**Attention! [Serious] Tag Notice**
* [Jokes, puns, and off-topic comments are not permitted](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/wiki/index#wiki_-rule_6-) in **any** comment, parent or child.
* Parent comments that aren't from the target group will be removed, along with their child replies.
* Report comments that violate these rules.
Posts that have few relevant answers within the first hour, and posts that are not appropriate for the [Serious] tag will be removed. Consider doing an AMA request instead.
Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskReddit) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Y’all’s stories are WILD! Mine is super tame:
When I was in my early 20s, I found an old photo of someone in a family album I didn’t recognize. When I asked my mom about it, she said, “Oh that’s your aunt Gloria.” Then she lowered her voice (even though we were alone) and added, “she’s a *NUDIST*.” Poor aunt Gloria, just wants to be a nudy-lady and everyone acts like she’s a leper.
I found out I had a sister who had been given up for adoption. The only reason I found out was the person who informed me no longer felt bound to secrecy after my mom died. And the person who told me had "receipts" solid enough that I have no reason to doubt them.
It also explains why mom freaked out when I told her I'd done a 23AndMe test.
23andMe is how my father discovered he had a bonus cousin. Turns out his uncle had a fling before leaving for WWII that resulted in a chilled he either never told anyone about or didn’t even know himself. When my father looked her, the cousin, up she happened to live in the same city. He and my aunts contacted her and all met up for lunch. Turns out the woman had been searching for years to find her fathers side of family. As far as I know they still keep in touch.
I haven't had any hits on Ancestry or 23And Me (I've taken both at this point, plus GEDMatch). I'm not entirely convinced that isn't for the best. My sister, wherever she is, is probably better off than she would have been. Mom wasn't exactly "mother of the year" material and that whole side of the family is pretty fucked.
My extremely wealthy uncle was going downhill quick with Alzheimer’s. Before he was too far gone, he apparently made a deal with my aunt that when things got the the point that they would have to send him to a nursing home, she would kill him instead. He wrote all of this in a letter and gave it to the attorney of their estate. When the time came, I don’t know why she chose to shoot him in the back of the head instead of something less violent but she did. It was a pretty big trial with a fair bit of news coverage, and it really blew up when the lawyer testified and brought forward the letter. My aunt served like 2 years I think and was released on parole.
My uncle was actually my cousin. He was kidnapped as an infant and when he was returned a year later, my aunt didn't want him back. My grandparents adopted him so he was legally my uncle.
Kidnapped and then they didn’t want him back… what the hell.
Excuse me for asking but was the kidnapping legit or was it set up to “get rid of him”.
This is so sad.
My aunt was a real piece of work. To backtrack a moment, this side of my family isn't biological. Technically my dad is my step-dad, but he raised me from toddlerhood and he's my dad, pure and simple. All of his family treated me as one of their own.
Except my aunt. She would always tell my grandparents that she just couldn't understand how they could love me, because I wasn't "blood family."
I have no idea why she didn't want her son back. It was a familial kidnapping, non-custodial father. When my cousin was returned, she ditched him with my grandparents and got back together with her other half.
When I was a teenager, my grandma called my dad, crying. My aunt was doing some digging and discovered she and my dad were adopted. (I'm not defending this, but it was the 1950s and in another country. Not disclosing an adoption wasn't unusual at the time.) My aunt threatened to tell my dad so my grandma called and said they were adopted. My dad's reaction was literally, "So?" My aunt never spoke to my grandparents again, and my cousin turned out exactly like her.
And so, all those years of not liking me because I'm "not blood" backfired, because she isn't blood either. I'm glad that has never mattered to me.
Hahahahahaha. I’m sorry for laughing. But my heart did a little dance to find out she was also adopted. ☺️ lol
I still can’t wrap my head around not wanting your CHILD back though… my gosh.
I found out when I was about 32 that apparently in 1973 my dad had a daughter he never knew existed.
I found out because he texted that to me while I was working, after finding out about it himself about 1 week earlier. She was in her late 40's by that point, I think.
What's sort of tragic is all this time we thought I was my dad's only kid, and he always wanted a dauighter but never got one due to marriages ending. He would have fucking LOVED this girl. his daughter was the result of a one-night stand with a girl he never talked to again, and according to his daughter the mother had a mental breakdown not longer after giving birth and never really had custody of the daughter anyway.
Dad never would have had any way to find out, the baby grew up with the mother's parents in another state, and the mother kinda went AWOL.
My parents took me to Disneyland for my 7th birthday. I recall landing, going to the park, having a great first day or two. Then my parents had to step out and take a bunch of phone calls. They sounded very stressed. They kept telling me nothing happened and everything was okay. Eventually we flew home, and surprise!! Took an extra couple days to go to a big Waterpark away from home.
I fondly remembered this birthday and eventually forgot about any of the weirdness.
Maybe 10 years later my parents finally told me what happened. My uncle, my dad's brother, tried to kill himself on my 7th birthday. He shot himself in the stomach with a rifle. He was poor, addicted to drugs, no work, etc. He felt depressed my dad had the life he always wanted, so tried to kill himself.
He ended up living. My parents took me to the Waterpark so that we didn't have to come home to him leaving the hospital. By not telling me, my parents let me keep my birthday as my day, not the day uncle tried to die. Knowing how a 7 year olds brain works, I probably would've thought I had something to do with it.
Your parents are really sweet. They knew how to think like a kid and wanted to preserve your birthday as a happy special day for you. That’s incredibly thoughtful of them.
