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 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

#2

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

#3

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

#4

My grandfather always kept the door of his home office locked. When he died in 1987, my grandmother just left the door closed and locked and eventually misplaced the key altogether. When my grandmother moved into assisted living last year, my mom and I cleaned out her house. I live closest so it was on me to wait for the locksmith to come and open the office door. The room was like a time capsule, complete with Winston cigarettes still on the desk, with butts in the ashtray and bills and a newspaper from 1987 stacked neatly. And the office was filled with photographs. My grandfather was a photographer so this was no surprise. Mostly they were from his job, and some were of the family, the house, vacations, etc. But then I found a locked file cabinet drawer and got curious/suspicious. Fully expecting to find naked pictures of my grandma (but not wanting to be the one who accidentally sold a cabinet full of cash or something), I popped the lock on the drawer with a letter opener. It was full of pictures of naked ladies who were NOT my grandmother. Probably a dozen different women. Some of them were obviously taken inside my grandparents' house. Most looked to be from the '50s and '60s, just judging from the hairstyles and shoes. These were not professional boudoir shots, either. It was straight up nasty p**n. I threw all the pictures away and never told anyone in my family about it.

Image credits: SandraVirginia

#5

Well this is not so much disturbing as it is awesome,
my grandfather kept a big safe in the basement of his house and about 6 months after his death we bought a diamond blade saw to get it open as we had no idea where the key was. In short there was £250000 in there that our whole family didn’t know existed nor where it came from. I mean, I guess it’s possible that he saved his wages over a long period of time to eventually have that amount. Possible, but extremely unlikely as he was a builder and not particularly wealthy. We all got a cut.

Image credits: richieZEB00

#6

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

#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

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

#9

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

#10

That my mom had given birth to twin boys while in college, long before meeting my dad. The father was a professor in her department. She went away for 9 mos. without telling her family, saying she was taking a class for her major. She was not keeping in touch, however, and her family grew increasingly suspicious. Eventually, her sister came up unannounced. She knocked, and my mom answered, obviously pregnant. The sister went back and let the family know what she had seen. My mom had the babies, put them up for adoption, and returned home to an icy, silent reception. The reason for her absence was never spoken of. I didn’t find out until many years after her death.

Image credits: yarzospatzflute

#11

So far we’ve found four of my grandfathers long lost children from his affairs, and counting.

Image credits: heartsbeating

#12

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

#13

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

#14

That my dad had been recording and listening to all our phone calls. For years. We found boxes of cassette tapes he had hidden in his shop after he died.

Image credits: Clamdilicus

#15

Not quite the prompt, but I only found out a couple of years ago that my grandmother’s sister hadn’t just passed away at a young age, she had (in all probability- there are no official records but it is the most logical explanation for her disappearance at that particular time) been kidnapped by the Argentinean military junta and either tortured to death in prison, shot by firing squad into a mass grave, drugged and dropped from an airplane… the possibilities are horrifying.
I now much more clearly understand why my grandmother’s family back in Argentina are so messed up.

Image credits: hannahstohelit

#16

After my grandmother died, I learnt that the bar she owned when she was younger was more like a w***ehouse. Also, she was almost sent to prison for another reason.
I learnt so much this year that I now call this part of my family "the bloody news family".

Image credits: cantormetrique

#17

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

#18

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

#19

My grandpa suppressed my uncle’s passion for music. Not only did he suppress the passion, but my uncle is a very gifted guy regarding music. He has an absolute pitch. The occurence of this skill is 1 in 10.000.

I’m not really surprised, that my uncle is in a miserable state, today.

#20

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.

#21

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

#22

My dad, brother and grandmother died in a car accident, turns out that was my dad's idea of s**cide and he took them with him because he thought he was doing us a favor as my 3 year old brother had some form of retardation and my grandma was a horrible person.

#23

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.

