Reddit user u/HardDeep69420 posed the question: "What's the most shocking secret someone has revealed to you?" From surprise siblings, to shocking criminal activity, to marriage scandals, people aired all sorts of dirty laundry. Here's what they shared:
1. "So, I'm 37, and my dad calls me and says, 'Can you come over tomorrow? I need to talk to you about something.' We'd just gotten back from a family visit that involved my aunt and uncle raving about their senior living community in Phoenix, and my parents are roughly that age, so I figured they were gonna sell my childhood home. Not a huge deal, but definitely not something you wanna drop on me by accident. No no no. Instead, I get there and my parents sit me down and say to me, '14 years before you were born and before we were married, we had a son. He was adopted by a family in Sweden, and he'll be here in half an hour.' Cue the longest, strangest two hours of my life."
2. "My brother had his appendix out when he was about 13. Five or six years later, he confessed to me that he made it all up to get out of doing some homework. He made all the right noises at the doctor's, so they sent him to hospital, where he fooled everyone again. After the operation, he said the surgeon spoke to him and said it was odd because there wasn't any inflammation. I am amazed that in the days before the internet, he knew where his appendix was supposed to be. He is 50 next year and my parents still don't know."
3. "I was like 5, so it was less jarring, but I went to my grandmother’s house, ostensibly to show off the first tooth I ever lost, and there was an old man there who I’d never seen before. My mom and grandmother were basically like: 'Tada! This is your grandfather!' I was like OK, I guess he just fell from the sky and now I have a grandfather. When I was a teenager, I learned the full story, which has a pretty wild component. My grandparents were very Catholic — like truly didn’t believe in divorce. And my grandmother, as wonderful as she was to have as a grandmother, was a very hard person to have as a wife or mother. So, my grandfather had an affair. My grandfather and mother had a close relationship, and his mistress was jealous. I assume she saw my mom as the reason my grandfather wouldn’t leave his wife (they could've been childless though, but neither would have been willing to divorce). So, she started stalking my mom."
"She would call the house and her work, and hang up or whisper weird stuff and threats in the phone. My mom got suspicious, eventually found out, and told my grandmother. Both were mad as hell. My grandmother kicked my grandfather out, and both of them cut all contact with him. This happened like 10 years or so before I was born. But, here’s the wild part: HE LIVED NEXT DOOR THE ENTIRE TIME.
My great-uncle (grandmother’s brother) lived right next to my grandmother, and my grandfather moved in with him. It must say a lot about him respecting boundaries, because I never heard him or caught sight of him whenever I was at my grandmother’s or my uncle’s house. I imagine it was really hard for him. My uncle’s windows looked right into my grandmother’s yard. I can’t imagine what it’s like to watch your children and grandchildren exist right under your nose and not be able to talk to them. Anyway, at some point, they all decided to reconcile. The day I met him, he had already moved back into the house. I’m glad, because he was amazing. He passed when I was 8, but in those three-ish years, he became (and remains to this day), one my favorite people on the planet."
4. "My friend from uni hid her pregnancy, had the baby, and gave it up for adoption without telling anyone. I regularly saw her throughout the pregnancy. She didn't really show or put on weight, and she only found out she was pregnant herself at seven months. One day, I noticed she was at the hospital, as she had left her location on Snapchat. I messaged her in a panic, asking if she was OK. She brushed it off as visiting a friend. I found out three years later from a mutual friend that that was the day she gave birth. I had actually caught up with her for drinks two days after she had the baby. I had absolutely no idea that she had literally just given birth 48 hours prior."
5. "My now ex-best friend told me she has stolen over 100 things from me over 10 years."
6. "I found out my mother and father were not divorced. He never really existed. She had a one-night stand, found out she was pregnant, bought a wedding ring, changed her name, and told the family that she had gotten married. She made up excuses every time she went to my grandparents' house as to why her husband couldn’t also be there to meet them. On the third visit, my grandfather told her to never wear that ring in his house again, and asked when the baby was due."