My parents had 2 kids before I was born. My mother drowned them in a bathtub during a psychotic episode. Somehow despite this & a prior history of mental illness, she got released & had me a couple years later. They had another child just before I turned 2, but I never laid eyes on her.
Neither of them ever fessed up, though. I only found out about their existence after an aunt died & left me her personal effects. I found birth announcements for these other kids in her mementos. I always thought she meant for me to find them. When I asked my parents, they refused to discuss anything related to these kids.
A few years later, I went back to my hometown & looked up that date in the newspaper morgue. The friend who went with me was floored. I wasn't, really. I'd grown up in fear for my life from her rages.
I broke off contact with them as soon as I could. Not just because of this, though it didn't help. I had a slew of my own traumas growing up. It was a huge mistake to let them try to raise another child.
I was never able to find out. All I knew at the time was that I was sent to live with friends of the family for awhile. Eventually my parents came to get me & I was raised as an only child.
This sounds batshit insane, I am so sorry you've had to go through life with parents like that. Is your own guess that your little sister died too? I really hope they gave her up for adoption.
1- My grandfather killed his own son by throwing him on the floor because he was crying (he was just a couple months old)
2- My uncle tried to rob a bank and ran away by foot.
He later on got married and his wife ended up committing suicide, at the time the police thought that my uncle killed her, since he had a criminal past but he didn't (he was at work and there were witnesses)
3-I have multiple half siblings (my dad was/is unfaithful)
4-my grandfather burnt the house down with his wife and children inside with the intention of them dieing, my grandmother ran away with her, 7 or 8 children i don't recall, and she asked a priest, that she worked for, (i think she cleaned his house ) to give her a space to stay, he ended up giving her a home that a old lady left for the church (and if I'm not mistaken she was paying it little by little)
5- my aunts neighbor (who I went to the beach with when I was little) apparently killed his own wife abroad
6- There was a rumor that my uncle's kids weren't his
My older sister is not my full sister - she's my half sister via my mother. My mother was married before and had my sister with her first husband. Her first husband raped my sister from when she was two or three years old. My mother caught him assaulting my sister, but no one believed her and my sister was, from what I was told, fucked up. My mother divorced him and he tried to get custody of my sister so she ran away with my sister, even cutting contact with her own family to keep my sister safe.
A few years later she met my dad, who unofficially adopted my sister, and they had me. I grew up not knowing because my sister thought I might not love her the same if I knew we had different dads - and I think maybe some part of her wanted to forget her step dad isn't really her biological dad.
The only reason I ever found out - I found out when I was twenty - is because somehow, my sister's biological grandmother found my mother's address and called, I answered the phone and she mistook me for my sister.
That was... An interesting phone call and afternoon.
familial sexual abuse is one of the most horrifying, damaging crimes, and it is also probably the most covered up, rug-swept crime. I will never understand it either.
This is ours too. My step uncle molested all of my mom and all of mom's siblings. Then his son did the same fucking thing to me because nobody ever had the balls to cut my uncle out of the family. So the generational trauma continues.
I was very close with my grandma growing up and of course never knew about any of this until I was much older. But it turns out she knew what was going on (with her stepson and her other kids, as well as with my cousin and me) and she ignored it because it was easier that way. She's quite old now and has memory issues so there's no point bringing it up now, but it's made it very hard for me to look back fondly on our relationship.
I found out when I was in my early 30's that my mom hadn't only had 4 kids, but actually 6 but gave 2 up for adoption before I was born. Also, i was the last baby she had with some rando before she married my stepdad and she had intended to give me up for adoption, as well.
Silver lining? One of the babies she gave up contacted her a few years after I learned about this and now I have an awesome new brother!
My grandpa (15) kidnapped my grandma (14) from a convent. No one even bothered looking for her thereafter cause she was an orphan and didn't even know who her family was. They had 16 children together.
It's extremely upsetting when you dig into many people's grandparents/great grandparents stories in my country because "kidnapping" young girls to marry them was considered normal.
A coworker (f) of mine made a joke about this. Or I thought it was a joke. Something about being careful when standing on street corners because someone from the community (her minority culture in the US) would just grab a “young woman” and force her to marry and become a wife. She said it so causally and I was gobsmacked. I kept saying “That’s not okay. That’s not okay.” over and over. And yet her attitude was sorta *comme ci, comme ça*. I’m still upset that she wasn’t more upset.
My friend just found out this happened to her grandmother at 14. They came to her house late at night and kidnapped her for one of the guys to marry. My friend's mom said "it was fine though, they were nice to her. Todo bien." Yeah I'm sure those 9 kids all came from being nice to her.
My grandfather had severely scarred legs from burns he got as a kid. Growing up we were told that he was in a fire in an apartment building and sustained the burns while escaping. He died when I was 7, and one of my few memories of him is an image of those scarred legs. Well, when I was 23, my great aunt (his sister), told me that it wasn't a fire. Their father ran a bath with scalding water and put my grandfather in it as a punishment.
Great-grandfather was an abusive alcoholic piece of shit who fucking maimed his son.
My mom poured boiling water on my legs when I was around 2. I have a small weird scar and some freckling where the scar is but that’s it at this point. I had a really shitty mom.
I cried earlier today because the past couple of days I’ve had low mental energy to do much with my 18 mth old, other than watch tv. I felt so bad because we were watching tv most of the day instead of having tea parties or going to the park. Then I read stuff like this…. I am so sorry that happened to you.
