We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us their family's biggest secrets, and they really delivered. Here are the jaw-dropping results.
Note: Some submissions are also from this Reddit thread because they're too juicy to ignore.
1. "When my great-uncle died in the '90s, my family went through his stuff before selling the house. They found a very decomposed dead body of a woman in the basement freezer..."
2. "My cousin is secretly a porn star. No, I won’t say who. Yes, I found out that way, by stumbling across her in a video."
3. "My dad faked his own death in an attempt to get back at my mom for cheating on him..."
4. "I was always told that my great-uncle died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Vegas, but I recently found out that he died mysteriously before he was set to testify against the mafia. We always assumed it was a mob hit, but nothing ever came from the investigation."
5. "When we were teenagers, my brother and I found out that we might not be our dad's biological kids because my mom had an affair... with our dad's brother."
6. "My grandparents basically swapped spouses. My grandmother on my mom's side had an affair with my grandfather on my dad's side. Everyone got divorced, and then the two of them got married. Family reunions were fun."
7. "My brother recently found out that he isn’t my father's biological son. Apparently my mom cheated on my dad a lot, but he kept taking her back. No one really questioned that my brother always looked maybe a little more Italian than the rest of us. We found out his real father is actually our next-door neighbor."
8. "My great-grandfather randomly ran off and left his wife and three young kids during the Great Depression to start another family. My parents refuse to talk about it."
9. "My great-grandfather’s second wife had an affair... with her step-son."
10. "When my mom was 50, she went to Denmark with my grandma and discovered that she had two older sisters and an older brother. Apparently my grandpa had been secretly married TWICE before he met my grandma..."
11. "My grandma’s infant sister went missing in the early '30s. Her father was highly abusive and was convinced that my great-grandma was unfaithful, so he believed the baby wasn’t his. My grandma was sent away to a girls' camp for the summer and when she came back, her sister was gone..."
12. "My mother randomly flew to me from the other side of the world right before I was scheduled to give birth. There's a lot of history between us, and I didn't find out until much later that she was actually planning on taking my newborn back with her to raise as her own child."
13. "My aunt mysteriously disappeared before I was born. Her car was found running and her purse was still inside, parked off the side of the road. No one knows what happened to her. They didn’t even fill out a missing person's report. It’s as if she 'ran away.' We’ve not seen or heard from her ever since. There’s a possibility it was murder, but my family is very hush-hush about the whole situation."
14. "My cousin’s youngest son is actually his nephew. A few people in the family caught his wife and brother in bed together. They deny it, but my little cousin looks just like his uncle and all of his other kids."
15. "My father had an affair with his brother's wife, and she got pregnant. So I guess my cousin is also my brother. My grandma let that slip whilst wasted. My cousin doesn't know."
16. "My great-great-aunt hid Jews in her apartment in Denmark during WWII. One of her neighbors saw a man in her apartment through the window and asked her about it. She knew she'd be killed if people caught her hiding Jews, so she said it was her boyfriend..."
17. And "my great-great-grandma went out to dinner with her husband one night. Her husband thought she was looking at other guys, so he brought her to a hotel room and slit her throat. He left her to die, but she survived and then escaped and left him. We didn’t find this out until a few years ago through an old newspaper."
