Recently, Reddit user Glitched_cookie asked the community, "What's a secret you're taking to the grave but willing to share?"
Welp, people opened their vault, and revealed some truly unbelievable things they've kept hidden (like...they really left me speechless).
So, here are some pretty intense secrets folks were going to take to their grave, but decided to share now:
Note: Some stories include topics of domestic violence and alcohol abuse. Please proceed with caution.
1. "When I was a kid, our neighbor was really mean to my mom. He complained endlessly about her 'wild' children (we didn't have a lot of money — we were pretty tame, stayed in the yard/house until she came home, and didn’t cause any trouble). The last straw was on Easter — she had worked that day and missed our regular traditions. As soon as she pulled up, he was screaming at her from across the street about her 'loud kids' (Note: Literally no other neighbor had any issues with us — just this guy, who was home all day because his 'job' was breeding several kinds of purebred dogs). So that night I snuck over, jumped his fence, scooped up about a pound of his own dog’s shit, and forced it in through his mailbox slot. Then I slid a hose in it and turned it on to a slow trickle for a few minutes to really moisten and spread the poo around. We woke up with him screaming his ass off at his dogs at 6 a.m. — he ended up having shit all over his front room."
2. "After American Pie came out, I was a super horny and lonely teen. I decided why the heck not — there’s a fresh apple pie and I put my dick in it. It was a little too hot, and I got dick burns. I threw out the pie in the neighbor's trash that was already set out for garbage day, and quickly went to the store and bought a store-made one. In comes my dad and my mom, and my mom said she made a fresh apple pie for dinner. My dad is in the garage and comes in all huffing and puffing, asking why she lied about making a pie when it’s store-bought. Seems like I didn’t throw the container away properly in my burnt-cock mission."
"My mom goes in to say she did make a fresh pie and doesn’t know what the fuck my dad's talking about. He provides proof, and then she laughs, asking why he's trying to start something. The pie is never forgotten — each fight would turn into, 'Oh yeah, just like you 'madeeeee a pie,' and they would have an explosive argument.
I felt like I couldn’t come forward and say I knocked the pie over and bought one so they wouldn’t be mad at each other. My dad had asked me, and I lied my face off as my cock throbbed with burnt pie on it. My dad's a real stickler for lying — he hates it, and you'll get in 1,000% less trouble if you come clean. Me lying like this? Some way, somehow, he’d unearth his kid is a pie fucker.
They end up splitting up and getting a divorce. Years and years go by, and they are both remarried and happy. They are civil and get along, but eyes still roll when pies are mentioned.
So, yeah: I fucked a pie, and it ended up with my parents divorcing. I never said a word about it and never will."
3. "In 2006, my ex-boyfriend cheated on me with a friend (they never knew I found out). I peed in a cup, went to a party he had, and added it to his tequila bottle (it was a pint). I also put bleach in his laundry soap. I broke it off, but I told him it was because we were 'drifting apart.'"
4. "In the '80s when my mom and dad separated, he would pick me up on the weekends to stay with him. One Sunday when he was bringing me back home, my mom (unprovoked) stabbed my father in the chest. As he lay dying in the hallway, someone called an ambulance. After being in a coma for a week, he miraculously woke up. The hospital was telling my grandma to prepare themselves for his death. When the police came and questioned my dad, he lied and said he had no idea who did it. Even though she almost killed him, he didn't want to see her go to prison. To this day, no one else in the family knows that my mom almost committed murder except for me and them. I was the only witness to the stabbing."
5. "In my early 20s, I met an older woman at a bar and went back to her place for a hot night. I gave her a striptease, and she loved it (so much so that she reached out several days later and asked if I wanted to strip at her friend's 50th birthday party). Reluctantly I agreed, as the money she offered was a good amount. So I stripped and spent the whole party in basically nothing — I had a blast and so did they. I thought it’d be a one-time thing, but I continued to get phone calls from women for months after. Some women at these events I recognized from my mom's church or social groups, and I’ve seen them since. This went on for about two years, and I made great money — don’t think I’ll ever tell my family, but I’m willing to share here."
6. "Over the course of a year and a half, I stole well over $1,000 from my mom's alcoholic boyfriend. He got paid under the table in cash, would get drunk, and just leave it in his pants. He paid for my first Stephen King hardcover as well as several metal band concerts."
7. "One of my friend’s dad's mistakenly texted me a message intended for his mistress (this was more than 15 years ago, and I was 19 (F)). We were on vacation with a HUGE group of people, including a bunch of my friends and their respective families. Keep in mind this was the time you had to pay for roaming services while traveling abroad, so the only way my friend and I got to communicate was through his dad's phone and mine. One night I received a text saying, 'I love you — good night' from his number. I knew it wasn’t my friend texting me good night, and my mind went 'CRAZY' trying to figure out WHY and to whom he was texting this to. I spoke to my parents, and they told me not to say anything until we knew more. The dude didn’t even say, 'Sorry, wrong number' — nothing."