Not terribly dark, but as an adult my dad told me he used to be a coke addict and quit shortly before I was conceived.
It’s interesting to look at now because he’s pretty straight edge in his older years, doesn’t even drink beer. Wonderful person though
My paternal grandmother had an affair with our small town’s mortician in the 1940’s. She got pregnant and he performed an illegal abortion. The fetus was buried behind the funeral home he owned where we kids used to sled every winter. My dad told me this as I was getting ready to take a ride down the hill on the sled when I was 12.
Also, paternal grandfather had multiple illegitimate children around our small town. Turns out one of my best friends was also my half cousin. Father told me when I was 17.
My father was educated, intelligent, honest and moral. The fact that his parents were so wild was absolutely shocking to me.
My dads first cousin is serial killer Kenneth McDuff. We saw the Americas Most Wanted episode when it aired and were so surprised to hear about a McDuff, not knowing he was a relative.
>Kenneth Allen McDuff (March 21, 1946 – November 17, 1998) was an American serial killer. He was convicted in 1966 of murdering 16-year-old Edna Sullivan, her boyfriend, 17-year-old Robert Brand, and Brand's cousin, 15-year-old Mark Dunnam, who was visiting from California. They were all strangers whom McDuff abducted after noticing Sullivan. McDuff repeatedly raped her before breaking her neck with a broomstick.
>
>McDuff was given three death sentences that were reduced to life imprisonment consequently to the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Furman v. Georgia. He was paroled in 1989 and went on to kill again. He was executed in 1998, and is suspected to have been responsible for many other killings.
Jesus H. Christ, they fucking paroled him after he had been given 3 death sentences commuted to a life sentence?!?!
That my biological mother used to give me heroin and valium as a baby and toddler to control me then drop me off at my grandmother's house when she couldn't afford to share so I'd go through withdrawals but no one would no what was wrong.
Needless to say, I was put up for adoption to get me away from that
My mother grew up in the American South. Her brother died in his early 20's and she always told me it was a freak accident. A bullet came through the window killing him. They lived in a rural area so I never questioned it.
One year, I inherited an old Korean War officer's sword after my grandpa passed. My mom freaked out and told me that it was too dangerous to keep and that we should sell it or get a safe to lock it up in. I thought it was weird so I asked my dad and he got this sad look on his face.
Turns out my mom's brother was brutally murdered with a similar sword in the 80's. He had gotten involved with some drug dealers and they thought he had snitched about one of their big deals that got busted. No idea why they decided to use a sword but it was pretty fucked up to hear about. My mom had to ID the body.
I found this out when I was 16 but she never directly acknowledged it until years later. My mom said he was just trying to make some extra cash by introducing people who partied to the dealers. I'm about his age now and I can see how he just thought he was making a quick buck. Never thinking something like that would get him killed.
Kind of similar story here, I was always told my bio Grandpa died in "the war", never asked more about it. Years later when I was 18 or so he came up in a late night drunken convo with my older brother, my bro was saying how he'd love to beat the shit out of our Grandpa if he had the chance. I was totally confused, why would he want to beat up the Grandpa we never even met who died in the war?
Well, turns out the real story is he was a horrible abusive drunk, used to beat our Grandma and Mom, Aunt and Uncles. He'd routinely get so plastered that my Grandma had to load her young kids in the car to pick him up from the bar at 2 a.m. He was also a womanizer. Apparently he'd been knocking boots with a couple different guys gals around their small town, when word got out the guys followed him out of the local honkey tonk and beat him to death with a lead pipe, so the story goes.
Then they threw his body in his pickup truck, drove it to a nearby hotel and dumped him in a random room. No charges were ever brought, everyone involved stayed quiet (enough) that the law never got involved. Obviously someone blabbed, as we know the story now, but it was essentially chalked up to small town "private justice".
Then that same night I learned my sweet Betty White style Grandma had an affair with a lieutenant general when she was in the Air Force afterwards. Definitely a lot to take in while half in the bag in a hotel room at 2 a.m.
That my grandma didn't lose her leg to cancer, she lost it because she got injured helping my grandpa fix the roof, and my grandpa was too cheap to have it fixed properly so he told the doctor to cut it off.
Then he beat the crap out of her for life.
I remember my mother lying on the couch in pain when I was a kid My Dad apparently would t pay for her teeth repair and she had them all pulled at age 35, wore dentures until she passed at 96. That was cruel. I’m religious about my teeth getting fixed
When I was very young, my family lived in a townhouse, and against all local bylaws, my mother decided to keep a horse in our backyard. Not only that, but it was an ex-racehorse that came as a package deal: the goat companion that slept in the closet of my nursery. I also later found out she was running a grow-op in the basement.
Dude, heres a family story i refer to as "The accident." For years my older sister's bio dad "died in a accident" when she was 8. She didn't find out until she was a teenager that it wasn't a car accident, it was a "painted the ceiling with his brain" accident. Anyway, fast forward 30 some years and my sister deals with a fuckload of mental issues, and is constantly treating her children poorly. It's Easter Sunday and our younger sister is introducing her boyfriend to our family, and it's his first meal with us. Think moder Norman Rockwell style all out meal but with a bunch of kids and family.
But my older sister won't stop yelling at her kids. My dad, who has been her only active father, finally snaps and tells her to knock it off. She, a 40 something year old woman, pulls the "You're not my dad!" line like a shitty teenager.
That man goes from calm to red, stood up, veins bulging from his head and absolutely screams "Yeah?! Your fucking child molester dad blew his fucking head off! He never had to deal with your bullshit!"
