-out-panic trying to figure out where she was, assuming that she was somewhere cheating.

While my father was trying to calm him down, my mother passed. When my father came back to my mother, she was gone. When my brother-in-law passed a few years later, I was surprised that my father didn’t seem that upset.

Before my father passed a few years after that, he told me why. I was in my mid-30s.

1116111

45. The Arsonist

My uncle on my mom’s side went missing around January 7, 2000. When my cousin Adrian went looking for him, he found him in his closet with a belt around his neck.

After that, everyone pieced it together based on weird conversations and his behavior, that it was my uncle who had set fire to my family’s apartment’s front door about a week prior, December 30, 1999.

That fire left my family psychologically and physically scarred—and my mother dead. Apparently, my parents were fed up with giving him booze-and-smokes money.

solariportocali

46. Didn’t See That Coming

One of my good friends was shot last year. He was one of the nicest guys I knew, he always called everyone he knew, checked up on them, made sure everyone was okay and was really supportive of everyone.

Move forward a week or two after his passing, and someone was apprehended due to a murder that happened a few days before my friend’s. 

Turns out the guy who was the suspect was the cause of multiple crimes (yet he had perfect alibis for everything); except we later found out that my friend was working for him and was getting paid 5-10k per person.  No one saw it coming but everything soon made sense…

TrafficTruck

47. Great-Grandpa’s Secrets

When my great-grandma passed last year, we found a photo album she had hidden in a closet.

It was full of photos from WWII, and the images were utterly haunting. We don’t know for sure because she never talked about it, but from the photos, it looked like my great-grandpa fought for the Germans and they lived quite the lavish life during the war. We do know that my great-grandpa was captured in France and when the war ended, they came to Canada.

Neither of them ever talked about the details. My mom and I tried googling my great-grandpa’s name, although we suspect he changed it when coming over. We found records of his brother who passed in battle but none of him.

As someone who loves history, I found it very interesting. For all we know, they could have been forced into joining.

Although my mom feels that they both supported that party just from what she remembers of their personality and the odd comments they would say.

Moosepoop26

48. The Other Family

I had a cousin who passed a few years ago.

I went to his funeral and was walking around hugging his wife and kids and giving them my condolences when a lady and two teenage boys walked in. Nobody knew who these people were, so of course, my great aunt asked.

She claimed to be his wife and the two boys were his sons. Turns out all those week-long work trips he’d been taking weren’t actually work trips.

They were trips to see his OTHER family.

truefakeadult

49. The Boozer

My grandma (Dad’s mom) was one of my favorite people before she passed when I was 14 years old. She was extremely sweet, generous, and gave good advice. My brother and I stayed with her and were alone with her all the time, and she never mistreated us or in any way acted unusually.

I found out only a couple of weeks ago at 33 years old that she was a severe alcoholic who would get drunk almost daily.

My dad said she would beat him and his brothers when they were kids, and as adults would still say severely psychologically abusive taunts while grinning at their faces.

I never had even the slightest idea.

RightToConversation

50. The Inheritance

When my grandma passed, we discovered that the entire family was willing to screw over her daughter for a bigger slice of the inheritance by going to court with a bunch of accusations.

It was just like Hollywood drama, but worse because it was real life. They all had the same (rehearsed) story, so guess what the judge decided… I’m not the type to be greedy for inheritance; my father is worth millions and I don’t care if I never see any of it.

The guy is a jerk and I’d rather be self-made.

But the family tearing itself in half for $500k? Bunch of idiots.

Daswatman

51. The Autobiography

My grandfather never talked about his life as a teenager; all he told me is that he was raised on the island of Java in the 1940’s even though he was German/Dutch in origin.

When he passed, he left me the autobiography he wrote for after his passing. Apparently, his father was a radio engineer for the Dutch government building long-range radio stations.

He and his siblings were attending a boarding school in the Black Forest in Bavaria.

His parents came to visit and discovered he had been forced into the Hitler Youth, and so they grabbed the three siblings and took them to Java. All was well until the Japanese invaded. The Japanese invaded Java and immediately made a beeline to their cottage, as their reconnaissance had told them my great grandfather was a radio engineer.

The Japanese then proceeded to take their family hostage in order to force him to build radio stations to support their invasions. My grandfather was separated from his family at the age of 16 and placed in 6 different prison camps over the course of the war.

In 1945, at the end of the war, he was at a prison camp outside of Kyoto.

He was 6’3″ (1.9m), 22 years old, and weighed 83 pounds (37.6 kg). The day that the emperor of Japan surrendered and bowed to the Americans, t