We all have secrets — some of them that we'll take to our graves.
Well, recently Reddit user u/Comfortable_Tomato_3 asked for people to share all the disturbing secrets they found out about their friends, colleagues, and relatives after they died. Here are some of the most shocking.
1. "[My] grandfather died when I was around 10. I distinctly remember being at his funeral and seeing a group of men there that weren’t associated with the rest of my family. I think I remembered this because I watched them pull up in beautiful cars and thought they must be rich. ... I wasn’t told until I was older, but my grandpa had been involved in some organized crime for most his life, and most of the time he was 'traveling in Europe' he was actually in prison. Those men were his partners, and my family hated them."
2. "My uncle...was awesome — [he] bought me Legos when I was a kid, and we'd play fight; he always just seemed really cool when I was young. ... Well, he disappeared around the time I was 13. Then when I was 26, my dad told me he died. He was apparently on the run and was wanted for years...for several murders. He was a hitman, apparently."
"He was never arrested, but he died in a shooting in Italy. I always had a hard time picturing him in that life. ... He always was really good to me and my siblings."
3. "When I was a kid, my dad told me that his dad had died from being electrocuted. My whole childhood, he raised me and my siblings to be very cautious around electricity. When my grandmother was on her death bed, she confessed to me that how my dad’s father really died was autoerotic asphyxiation. It was the '60s, so the fire department in their small town helped cover it up."
4. "After my husband died, I found the stash of love letters that he had saved, which had been written to him throughout the course of our marriage. None of them were from me."
5. "My grandfather was a member of the KKK. My grandmother found all his robes and other shit hidden in the trunk of his car after he died. She burned it all that night in the backyard, utterly mortified that he was an active member."
6. "My father fabricated an entire military career. We only found out when he died, and everyone stopped agreeing to lie for him or not mention it."
7. "I went to one of those fancy New England prep schools that has had to release reports about the sex abuse committed by teachers and faculty. Two of my teachers who had since retired (I graduated back in the '00s) died within a few months of each other. Days after the second one passed, the school released a report that named them both — among others. They had both remained employed for many years after abusing students despite having been reported to the school by the students at the time."
8. "My maternal uncle was killed during a robbery gone wrong (he was staying the night at one of his furnished rental properties, which was not being leased at the time). At least…that was the story I was told before hopping on a plane with my mom to attend the funeral held in our home country. The day of the funeral, a cousin angrily shared with a small group of us that he had seen a photo of my uncle on the front page of the local paper. ... I looked it up on my phone, and proceeded to read a whole article about how my uncle had been tortured and killed in retaliation for past child abuse."
"Dead uncle had allegedly abused several children at different times, spanning decades, but 'somehow' was never prosecuted. (My mother’s family is wealthy, so the cousins are pretty sure that authorities/parents of the victims were paid off anytime he was accused, as the victims were primarily children of low-income families). To add to the horror, my relatives knew to keep us children away from him outside of 'supervised' family events."
9. "When my stepgrandmother died, we found out she was unloading my grandfather's money to her daughter who was born from her previous marriage. My grandfather was in cognitive decline in his later years, and his health was failing. She got him to sign all kinds of things. ... Over a five-year period, she was able to transfer close to $8 million."
"By the time she died, my grandfather was in really bad shape — mentally and physically. We had to clean out her things, and we found all of the paperwork: every last detail. He couldn't comprehend what she had done, and after trying to tell him about it a couple of times, we stopped trying. Nothing could be done legally. Her daughter was set for life."
10. "Our neighbor. He was known as a veteran soldier. ... His family used to be popular in our neighborhood, too, and they seemed pretty well off. They had a female housekeeper who disappeared one day, and the story was that she eloped with someone. Years after his death, his son had their fence fixed by another neighbor, and they unearthed a skull and some other bones. Guess who?"
11. "When I was about 10, my mom’s uncle, so my great-uncle, died. I remember going to his funeral; he was a firefighter in a major city, and we spread his ashes at the beach. I wasn’t close with him, but my mom was. I didn’t know how he died at the time, but I recall thinking it was weird ‘cause he was younger than my dad, who wasn’t terribly old yet. I found out nearly a decade later that he died not only via suicide, which is awful, but before he did that, he murdered his wife."