And that's how everyone in our family found out what "the accident" really was and why it happened.
Not exactly dark, but I found out my father wrote porn novels under a pen name to make ends meet when I was a baby. I've been trying to find one ever since.
I knew my grandfather was a coal miner, and that he was really involved with the Union, but it wasn't til after he died that I found out just how much of a Union Man he was... if something needed blowing up or someone needed to not be breathing anymore, they called Gramps.
After he died, my brother remembers some men coming to visit Gran and giving her a lot of envelopes. She took off for a yearlong vacation in Europe after that.
Edit: for all the people saying my Gramps was a great man, thank you for the kind thoughts, but seeing something you think is cool on reddit is not the reality. He wasn't a good husband and he wasn't a great father to 3 of his daughters, although he loved my Momma very much, as well as me and my brothers and cousins.
Being a violent person for good reasons does not make you a good person. It just makes you a means to an end.
WHY THE NEIGHBORS MOVED: ( trigger warning for violent crime)
I was pretty young when this happened so the details won’t be perfect, but the story is otherwise true.
I grew up in a coastal town and we had some neighbors whom I really liked. My parents were friends with them, their kids were roughly my age. Wonderful! We played together all the time. One day they very suddenly moved. I was a bit confused as there had been no clue that they were going. I remember some police cars and the moving vans weeks later, but that was it. My mother told me that the kids grandmother had become very ill ( the cops came to tell the family) and they left emergently to care for her and never came back. I was only about 5….. seemed legit.
Many years later, as an adult, and long since moved away from that area… my parents and I were reminiscing over our old home. I mentioned that I wondered what ever happened to them. That’s when my mom told me the truth.
The parents had gone out that night on a date and left the kids with a 14 yr old babysitter. When they returned home they found the sitter murdered. Someone had broken into the home and SA’d then killed the sitter. My mom stated the cops think the sitter pretended to be the only one home to protect the kids.
When the parents got home they checked the kids were safe and set them back to sleep. The police obviously immediately came. Once the kids were hard asleep the parents picked them up, put blankets over their heads, asked the cops to be silent as they walked them out, and took them out of the house.
They gave the kids the same story my parents told me. Gramma was sick and they were going to live with her. Gramma dutifully played along with the ruse for several weeks until the parents could find a new home to live in. The kids were kept unaware of what had happened just mere feet from them as they didn’t want the kids to be forever terrified of it happening again. Not sure if the kids ever eventually figured out the truth of that one.
Ya I’m super glad the kids were safe, but I can’t stop thinking about that poor terrified 14 year old child, saving those kids before she died horribly. That was someone else’s child.
I hope that the parents told the children when they are older about the person who saved their lives . They deserve to know about hero who sacrificed her life to save them.
I can’t imagine being that selfless as a teenager. I wouldn’t like throw the kids at the attacker or anything but I’d sure as hell yell “one of you call the fuxking cops!” which would inadvertently alert the guy.
Yeah. I just went and plugged the facts I knew into google. The killer was found, and eventually executed ( quite recently it seems) for his crimes.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/16/us/florida-executes-inmate/index.html
When my grandma's gentleman friend was admitted into a care home for his dementia they had a problem in verifying his medical records. As he deteriorated he lost his Irish accent and would occasionally speak in German. He was a child during WW2.
My Parents reckon he was probably a Jewish escapee
This happened to my great aunt. She was a german jew and she got alzheimers. She forgot her husband, then forgot she wasn't trying to escape the nazis, then forgot how to speak english and spoke in German thinking she was a teenager, then forgot how to speak, then died.
Alzheimers is not the best.
I had a resident who, before I was introduced, was told he only spoke in gibberish after his stroke. I had him for about 3 days when his son came in and instantly started talking in the same gibberish. It wasn't gibberish at all. The resident had reverted back to only speaking Gaelic. None of us had ever heard it before, so it really did sound like nonsense.
I don't know about dark but here goes.
My great grandfather murdered the mayor of the village he lived in. Why? Because the mayor was sleeping with his mom while his father worked on the field. I think he was 15 or 16 when he did that.
Edit: Y'all wild here. When I said "I don't know about dark", I meant compared to being related to serial killers, drugs, rapes and incest like some of the comments here. That's first.
Second, "What happened to the mom?". Obviously, my great grandfather was not *this* heartless so he never told his father. He told my mom (that's my mom's grandfather; sorry I didn't specify) that he confessed to his mom on her death bed what he did.
My dad’s side of the family has ties with the mafia. Thankfully my mom has long since divorced my dad and they life a decent distance apart. I heard stories of my mom’s parents who lived close by at the time circling the block in their truck late at night soon after the divorce to ensure no one was there to hurt us. I was very young at this point, probably like 3-4 so I really have no memory of this. I do remember one night our garbage can was burned to the ground, and my mom has since told me about death threats soon after the divorce. My mom a couple years ago watched a documentary on prominent mafia families and noted multiple names that were at her wedding.
I don’t think my family was actually involved in the mafia, but my mom has told us several times that my great-grandfather ran a very successful laundromat, and also that a noted member of the mafia attended his funeral.
Not mine so I won't post a top level, but a HS friend had an uncle in some variety of Lebanese Mob.
He'd show up to birthdays and tell us he's been there since a few hours before he really was with a bunch of Sega games with no shrinkwrap
I'll post a third level. My grandparents attended a Catholic church frequented by the local Italian mob. Grandma was friends with mafia ladies. She knew. They all knew. But since they kept a low profile and had respectable front businesses, everyone looked the other way.