7. "My husband and I recently learned that his kid's grandfather (mother's side) is a convicted serial killer. That was...fun? Given the caliber of his exes, I would have thought this was a lie, however, the mother was interviewed for a documentary about it. Needless to say, the kiddo slept over at our house while the interviews were taking place. They are way too young to process that kind of cluster."
8. "My brother owns a restaurant that has an old-school counter service. Same customers every day. Very popular place. This one guy, a city worker, came in every work day religiously. One day, he finished his lunch, called my brother, and told him to call the prosecutor's office. He admitted to killing a classmate in school 20 years prior. My bro said he was casual as could be. Just said it was time to be accountable. You never know."
9. "I was not told this secret, but stumbled upon it after someone’s death. My wife is an only child, and her parents were married for 30+ years. I’ve always known that they didn’t actually get married until a month or so after she was born, but they were dating and supposedly engaged for several years prior. After her dad died, suddenly I was doing a family tree online and discovered that at the time of my wife’s birth, he was married to another woman in a different state. Their divorce was finalized shortly before he married my mother-in-law. I know my wife doesn’t know this, and I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law doesn’t either. I’ve decided to keep it to myself to spare them any pain."
10. "Literally just happened to me. I have an almost two-year-old son with my ex-girlfriend of over four years (we broke up not long after he was born). Come to find out she cheated on me throughout nearly the entire relationship with at least five different people, and she was even cheating on me well into her pregnancy. I am absolutely devastated and should probably get a paternity test."
11. "My mom used to drop things on me casually amidst a normal conversation. I called them 'mama bombs.' One Christmas after my dad died, over breakfast, she said, 'Well, back when Stephanie and I were sexually involved…' It took a minute to sink in and it was like a series of puzzle pieces clicking in my head. So many things made sense. Stephanie was her close friend from work. They were both married to men. Stephanie was a good 30 years younger than my mom. My mom had never mentioned romantic feelings or relationships with women before. They were both in pretty lonely marriages and for a time, made each other very happy."
12. "Years ago, after high school, the high school was set on fire. My friend told me that it was her ex-boyfriend (who she never got over) who set the fire."
13. "I worked with a very sober and intelligent woman with a background in biology. Once, when she was drunk at the company Christmas party, she told me about a very intense experience with a UFO-like object when she was younger. A multi-colored, shimmering, and incomprehensible thing hovered above her for 30 seconds and gave her sensations of information she couldn't make sense of. She swore me to secrecy and admitted to having needed a lot of therapy after. Her story was quite believable."
14. "I found out my parents weren't married when I was 14, and my parents had a massive row after my dad was caught by the police with a sex worker. My mum blurted it out to me, along with the reason why they were arguing. I'm 50. Up until then, they pretended. When my Catholic secondary school asked for a marriage certificate as part of my screening for the school, they sent a letter to the priest confidentially. I still got in. Explains why from birth until 11, a Catholic nun would visit my parents every weekend. Probably to ensure my soul was intact, lol."
15. "When I was 18, my parents sat me down and told me I had a half-brother and half-sister halfway across the world from my dad's previous marriage that I knew nothing about. There was a picture of them on the wall in our house, and we were told they were our cousins from Australia."
16. "I grew up thinking my dad, who was a fisherman, had drowned. I went on a cruise in my early 20s with family, and my mom revealed that he had been murdered by a new crew member for a paycheck. The guy skipped town the next day, and the local cop, who hated my dad over something trivial, didn't do anything."
17. "A majority of people from my dad's side of the family 'borrowed' money from my great-grandmother and never paid her back. I'm talking like $10,000-20,000 each: my uncle, aunt, grandmother, great-uncle, and great-aunt. Apparently, when she died, they all fought over the remaining stuff in her house and the money that was left over. My dad never asked for money — he never asked for anything. After she died, all we got was her van. That van was then handed down to me, as I had just gotten my license as a teen. It was a good van. Heated seats. Good speakers. TV in the back. Seats went all the way down. Hot-boxed that van so many times. Got lucky in there as well. I loved that van."
