Recently, I saw this tweet from @zozagoon (well, I actually saw it in this viral TikTok), and since then, tons of people online have been sharing their own deathbed confession stories.
Nursing school doesn't prepare you for the number of elderly patients who will casually confess to decades-old murders.
Knowing that there had to be more out there, I thought it would be interesting to ask the BuzzFeed Community to share the wildest deathbed confessions they've been told...and YUP, they delivered.
So without further ado, here are some of the wildest, most terrifying, and surprisingly sweetest(...?) deathbed confessions out there.
1. "My mom had a patient who was terminal and confessed to killing his twin brother in Vietnam so he could blame the death on the war, steal his identity, and then return to the US to be with his brother’s wife."
"The wife had passed away years earlier, and the patient’s children blamed the confession on dementia until after his passing. But as it turns out, the patient’s daughter ended up finding a handwritten confession from decades ago stuffed in an old Bible."
—Anonymous
2. "A great aunt of mine says that when her husband was on his deathbed, he confessed that he had actually shrunk two of her very favorite and expensive sweaters by drying them many years earlier."
"She thought that maybe someone broke in and stole her things because he threw them away to hide the evidence. For YEARS, she had hope that they might turn up. She said she even suspected one of her friends may have stolen them at a party! Nope. He was just afraid to admit that he'd ruined them. For like 20 years. She forgave him (obviously), and they had a laugh about it right near the end."
3. "I had a patient who was an 86-year-old woman who put a BUNCH of crosses around the room. I had to ask her to take them down due to the inability to create the care she needed. She insisted they all stay up because 'It was one cross for each soul she took.' If that's true, she took 14 souls."
—Anonymous
4. "My great-grandmother told us her birthday was Oct. 30 her whole life. On her deathbed, we found out it was Oct. 31 — she and her family had lied for 80-plus years out of superstition. Paperwork proved it after she was gone."
5. "When my grandpa was dying, he confessed to my mom that her younger brother was not his biological son. My grandma had passed away years earlier and had gone to her grave with the secret."
"My grandparents were not together and lived separately, but during that time, it would have been scandalous to have a child by another man. My grandfather raised my uncle like he was his own son, and none of the kids or anyone suspected he had a different dad. It wasn't until later, when my mom told my uncle, and he didn't care. Basically no one in our family knows; even I found out by accident."
—Anonymous
6. "My dad told me that when his grandfather was about to die, he finally told his family why he had this tattoo on his arm — it was always a mystery because he was a pastor at a church, and he never spoke of it."
"Apparently when he was 19, he was a safecracker and robbed a bank and then got arrested, so he got the tattoo in prison. But when he got out, he decided to never tell anyone and turned his life around."
7. "I work in end-of-life care and have been there for many deathbed confessions, but the saddest one was a woman who delivered an illegitimate stillborn baby at home by herself and decided to put the baby's body in the basement freezer because she couldn't bear the idea of her community knowing what happened."
8. "My mom and aunt grew up thinking their sister, Suzanne, died by slipping and falling while getting out of the bathtub. They were all in their 20s when it happened, and it wasn’t until my grandfather was on his deathbed that my mom and aunt found out how she really died."
'They had been cleaning out the house when they came across Suzanne’s death certificate and discovered the true cause of death. They confronted my grandfather who confessed that Suzanne had died by suicide."
9. "When my grandfather died, he finally told my mom that he and my grandmother had been divorced for YEARS. No one in the family knew at all."
"He had it in his will to still give her everything, and they still lived together. When my mom was going through his things, sure enough, she found the divorce papers dating back to 1978."
10. "My mom never knew her dad, as she was result of a one-night stand back in the early '60s. My nan came from a conservative family, so it was a bit of a scandal. She was going to give my mom up, but her own mother (my great-nan) said no way and raised her herself."
"My nan always lied about who my mom's dad was, saying he was a horrible person and going as far as to give him a cartoon character's name, thinking it would make it hard to ever look him up. On her deathbed, she confessed she actually didn't know who he was, and that he was one of a few sailors who were at the port when my mom was conceived. She had no names and no details about him at all."
11. "My grandma confessed to cheating on her husband, and she encouraged my mother (her daughter-in-law) to do the same."
—Anonymous
12. "Before my grandma passed, she told us she hated being married and raising kids."
"She said she wanted to do so many things she could never do, but that she still loved everyone more than anything. My mom later passed away with the same type of regrets."
13. "My dad grew up thinking his mom committed suicide when he was 10. When my grandfather passed away about a decade ago, he confessed to my dad on his deathbed that he had actually killed my grandmother."
—Anonymous
14. "My grandmother was born in Cuba, and when she came to the US, she would cash her social security checks and keep them in a pot under her bed. When she died, we decided to go through every inch of her apartment to see if we could find the money she would hide."
"My uncle told us that the final week she was in the hospital, she kept telling him to check in the oven but gave no context as to why. Well, when my mom and I opened the oven door, we found a trash bag taped under one of the racks. We opened it up and found two Tupperware containers with a total $12,000 in them."
—Anonymous
15. And finally: "My grandmother told all of the 'kids' (me and my grown cousins) that she had a tattoo of the outline of Texas on her ass. The nurse in the room burst out laughing and confirmed that it was true."
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.