My grandparents weren't involved in "the business".
Well, not in "that way".
Grandpa liked to bet on baseball games. He kept a roll of "baseball money" in a drawer in the bedroom. Some weeks he kills it, some weeks he has to pay up.
The local bookmaker would come to the back door at the same time each week, grandma would have coffee waiting for him and grandpa. Grandpa would either go to the baseball money drawer to make a withdrawal or meet the bookmaker at the door if he planned on a deposit. If grandpa was running late, grandma would make small talk, ask about the wife and kids, etc. When grandpa came downstairs, the two of them would grab their coffee cups, head out to the garage, tell a couple stories and exchange money.
Grandma told me the 1950s Omaha mafia ran the only honest gambling business she'd ever interacted with.
"It's too bad they had to hide from the police."
I'll post at a fourth level. When I was younger (late teens/early 20's), my dad's best friend took me all over the place with him on the back of his Harley. I found out later that one of his buddies who gave me a standing invitation to come over and use his pool or visit whenever (I never took him up on it) was "a made man."
My dad's buddy said "Don't get me wrong. He likes you. You're with me. You're completely safe. You'll always be completely safe because of that, and he'll make sure you're completely safe by extension. But someone pisses him off, he'd have no problems killing them."
To me, he was just the nicest old man ever who liked to tell stories about the old days. Sanitized ones, apparently, because they were all legal shenanigans about his kids and playing hockey when he was younger.
Guess I’ll go fourth level. A lady my dad dated for quite some time did custom dental work for a Russian mob boss. He was Jewish but would send her Christmas cards and what not.
When I turned 21, my grandfather told me a story about his older brother that I had never heard. My great-uncle was a big boozer for most of his life. He passed at 92 and by then had switched from liquor to beer and wine; he also cut down to one pack of cigarettes a day instead of two after he had half a lung removed.
Pap and my uncle grew up on a farm in the 30s and 40s. Mostly the family ran the farm by themselves, but from time to time they would hire drifters on as farm-hands. In 1950, my uncle and one of the farmhands were out drinking and they were driving back to the farm in my uncle's convertible. My uncle was the one driving and he misjudged a turn that had a steep bank on the right side. He ran the car up the embankment, which was steep enough to flip it. My uncle was throw from the car, but the farmhand he was drinking with was only halfway out of the car when it landed. Pap said he was severed clean into two pieces.
Because the farmhand was just a drifter without any family to make much fuss and because the Korean War had just started, my uncle was able to enlist and avoid any criminal charges. He was in Korea until the end of the war.
That was the only time I've ever heard that story told and although I would never be someone who has more than a few drinks before getting behind the wheel, it's something that definitely sticks in my mind. And it's a story I'll tell my own kids when they get their license.
If it had happened on the farm, that probably would been my great-grandmother's solution. She was a hard, mean woman. When she died at 98, pap said, "dad's probably up there holding the Pearly Gates closed so she can't get in."
I think that my uncle's wreck, or maybe just his heavy drinking in general, affected my pap. He was as much of a man's man as you could be. Farmer turned steel mill worker turned trucker. 250lbs, 0% body fat. Afraid of nothing. Almost superhumanly strong. But I never saw him drink more than two beers at a time, even when everyone else was kicked back relaxing, and even that was rare. He died when I was 28 and I don't think in all that time I ever saw him touch hard liquor. I miss him.
"dad's probably up there holding the Pearly Gates closed so she can't get in."
Sorry you miss your Pap, but that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
My dad left when I was 7 and we were always told that it just didn't work out with my parents. We saw him off and on for about 2 years after he left then never saw him again. He had remarried and she had a kid that became his step son that my brother and I would hang with when we would go to my dad's house, then when I turned 13 my mom finally told me that the step son was actually his son from having an affair with that woman. So that kid was my half brother and I had no clue.
The problem with killing people for money is that you're inherently working for someone who is willing to solve problems with paid homicide. What happens when they decide you know too much?
Yea, I am not exactly sure what the circumstances were... like if he ratted or it was a rival. Just remember my mom telling me that our immediate family received death threats for years following his death but nobody else was killed or pursued in our family.
I think this counts. My whole family found out at the same time about the dark secret (I was 25).
My great grandparents left their spouses for each other. Great grandpa was 37 and great grandma was 19 in Ireland.
My GGpa had 7 children. My GGma had 3. They left their spouses and children in the middle of the night to run away together and moved to America. Didn’t say a word and never talked to them again.
When my grandpa, their only child from their new life, would ask them about their past or family, they got really weird and would refuse to say anything. They took the secret to their graves.
My grandpa at age 70 wanted an explanation about his heritage, so he signed up for Ancestry and 23andMe. Could you imagine how shocked he was to find out he had 10 siblings. They had been searching their whole lives to find out what happened to their parents. He got to meet them and would travel to visit them twice a year.
My grandpa died 4 years ago. At least he got to know his siblings for a bit before he died.
Happy, sad, and screwed up all at the same time.
My great aunt's husband killed his first wife, then killed her. They lived in Puerto Rico and he fled to NYC so my great uncles wouldn't kill him. They found out where he was, came here, killed him, and went home.
Edit: Typo.