Image credits: dyphter

#24

Uncle died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. So it came out that he was into auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Image credits: Nkklllll

#25

After my baby brother died, as Big Bro, I seized every piece of technology he had. Mom wanted his phone so I sanitized the f**k out of it. After I broke into his laptop and started cleaning it up and organizing it I found several documents on there and found that he posted to several sites talking about how lonely and depressed he was.

He talked about how mom's new husband had made his life hell and how it was f****d up that she repeatedly let him come back into her life after causing a lot of family drama. He also talked about how close he and I were and how he hoped to make me proud one day. (I was always proud of him.)

He talked a lot about my daughter, his niece and how I was being the daddy she deserved and how proud he was of me. He wished that he and I had a dad like me when we were growing up. Instead he had me and I did what I could. I was only 8 years older and a child raising a child. He missed dad a lot because he had started to finally change after years of abuse…but then up and died.

He also talked of all the times he thought about s***ide. How he came close to doing it but never did follow through.

I miss my brother so much.

Image credits: AxalonNemesis

#26

That my great-grandfather was an avowed racist, who had helped start a branch of the KKK in our area. As it turned out, most of his kids -grandparents of my generation -knew about it, but it came as a huge shock to us great-grandkids. I grew up next door to him, and was constantly over there. He was a great guy, always had time to play with us kids, let us drive his tractors and four-wheelers around his yard, gave out fifty dollars cash on birthdays, and made it to every family event, where he talked to everybody -he never left any of us kids out.

I grew up thinking he was a hero -he’d fought in WWII -and a great guy. Then, at eleven years old, after his funeral, I find out he was horribly racist -if he saw a black person in a store, he’d walk out, and find somewhere different to shop. He’d tried getting town ordinances passed so that blacks couldn’t live in our little town. Eventually, when all of his other efforts hadn’t stopped anything, in the early eighties, he’d started a local KKK group.

It rocked my world. Couldn’t believe that one of the nicest, sweetest guys I’d ever known was that sort of person. I still struggle with that sometimes.

Image credits: Saoirse_Laochra

#27

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

#28

my great grandma saved 13 million over her lifetime. It all went to my grampa. My grandma died. He remarried a nutjob. He got lymphoma and died five years after the diagnosis.

The day he died. His wife took their picture off the wall when they declared him dead.

After the funeral she got in his truck and we never saw her again…

Image credits: thejaypalmershow

#29

Apparently my great grandfather may have been a p*****ile. My mom told me this last year and she and her cousins had to be careful around him when they were growing up. He never did anything to my mom but her parents as well as her aunts and uncles suspected that somewhere down the line, he was being inappropriate with someone's child but I don't think mom ever knew who it was and she is no longer a live for me to ask.

#30

My grandfathers brother on his death bed told his entire family that during the Second World War he has an affair and a second family. This included an illegitimate daughter. Right before he passed he told them not to worry as she had been paid out of the will and any inheritance.

#31

That he was an actual horrible person. My dad rarely talked about when he was growing up. When he does, normally stories about my grandpa arise and he was an absolute a*****e. The final straw for me to say he was just a horrible person through and through was right after he died. Below is just a small list of the s**t he did that I know about.

– Cheated on my grandmother

– Remarried to a woman my father’s age.

– She has a kid a year younger than me. I have a step aunt who I’m older than, but more disturbingly, my father has a step sister a year younger than his youngest kid.

– M***ered the family cat and told no one for years. (Dad over heard him talking one day years later when he was bragging about it)

– Complained about how everyone was going to hell except him.

– Would leave my dad the car every week while he was out of town only if he drove him to one of the busiest airports in the country during rush hour and would beat him because the traffic sucked.

– Refused to have a funeral and wanted to be cremated with his ashes spread out in the field he was cheating on my grandmother with.

– Would pressure me into finding a girl and having kids for the sole purpose of passing down the family name. (Would be a complete a*s to my sister about this)

– Growing up, he though a good present to me was a literal stick. He found it in the yard and gave it to me as a present.

