Many people have skeletons in their closets. To put that into perspective, researchers say that around 97% of people have secrets about infidelity, illegal behavior, and unwanted pregnancies.
Sometimes, these matters remain undisclosed until the person’s death. However, no secret remains hidden forever, especially if the topic comes up in online forums where people can hide behind anonymity.
A Reddit user asked a loaded question: “What disturbing fact came to light about a family member after they passed away?” The subreddit was flooded with answers, ranging from hidden wealth to illegitimate children and fabricated identities.
Scroll through and be amazed (or shocked) at the stuff people kept concealed until the end.
#1
That my godfather was abusive to his wife and had tried to strangle her once. We didn’t find this out until years after he died, until his daughter finally snapped after hearing for the hundredth time what a great guy he was.
Image credits: EarlGreyhair
#2
That my uncle passed from AIDS and not cancer like he said. Turned out he had been sick for a really long time. Gutted he never felt like he could share with us and went through it alone..
Image credits: imperator-paloma
#3
Shortly after my great Uncle died, who had no wife or children, my mother found some of his military records dating back from WW2. Turns out he was captured by Japanese and sent to a POW camp and worked on the Burma-Thai railway.
Image credits: strangersIknow
#4
Disturbing only because it was sad. Evidence that a beloved uncle was a closeted gay, discovered while clearing out his home after his funeral. This was in the 80’s, so at no point in his life would coming out have been easy.
Image credits: Scrappy_Larue
#5
My paternal grandmother – we called her Nannie – gave birth to baby girls in unwed mother’s homes three times before she married my grandfather. We thought that it had only happened once. That one got adopted out to a couple in Australia (we are all from New Zealand), and I went to visit her when I was a kid and went to her wedding. But once Nannie died my aunt tracked down a second one, who lived about two hours away from us! When I met her it was like seeing a ghost. She looked just like Nannie, and acted just like her as well, even though they had never met. I remember she walked ahead to open the gate for the car and turned around to lean against it, and my mum gasped and whispered “that’s Barbara!” to my dad.
The saddest thing is that we have since found out that there was a third, another girl, but we can’t find her. My aunt found a nurse that remembered Nannie and swears up and down that she was there to have a third child. Unfortunately the building burned down not long after the birth and the records were lost. So we will never find her.
I’ve also since learned that my dad is not my grandfather’s child. Nannie was pregnant when she met him. This is an open secret in the family – we don’t talk about it, especially not to dad, but we all know.
Apparently Nannie had quite a sad life before she married and there is a story about a man that was the great love of her life but she couldn’t be with for some reason. I don’t know that story fully though, I only heard it mentioned once when my mum was drunk and feeling chatty.
This is why birth control is so important. Birth control wasn’t available when Nannie was a young woman, especially in the rural areas where she lived. Had she had access to it, her life might have turned out very differently.
Nannie hated women the whole time I knew her. She didn’t like her female grandchildren and had no female friends. She was openly sexist against women, despite being one. I wonder if girl children reminded her of her babies that she had to give up and that was why she didn’t like us.
#6
My great-grandmother tried to get custody of me, claiming my mom had abandoned me.
When my mom divorced my biological father, to get away from him (he was very manipulative and abusive), she packed up everything and moved up to Georgia.
For nearly a year, I stayed with my great-grandparents while my mom went out to find a place to live, find a job, and also she met a man who would become my adoptive father, and give me his last name.
My great-grandmother was a bit manipulative and controlling herself. She was also delusional. She believed that my mom had abandoned me, and set about trying to get custody of me. She tried to rope my grandmother into it, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She worked for an attorney, and she said, “Prove it.” Great-grandma couldn’t.
My mom told me she’d visit weekly, and once she got settled in, she came and got me.
Image credits: PatrickRsGhost
#7
In 2009 I got a Facebook message from a guy saying essentially : hi, I think we have the same dad.
My dad died in 2004.
I knew he had been married way before he met my mom but none of us knew he had a son that he abandoned. When the baby was 6 months old he up and left to join the army, never seeing his son again.