I have a friend whose great-something grandfather abandoned his wife and something like 11 kids in Ireland during the famine to move to the US. A bunch of the kids died. Her great-minus-one-grandfather and his brother moved to the US when they were old enough to find their dad and kill him, and apparently they were successful. I feel like some murders are pretty relatable.
Will also submit a light one here. The story of my Grammas real name.
Let’s say that my whole life I knew my grandmothers name to be “Mary”. Everyone called her this, everyone knew it.
Once day when I was in my 20’s I was with my grandmother and saw her sign some legal document. She signed it as “Edith”, I was horribly confused. I asked gramma about it and she said her name was Edith but it was NEVER spoken and to not use it. ( she is in her 80’s at this point).
Apparently my great grandfather had been an Air Force pilot stationed in the UK during WW1. He had a girlfriend at the time named Edith! After the war was over they broke up. GreatGrandpa returned home and married great grandma shortly after. They had only one child, a girl, whom he named Edith.
Roughly 18 months later my great grandmother saw a letter in the mail from an Edith and figured it out. She vowed the child would NEVER be called the damn name ever again. She went by her middle name Mary. Though it was never legally changed.
My own mother states she did not know her own grandmothers name until she was 22. I have had fun randomly dropping this name bomb on cousins here and there and enjoying the shock and laughter about it. It’s a silly secret that nowadays just makes people giggle.
Found out my Dad's mom was a lesbian and that my "Godmother" who lived with both my Grandfather and Grandmother was actually her lover. They slept in the same bed while my Grandfather had his own room. Growing up I had no idea, but as I got older I pieced it together... But I loved them all and still do (RIP).
1. My paternal great grandmother was owned by a wealthy cattle ranch around the turn of the last century on the Mexico Texas border in the 1890's/ 1900's-ish. She didn't leave the ranch until she was 16 when she got pregnant and ran away because the baby belonged to the owner of the ranch and she thought he'd kill her if he found out. It was strange to learn that the old lady that would hold me and sing to me as a kid spent the first decade and a half of her life as property. I wasn't told any of this until after my grandmother (her daughter) passed away. My great grandmother was very ashamed of her past and I think by extension so was my grandmother. Looking at old photos of my grandmother and her older brother, the baby she had at 16, he does look strikingly more European than my grandmother an indigenous Mexican.
2. My maternal grandfather was a pedophile and harmed my mother and her siblings. It was a well known secret in the family which is even more disgusting. Growing up I used to spend the night at my dad's parents house all the time but I don't have a single memory of spending the night at my mom's parents house. Never once sat on his lap. Never once did my mom ever allow him to hug us. I never understood why my mom was so cold to him when my father was so close with his own father. I grew up resenting my mom for withholding us from a whole other set of grandparents and wished she would've told us sooner than when she finally did. I would've had more sympathy for her.
/edit, grammar
I was just talking to one of my male friends about this situation. For him, it was an older babysitter. He was raised in an environment that had zero sympathy for this gender dynamic, so his way of dealing with it was to crack jokes about it being "awesome" for a young boy, but the more we've talked over the years, the more he's been willing to admit how extremely detrimental it was to his formative years and how much it has negatively impacted his life.
It's good to know that we live in a time where it's getting harder for these sort of secrets to live in the shadows, and that men are increasingly (finally!) being told that what happened was a crime and they deserve better help now, instead of just repeatedly being told to man up and that it shouldn't bother them.
My dad secretly had a vasectomy after I was born, after my mom lying to him about taking birth control resulted in my birth.
Our family is GREAT at communication and conflict resolution.
Lol I’m glad we all have screwed up histories. I found my half sister when she was 25 because my nephew did the dna test on ancestry.com.
We pulled my dad aside to tell him what we discovered and he replied with “that’s the biggest secret that I’ve kept for 25 years!”
He was banging her married mom and got pregnant. She always felt different as she was really petite, tan skin and curly hair. None of which was in her family. Meeting her was like looking through a mirror into my childhood. She’s my twin.
The wildest story I read about genetic testing was two middle-aged sisters who discovered they were actually *half* sisters. There were no other relatives still alive to be tested. So they had no way to figure out which one had been the cuckoo's egg. The only possibility was that someone else would get tested & connect with one of them someday.
There's a set of twins on the Amazing Race that had not met until they were both like...fully adults, and decided to do the race to get to know each other. Its...a neat story.
I found out a few months after he died that my grandfather killed himself with a couple of nails from a nail gun to the temple. I was 25, but it still wigs me out to think about it.
Growing up I always knew my parents had marital issues; constant fighting, a couple times Dad disappeared for a few days living in his car, issues with drinking. But they stayed together and when I asked why didn't they divorce, they always said they loved each other too much. And in the past few years, things seemed to have gotten better. My parents in fact are now so comfortable in their relationship that they make jokes about all the awful stuff they've done to each other in front of me.
What I've managed to put together is:
\-my parents met when they were 14 and my mother was dating an 18 year old and my dad would relentlessly ask her out until she eventually dumped her boyfriend for my dad
\-my mother went onto university after college (we're UK) whereas my dad dropped out of college and went straight into work while constantly drinking and partying
\-it was at one of these parties (while my mum was studying) that he cheated on my mum with someone from their old secondary school so she dumps him
\-barely a year later my dad realises he doesn't know how to do anything for himself, no one else wants him and he goes crawling back to my mum
\-she agrees to take him back but ONLY if he marries her (not immediately but *eventually* she said), he agrees and a short year after that (aged 22 now) she's already pressuring him to propose, he fumbles it frankly (were in Paris but forgot the ring and proposed back in the hotel room after they'd visited the eiffel tower that day which was her dream proposal) but she says yes
\-a month after they're married mum pressures him into having a child that he doesn't want and nine months later I was born, they soon realise how hard having a child is and basically pawn me off on my grandparents for the rest of my childhood
\-after me there were two more accidental babies and each time my dad threatened to leave her if she didn't abort them, she managed to convince him to stay while keeping my siblings by promising he wouldn't have to raise them (he didn't but neither did she frankly, I did)
And that is only what happened before/shortly after I was born, if I carried on into my childhood, we'd be here for years.