– Kicked my dad out of the house one day for making a smart a*s comment. (GP was bi***ing about mass being changed from Latin to English, dad commented that Jesus never spoke Latin, the people who k*lled him did though)

He died in September right before Irma hit our house. September was not a fun month in our household.

#32

My grandad was a freemason who travelled the world in the Navy in the 50’s, he had a stroke when i was young (around 10) and lost his ability to speak, my dad has told me that he tried to encourage him to join as he could put a good recomendation in for him, however after attending a meeting he backed out. Hes always came close to telling me about it but seems to stop himself before going too far, which just makes me more curious. also any time I go to visit my grandad these days, he always gives me a number of complex handshakes followed by a wry smile, its like he knows i want to know his secrets but is content with the fact he cant say a word.

#33

For years we blamed my cousin's wife for ordering a hit on him because he was cheating on her (this is all within bounds for that side of the family, which is shady as f**k on a good day). My cousin was found with a headshot wound inflicted by his driver's firearm. Turns out he'd committed s**cide because he owed a lot of bad people money; we only found out because said bad people eventually came for his kids' money a few years later. S**t was f****d.

#34

Sort of jumping the gun but found out wheb my Grandad dies, his daughter (my aunt) gets £0 from him. She has screwed her life up and is in huge debt and homeless (staying with us) and my saint of a mother is sorting it all out for her cause she is doing nothing to help herself. My grandads already helped her out a lot and it came to light when trying to sort debt relief that he’s made sure ahe doesnt get a single penny from him when he dies.

#35

I recently learned that ALS k*lled my great grand mother, 2 uncles, and my aunt and cousin are started to have symptoms in their legs. All from my dad's side of the family.

#36

My grandfather in law (who has the same name as my father in law) had another secret family. He saw them every weekend when he was “golfing”. Apparently he kept in touch with them for most of their lives until he had a stroke and couldn’t. A year after he died, one of his daughters contacted my father in law thinking he was the same man. That’s when we found out. Never told his mother the truth though, although we don’t know how she wouldn’t know.

#37

My mom’s cousin greg died before i was born. they always said he died in a house fire and couldn’t get out in time. I didn’t find out until i was 18 and came across my mom’s old diary that i found out that Greg had actually set the fire himself. it was a s**cide.

#38

My family doesn’t know but I’m an adult diaper fetishist. They’ll likely find out when I die and they clear out my stuff.

I’m really glad I won’t be there for that.

#39

That my grandfather lied about everything.

My mom was getting a family tree together. She kept hitting blanks when adding him to the tree. They weren’t close due to him being an a*****e – so she asked her brother for help making sure she had all the info right.

Eventually came to light that he didn’t technically exist until he enlisted in the army at 17. He lied about his date of birth and his name. My great grandmother is listed as having one child in a census we found – but no name and everything relating to him is false.

He lived his entire life with a false name and false birthday. I want to know what happened in his teenage years that prompted that choice.

#40

Grandfather fled his home country for the us. He always said it was because he didn't want to fight in a war that was going on at the time. In reality, he beat someone important up in his home village and left him for dead (m**dered him with bare hands) and his family and everyone dismissed him as a ne'er-do-well and he came here to disappear/not shame them. His surname is rare – everyone with it is related to us – and when my uncle met someone with our name from the motherland and told them about Gramps, to uncle's surprise the guy didn't seem happy. And also grandpa wasn't happy that his son met and spoke with this person. He was embarrassed. He was like shamed out of his country and knew that no one from there would be happy to hear from him. The less we could know about the circumstances of him leaving, the better. He wasn't fleeing a war-torn country, he was hooking up with a married woman of some kind of stature locally and k*lled her hubs. He had to leave or be k*lled himself. By now though thankfully anyone who knows of the scandal is dead.