So I have a half brother who is about 20 years older than me
Since I was the first to find out. I was tasked with telling my mother. I called her up and she basically said : “meh, your dad was bound to have some more skeletons in the closet that we didn’t yet know about”
The whole thing makes me incredibly sad when I think about it. Sad for this guy that didn’t have a dad (he had been looking for him on and off since he was 17). But also sad for my dad that he carried this secret with him for so long, and died without ever having told anyone. It must have haunted him.
Image credits: frenchbritchick
#8
Found divorce papers for grandmother and found out that my grandfather was divorcing her because she abused him. She was given custody of my mom instead of him. I wonder how different she would have been if he had custody. She is a very easily manipulated and timid person. I wonder if grandma was abusive to her as well.
Image credits: cocuke
#9
So far we’ve found four of my grandfathers long lost children from his affairs, and counting.
Image credits: heartsbeating
#10
About 20 years ago I had a boyfriend who got cancer and died within a year. As he got sicker I began to realize that all the stuff he had told me about his family was made up, and all of the truth came out afterwards.
He didn’t have a twin brother who trained dolphins at SeaWorld, he had a regular upbringing in the USA and not Morocco, his parents were normal boring people from Michigan – not an actress and a professor from Paris. Even his exotic sounding first name was invented, he was actually named Steve.
Interestingly there was one thing that was true: his cousin who worked at NASA really did. I guess that was already interesting enough that he didn’t have to make that up.
As to why he did this, it was never clear. He didn’t lie about other stuff AFAIK. His real family was on the other side of the country and didn’t want to visit while he was sick and didn’t come to the funeral either. The whole thing was sad and strange.
Image credits: anon
#11
My grandfather, who we called Opa, was a carpenter his entire life; built half the houses in my hometown, and loved to give them away AT COST to young couples getting a start in life. when my grandmother passed, Opa began building his own coffin, and it was beautiful. he asked my mom to put in nice red satin upholstery, and when it was finished, he stood it up at his 90th birthday party and asked us all to pose with him in it.
we'd always known that he'd served in WWII, but like many men he never talked about it. we learned after his passing that he'd signed up when circumcision was still required, and he volunteered for the procedure so he could go fight. once enlisted, they put his carpentry skills to use building bridges, but for the most part he spent his time making coffins, to send boys home.
Image credits: adelaide129
#12
Uncle died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. So it came out that he was into auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Image credits: Nkklllll
#13
Not necessarily disturbing, but my grandfather knew he had cancer six months before he passed away. Even when his health declined rapidly the last two weeks, he never said anything about it. I kind of knew that was going on. He’s to stubborn to let his family take care of him or be bedridden.
Image credits: Owlettehoo
#14
My great grandmother was most likely a lesbian and a cleptomaniac.
The most shocking to me was my grandfather who was all about the Marines. Everything was about the Marine Corps. I always thought that he was a long term Marine and had fought in WWII. Turns out he was in for less than a year and did maintenance on docked ships. My (gay) partner that was kicked out for being gay served a lot longer. My family makes fun of the fact that he (my partner) was ever in the Marines, but still act like my grandfather single handedly won the war. He was buried with full military honors.
Image credits: rottisnot
#15
My great-grandfather had another family that wasn’t revealed until after he passed in his late 90s. He lived til I was in my mid-twenties and not once would I have ever suspected it. He was present at every family party, took me for haircuts once a month, I cut their lawn every week. It turned out my great-grandmother knew but hid it from everyone in the family. She actually knew his other kids and families. She told my dad while in Hospice. The real kicker was when doing a family tree on one of those sites, it kept suggesting a public family tree I did not recognize. Turns out it was his other family.
Image credits: sideofricepilaf
#16
Not necessarily disturbing, but surprising. My dad did one of those genealogy DNA things and found out that my grandfather was not actually his father. It appears that both my grandparents had multiple affairs and my father was the product of one. They stayed married to each other for more than 50 years though.
Image credits: sweaty_yeti
#17
My dad passed away a year ago from a heart attack, upon trying to set all his paperwork straight, I found out he had been spending around $600-1000 a month in slot machines at the hotel in the next town over(he was taking out money at the hotel ATM). Not sure how much of that he got back, if any. It had been going on for at least 2 years according to my uncle.
I never knew he had a gambling problem, didn’t see him often enough to notice. 🙁 He also was retired and didn’t cash out that much from his retirement.
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Image credits: dyphter
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