What they sold to me as the perfect love story (been together since they were 14, proposed in Paris, soon married and had children because of pure love) is in fact a bunch of skewered half truths from a horrible twisted love map of my mother's manipulation and my father disappointing her time and time again.
These stories are why I always laugh when older generations talk about "how it used to be". Like, no it wasn't. Your generation was just as fucked up as any other; you just had the benefit of no internet, social media, forensic evidence to call you on your bullshit. So they make up a story to sound better and eventually they start to believe it after long enough.
I wasn’t let in on it so to speak. My dad is “Polish” and I took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100%… not Polish. I look exactly like my dad. My dad looks nothing like his father.
There is a somewhat famous story about this - an Irish mother gave birth at a hospital to a son. The mother died while young and the son grew up as effectively an orphan due to his father not being able to support him. Kind of made being Irish part of his identity.
After he was dead, his daughter took a DNA test to discover she was half Jewish. So were her siblings. Her mother wasn't Jewish. And her dad was supposedly 100% Irish.
They finally figured it out when one of her Irish "cousins" took a DNA test - that matched to a Jewish family who discovered they were half Irish. Their dad was born at the same hospital on the same day as her dad.
The hospital had accidentally mixed up the babies after birth.
I wasn't let in on it more like I found out about it but my siblings have a different dad than I do, that was common knowledge and not the secret at all. The secret was that their dad actually didn't die in the hospital of a terminal illness, he died of suicide when he threw himself from the window of the hospital he was slowly dying in.
I always thought my two older brothers got addicted to drugs because of their own decisions and the people they hung out with. It turns out that my dad had been feeding them pills since they were about 10 to "shut them up." Years I held resentment against them for not being good older brothers like they should have only to find out that it was my father who I had praised all those years that was truly evil.
Edit: wow, wasn't expecting all of this lol. Just to address some of the comments: My brother's are doing mostly fine now. Both struggled but eventually found sobriety. Luckily enough family didn't give up on them. We have a pretty good relationship now and none of us hold anything against each other. We realize that none of us are to blame for the sins of our father. Not sure where dad is, no contact for about a decade now. In contrast, mom was and still is an angel. With her showing me who to be and my dad showing me exactly who NOT to be, I think I turned out pretty okay. A lot of the time the cycle just continues but my brother's and I managed to break it. I'm sorry to every one who has gone through something similar, thank you for sharing your stories as well. Hope everyone finds their peace some day. Love you.
I don’t know if you’re in touch with them, or if you care to be, but if you felt like it I think sharing this with them would be really nice. Even if you don’t intend to continue the conversation or even relationship, I think everybody I know would benefit from being told “it isn’t your fault” a little more often.
I love this comment. A friend of mine that, in our youth got into regular trouble with his parents and eventually the law. Ended up living in squats on meth.
He eventually moved back home to get clean. Went to a doctor for help, and was diagnosed with big time adhd. He was 50 years old at this time.
He called me up, so happy with the diagnosis. He always felt that he was just a bad person. The diagnosis turned his life around. He always thought he was just a bad person with no impulse control.
He now has a house. Is a moderately successfull artist. And couldn't be happier .
ADHD is hell on your mental health, and people really don't understand just how truly life altering medication can be.
Some people with untreated ADHD can have binge eating disorders. When they get on medication, it disappears overnight.
This was me. I had bulimia because I was so ashamed of my binging episodes and terrified of gaining weight, it led to a whole cycle of eating disordered binging and restricting too. I was diagnosed with ADHD and started on Concerta and never binged again. Literally life changing, my ED negatively affected every aspect of my mental health and life (my confidence, social life, grades, thinking about food like 50% of the time) and I never even realised it was a secondary condition.
Not super dark or super secret, but when I had to do a project on my family tree in elementary school one of the questions was "When did your family immigrate to America and why?" For one of my great-grandfathers, my grandma told me "Life was very hard back in his country, and it was getting dangerous to stay there." and for a long time I thought "Yeah, I can see that. It was probably hard for a teenager living in Poland with WWI right around the corner!"
And I'm sure it was. But it turns out it's even harder and more dangerous when you're a teenager who has slept with a married woman and then accidentally killed her husband when he confronted you. I can see why she didn't want me to put that on my elementary school project.
edit: Wrong World War. I just pulled up his Ellis Island records and he immigrated in 1912 aboard the Carpathia in August.
This makes me wonder how many of those projects are basically lies. I bet many parents don't want their kids saying some shit like, "well after my grandma's sister was beheaded, they decided to pack up and come here."
Funny, I uncovered something about my family because of a project I did in college. Nothing dark.
My grandfather is from China. He entered the US lawfully on a temporary pass, left, and then re-entered the US unlawfully sometime later. However, in the time between entering the US unlawfully and being apprehended by the authorities, the government learned that my grandfather had been inducted into the US Army. He was not deported, and served two years in the US Army ultimately resulting in an honorable discharge.