12. "I found out that my uncle somehow had a black market liver. He went through the first via drinking himself nearly to death. He wouldn't stop drinking and drugging, so the implant folks wouldn't put him on a list. He then takes a trip to (I believe) India and gets a liver implanted. He then found a shady doctor here for after-care. After that, he drank through another liver in three years. He was preparing for another trip to India, but COVID stopped him from traveling (he was anti-vax too). He died not long ago due to his liver not working anymore. From what I'm seeing and what his wife says, I'm 99% sure that liver was harvested from a living donor."
13. "My great-grandma and her brothers were notorious in Watertown, Massachusetts for their check fraud and forgery schemes."
"Oh, the things you find out about the woman who would make you hot cocoa."
14. "My mom found a whole bunch of letters in my grandpa's stuff after he passed away, all from a child of his (my mom's half sister, apparently) from Korea, after my grandpa served in the Korean War."
15. "I live in an apartment building, and there’s a big family who live in the several apartments upstairs. A patriarch with several children and all his children have families who live in neighboring apartments. A few years ago, the patriarch passed away, and it was only then that his family found out he had a whole other secret family that he’s maintained for at least 20 years."
16. "My partner's grandfather died. A week or so after his death, the grandmother started getting really sick. She is in her '80s, and doctors suspected it was a bad UTI gone into other organs. Turns out it wasn’t a UTI, but multiple STIs. The grandfather was sleeping with a ton of women at the church he was a preacher at."
"He left her and many members of the church with quite the parting gift. We all knew he was a crappy guy, but didn’t know to this new extent."
17. "My uncle died suddenly in a car crash when I was 18. My aunt has schizophrenia and went off her meds after he died. ... Eventually she couldn't stay in the house anymore, and we went to help clean it out. We found cameras everywhere. Behind paintings, in the bookshelves, just everywhere. Eventually we found a safe tucked away in a small opening in his closet, and when we finally cracked it open there were two unregistered guns in it alongside a wad of cash."
"My uncle was already very wealthy; we don't know why he specifically had this cash set aside, or why he had illegal guns, or why he bugged his entire house. But we suspect my aunt's illness and paranoia was worsened by him, and she wasn't always as delusional as he made her out to be. In better news, my aunt now lives in Florida with a caretaker in a condo. She paints for a living and is very happy."
18. "My cousin died a couple months ago of a drug overdose. Investigation found that his roommate was a drug dealer, and my cousin had also been making payments of tens of thousands of dollars to a woman who was arrested shortly after for brutality murdering an old woman in my hometown."
19. "I remember a few years back while I was still living in Russia, I went to my grandma's funeral, and in someone's speech about her they began to talk about how she was in a concentration camp and how she had gone through so many horrendous things I won't repeat. I never knew, and it's clear no one else did either."
"She went through horrible stuff, and it disturbs me to this day. We cleaned out her house, and there were so many things from that time in her life that documented all that, and I looked at it, and I felt sick."
20. "A friend of mine passed away last year, and I had to go through her computers and wipe everything. Before we could wipe it, her partner needed help getting some information to settle her accounts. I saw so much homemade porn of her with all of our friends."
"So. Much. Porn. Everyone we knew together and lots of people I don't know."
And finally, let's end on a story that's really heartwarming:
21. "My grandpa died in the late '90s of a heart attack when he was about 65 years old. My whole family came to Germany from Poland in the '80s, and my grandparents were kids throughout World War II. We didn’t find any pictures of him from when he was a child when we went through his stuff after he died. ... We asked my grandpa's aunt, who was still alive at that point. She burst into tears and told us that he was a German Jewish kid my great-grandparents rescued from a train heading to Auschwitz during World War II."
"They used the papers of their son who passed away just a few weeks earlier. We all were stunned, but in hindsight it did explain a lot of things, like how he suffered from PTSD and almost had no Polish accent when he spoke German. It still amazes me how they kept this secret for over half a century."