#41

After my mom passed away, I went through all of her junk in boxes. Came across one big hat box that contained lots of documents and newspaper clippings from the early 1900's up until the 70's.
Nearly every piece of paper in that box completely was the opposite of what we were taught as kids about the family. My dad was this upstanding preacher who had only been married once. Wrong! He was married 4 times and had lots of kids from his other marriages. My uncle who ended up marrying 13 women and having untold numbers of kids, was gay when he was a teenager, My grandfather didn't approve and one day shot his lover right in front of him and made him bury the body in the woods. My grandmother made a notation on a side note that that was the day her baby had died. Talking about my uncle. He eventually was so tormented by his miserable life and drinking, that he k*lled himself in 1980 at 47 years old. Even my dad and uncles military histories were all phony. What was most amazing was our name wasn't even our last name. My grandfather and his brothers got in trouble with the law in the early 20's and changed all their names. Another big shocker was one of my uncles was a bigtime racist back in the 60's. My grandmother kept a ledger of all the money she would send to all of his kids who were born by different mothers. Most of the kids were black. She even had pictures of some of them and they looked just like my uncle as a kid except darker skin.
There was newspaper clippings about m**ders and assasinations and all kinds of nasty stuff the family was involved in.
After going through all of it I was nearly in shock. Everything I knew about my family was a lie. I called up my last living aunt and asked her about a bunch of it. Her husband(my Uncle) was a straight laced military man who really didn't get along with most of his family. She said that from what he had told her over the years it all made sense. It even explained why he was given a different last name in the military after he had a background check for a security clearance. They always thought it was a mistake from the military that they couldn't get fixed. But it was the real last name of the family.
I asked her if she thought anyone in the family should know about this stuff?
She said "GOD NO!" Burn it and never speak of any of it to a soul ever again. She said that if any of it does come to light, I will be hated by the entire family for not keeping it hid. She said people like to live the lie's they make, not the reality of who they really are.
I still have it. Can't bring myself to burn it.

#42

Not so much disturbing as much as ‘wow, his untruths went that far?’

Turned out that he did have a passport (therefore didn’t enter and exit the country numerous times without documents), the police were not looking for him, he’d never created a new identity for himself by claiming to the authorities that he was born to a gypsy family and didn’t owe thousands in tax. To say he was a bit of a fantasist is an understatement, but we knew it. He was, however, a cool uncle, especially once we could start going to the pub with him and I still miss him sometimes- but we knew better than to believe everything he said!

#43

My maternal grandmother was apparently married four times, and there’s no father’s name on my mum’s birth certificate.

She seemed to have had an interesting life.

#44

Long after he died, we discovered my father and mother “had” to get married because of my older sister; they just lied about the year they got married.

It’s s****y only because my sister also “caught” outside the bonds of holy matrimony, and my mother treated her like absolute s**t over it.

#45

Probably not the most disturbing but only after my maternal grandfather died did most of my family find out that he and my grandmother had been married over fifty years. According to my mom, they never celebrated an anniversary or talked about it much. Turns out it was a shotgun wedding necessitated by the fact that my eighteen year old grandmother was pregnant by my then college student grandfather. This was a big and conservative catholic family too.

#46

My grandmother hiding that my mother was possibly a bastard child for over 40 years from the rest of our extended family.

#47

My grandfather was a high ranking officer in Yugoslav partisan army. Not that disturbing. He was, however, most likely involved in covering up post-war massacres of civilians and political enemies.

My father, on the other hand, was much more tame. He was only a high ranked member of Freemasons with a ton of secrets. I know he was involved in some behind the scenes political happenings, but I was never told what he exactly did.

#48

The county covered up my great grandma's m**der. She was from Louisiana and didn't speak very good English. She was also biracial… So the son of her husband wanted her. She was closer to the son's age. He got mad and k*lled her. And the county said oh well.

#49

I don’t know that this is disturbing per se, but my dad died in 2015, and last month we found out that he had had a son when he was around 20. So now I have a half brother!

#50

It was only after my uncle was m**dered that we found out he was gay.

Because he'd been m**dered by his teenage Romanian boyfriend.

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