"Then, I learned that my great-grandmother didn't actually die in her living room like I had been told. She died in the driver seat of that van. Just died while putting it in park one day. I feel very weird when I think about everything I did in that van now."
18. "Several months after my mom passed, my aunt decided to tell me that my mom had given a baby up for adoption when she was 17. Somehow, he had contacted my aunt several years ago wanting to meet his birth mother, but my aunt decided to play gatekeeper and told him my mom was ill (she had dementia but was still functioning several years ago) and she didn't think it was a good idea. Why did she even tell me? It's too late. I can't ever get answers to my questions. I tried a DNA website hoping to find him, but no matches came up. In my moms last few months, she kept asking where the baby was and calling a name I did not know. At least that makes sense now, but I feel bad that I kept telling her there's no baby and we don't know anybody by that name."
19. "My whole life growing up, my dad told me that my mother was a drug addict and didn’t want me. When I was 21, I met my mom for the first time, and as it turns out, my dad kidnapped me when I was 4, and she never knew where we went. Yup. I should be in therapy. Both are dead now, and my dad and I never reconciled after I found out."
20. "I have a friend who presents as euphorically happily married, but she told me recently that the reality is she married her second choice and that it will forever silently hang over and haunt the relationship. She said she wishes she had just been alone until she found somebody new altogether."
21. "My aunt murdered her second husband to marry her third, then she made the kids go to the lake and campground where their dad died every single summer for vacation. My cousin just dropped this bomb, like, 'Oh yeah, my mom isn’t a good person, and I wish everyone would quit acting like she is.'"
22. "The mafia called my grandparents to threaten harm against my mother because she ripped them off."
23. "I had a random gal who was buying some furniture from me tell me her deepest secret. Apparently she and her four siblings were in a continuous fight over the cremated remains of their father, and she had possession of them. I guess all except her agreed to equally distribute them amongst the remaining children. However, when it was time to share the remains, she gave her siblings her deceased dogs cremated remains instead! I guess her dad is in her closet. I gasped! I asked her if she thought she’d ever tell them, and she said yeah, some day. But, she fully expects them to never speak to her again."
24. "I was chatting with a detail cop, and he happily told me that he sold all the drugs he confiscated near a CVS in town."
25. "My great-grandma recently revealed to me that, when my great-grandfather was in hospice 20 years ago due to leukemia, she got tired of caring for him and irritated by how many people were at the house, so she turned off his oxygen and 'sent him to rest with the good lord.' She was diagnosed with dementia at some point within the past few years, so I don't know how true this is, but I will never look at her the same."
26. "When I was 20, my then-boyfriend (24) confided in me that he was the father of a mutual friend’s child. This friend was married and still is. I have never said a word, but this child is now a father of teenagers, and they all inherited my boyfriend’s eyes."
27. "I'm 56 now, but at some point in my early 40s, while driving with my dad, he said: 'You have a half-brother somewhere.'"
28. "My mom admitted that my parents couldn’t afford to reverse my dad’s vasectomy, and so my little brother is a sperm bank kid. I’m the only one, other than my parents, who has any idea."
29. And: "Not me, but my mom. Her parents were really close with another couple — like best friends, and the kids grew up together and called each other cousins, etc. One of the kids was killed, and at the funeral, my grandmother took my mom to a side room. Then, she told my mom: 'I just wanted to let you know that he wasn't just a family friend to you, but he was also your brother. His father is your real father.' That's how she found out that she was the product of an affair between her mother and mother's best friend's husband. I found out the secret when the DEA came to our house to ask my mom if she had seen her bio father recently. He was on the run and they were talking to all his kids. It was pretty shocking."
Oh my word. 😮 I can see why these were secrets in the first place...
Note: Submissions are edited for length and/or clarity.