"A week into the vacation, we were all hopping into vans to do a tour. I randomly ended up sitting next to my friend’s dad. Minutes into the van ride, he asked, 'How far are we from our country?' to which my dad replied, 'An hour or so by plane.' He pulled out his phone, I began to sweat, he searched for a name where the first four letters matched my last name, and I popped up first on the search. That’s when I knew he sent the text to me by mistake.
He proceeded to text the person who had a typical male name, 'So close yet so far — I miss you.' I was trembling — I didn’t know what to do. Was he gay? Was his wife aware? Was this an open marriage?
Two years after that, my friends and I were gathered in this particular friend’s house, talking about everything and anything. After a couple of drinks, this friend opened up about how her dad had an affair with a woman from their office, that he had her under a male nickname to avoid suspicion, that he had put a lot of things under her name, and that there was a horrible legal battle. They were pretty sure the affair started around the same time we went on that vacation.
I had to act surprised, hugging her with the rest of my friends like I knew nothing. To this day, she doesn’t know that I’ve known since almost day one."
8. "I'm with someone who's going to be my wife soon, and will never know about one specific job I had in the past. She knows about my work in retail, kitchens, hospitality, security, the government, and currently manufacturing. But, she's never going to know about the year I spent driving sex workers to their clients. For a 20-year-old, the kind of money I made doing that would make some of you fucking weep with jealousy. I don't think she'd take it well, knowing that I would spend nights talking and laughing with gorgeous women, dropping them off to do their job, and then driving them to McDonald's."
9. "My younger sister and I were in high school at the same time. She was the most beautiful girl in the whole school, and surprisingly, this caused her to not have many friends. She did have one group of girlfriends who bullied her and eventually kicked her out of the group. One of the girls was her childhood 'best friend' (it was obviously a jealousy thing, as she's the sweetest person you'd ever meet). One night my hooligan friends and I were driving around trashing peoples' cars who we didn’t like (I know, so cool). It was just with things like glitter, beans, toilet paper, etc. — no damage was actually done. These people were also just mean assholes, and we had fun doing it. We got to one girl's house whose little sister was the main bully of my little sister. We watched from the car as they arrived home, and I said, 'Y’all stay here — I got this one.'"
"I went up and knocked on the door. The mom answered, and I said, 'Hi! Is [X] here?' [X] came to the door, and her face dropped. I told her that if she ever put my sister's name in her mouth ever again, I’d come right back and beat the shit out of her. I pointed over to the car with my friends faces all glued to the window and said, 'And they’ll come, too.'
They left my sister alone after that. She thought it was because she was the bigger person and felt proud of herself for never lowering herself to their level. I never told her."
10. "I had to fly to a state where abortion is legal. My husband has been unemployed for eight months, smoking weed multiple times a day every day, and for that reason he can't get a job. We are barely scraping by on my paycheck, and just before I left for the airport, he tried to convince me to keep it because things 'might change' in the next six months. My family is extremely conservative, and they'd stop talking to me if they found out. I'm just trying to do the right thing and not fuck up our situation even more, but I feel like in the end, I'm just going to lose everyone."
11. "I know that my mom cheated on my dad (it was confirmed by my dad when I asked him about it). My mom doesn’t know that I’m aware of it, and I’ve also never told my brother. When I found out, I was under the belief that my parents were going to divorce, but it’s been four years, and it hasn't happened. If I was to tell my brother, it’d be like a bomb going off in the family dynamic (for context, I’m a 30-year-old male)."
12. "I have never told anyone the number of sexual partners I have had, but my wife tried to guess. The number she guessed was 10% of my real number. I let her think she was right, and she got upset because she said she was intentionally overestimating."
13. "In February 2021, I started an eight-month affair with a married deputy in my county (we met at my work). My husband knows, and we've worked our shit out, and we're good now. But, the deputy's ex-wife doesn't know that's why he left her. I have been battling this moral dilemma of telling her since it's been nearly three years now, and he's been through two more girlfriends and tons of women since. I wonder if it's worth bringing up to bring her peace, or if she'd just be angry, and then they'd both be pissed at me. He bought a house in my hometown at the end of my road, and his ex-wife lives in the next town over. So I just keep my mouth shut because our youngest kids will be in preschool together this fall."
14. "Last fall my boyfriend and I were driving down a windy mountain road en route to a camping site. He was focusing on the turns because we had had a couple of close-calls with other cars rip-roaring around bends, nearly hitting us head-on. At one point I saw a box turtle in the road, but I saw it too late and didn't have time to warn him. We have always been the type of people to get out of the car and move turtles out of danger/off the roads when we go camping in the back country in the fall and spring. I knew he would be upset to know he had unintentionally squished one, so I've kept it a secret. I doubt I'll ever tell him about it — rest in peace, Mr. Turtle."
15. And finally, "My parents wrote my brother out of their will and told me about it. I told them to write me out, too, because there’s no way I’d participate in something that would be so hurtful to someone. I said anything they left me I’d give to him if he wasn’t in it, and he’d never know they wrote him out (but their shame was already in the open with me). They changed their minds and included him, but sadly, my brother passed away. He never knew any of this, and he never would have — I would have taken it to my grave. Coincidentally, just two weeks before he died, my brother shared quite a few things with me that he assumed he’d take to his grave. So if you have things to share with others, don’t wait."
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.