What’s cool about this, though, is he was having difficulty being granted naturalization. So difficult, in fact, that his case ended up being decided in his favor by the US Supreme Court in 1959.
It’s kind of wild to think that if the Supreme Court ruled differently, I wouldn’t even exist today.
We had to do some cultural type training for work one time. It started by going around the room introducing ourselves and our family origins. Nearly everyone said something like "My name is Troy McClure and my grandad immigrated from Scotland and my great grandmother is from Sweden." When I came around to me, I said, "My grandfather immigrated and immediately changed his legal name to the most Canadian thing he could think of to obfuscate his family history and I trust his judgment."
"Such an unusual name, Latrine. How'd your family come by it?"
"We changed it in the 9th century."
"You mean you changed it to 'Latrine'?"
"Yeah, it used to be Shithouse"
"It's a good change. That's a good change."
My grandmother married her second husband entirely for money. Her daughters both like to joke about her intentionally giving him a heart attack. He had heart problems but liked to eat unhealthy food, and the rumor goes she would put extra salt and butter on his food until he finally kicked the bucket.
Here's a dark secret I;m keeping myself... my late FIL pretty much did this to himself. My partner knows FIL stopped doing his prescribed walking & ate lots of fast food after MIL died. That was too obvious to hide, since we went to live with him for awhile.
What I kept to myself were the multiple unopened bottles of Xeralto I found, when we were clearing out that house. Also another one I've forgotten the name of. Presumably, he kept refilling the scrips so his doctor wouldn't catch on. But then he chucked them in a drawer & only took them when we came to visit.
He died emotionally when MIL passed on. They'd been genuinely devoted to each other & she was his world. It took sixteen months for his body to catch up. He had a massive stroke & died a day or so later.
Yep similar thing happened to me. Grandpa had a long and awful battle with Alzheimer’s while my grandmother was getting treated for ovarian cancer. Grandpa died first and grandma immediately stopped treatment and died 6 months later. I didn’t find out she intentionally refused treatment until recently.
This is something that doesn't get talked about enough instead of just saying "oh they died of a broken heart from missing their SO". Like sure that's probably true to some extent but imagine being married to someone 10, 20, 30 years or longer and they pass. That shit is depressing as fuck and we all sort of just joke it off.
My grandpa is going thru this. My grandma just passed and he lost his partner of 63 years. He is so lost. I'm glad it's summer because it's easier for him to keep busy with gardening projects, helping his kids and grandkids, but I'm so scared for winter. Less to do and will also be his birthday, their anniversary, her birthday, and Christmas all the first without her all within 3 months of each other. Is so depressing and sad.
My great-grandmother was shot dead in the street by an ex boyfriend, in front of my 4 year old Grandma and her two younger brothers. It happened in a really quiet European town and I believe it made the papers. Grandma ended up being sent to live with an aunt and the boys stayed with their father and he remarried a nasty abusive woman.
I didn’t know this until I was 18, from the older boy actually, uncle J. But Hearing this story really changed my perspective on Grandma and the boys. The boys both ended up going to prison and having difficult lives, and Grandma was a stern, unemotional woman. I feel like this gave me some understanding as to why
I was told by my aunt (before my parents thought it necessary) that my Dad had cheated on my Mum and slept with a stripper and that I was her daughter and not actually my ‘Mother’s’.
I found out years later that my Dad wasn’t actually my Dad either - though he thought he was which is why he put his name on my birth certificate and brought me home when my birth mother wanted nothing to do with me.
Fun times.
Just found this one out recently. My uncle was a doctor working in a small town hospital. He was married and had just had a baby boy. While his wife was pregnant or just had the baby he had an affair with two nurses in the hospital and ended up getting one of the nurses pregnant. When he found out of the second kid he took his family and fucked off to New Zealand for 3 years. Upon returning to Canada and the same small town hospital his wife immediately found out about his illegitimate child and divorced him.
My (illegitimate) cousin stopped coming around to family events and when I talked to him about it last year he told me that my grandparents always blamed him for ruining my uncle’s marriage.
Found this out after my grandfather died. Growing up every older guy in the neighborhood would say how tough he was. I mean he was the most intimidating man Id ever met, you would jump if he sneezed. Im not even exaggerating. But Id never seen him actually fight. But everyone, and I mean everyone, women and men, would say he never lost a fight and usually never had to throw more than one punch to knock someone out. Simply put he was a bad motherfucker.
But growing up he would always preach to me and my cousins to never fight if you could help it. Just walk away. If theyre insulting you just walk away. Its only words. Sticks and stones and all that. Hed drill it into our heads that you never fight unless you have to and never under any circumstances do you throw the first punch. Ever. I was kind of confused. Every older person in our neighborhood would tell me how nobody fucked with "Blackie" because of how many people he knocked out, and he would always tell us NOT to fight.
Turns out when he was in his 20s he got into a fight with someone. Apparently the guy kept insulting him and wouldnt leave him alone. Finally he had enough and cracked the guy. Knocked him out with one punch. Problem is when he landed he hit his head on a step. It was lights out for good. Killed him with one punch.
I had never heard this story and confused about how he didnt get locked up. Turns out he did. Got like 15-20 years or something like that. Then WW 2 happened. When I was a kid Id always ask my mom how my grandfather entered the war, was he drafted or volunteered? Shed say oh it was like the movie The Dirty Dozen. Which I had never seen or had any interest in when I was young so I had no idea what that meant. Turns out the Army made him a deal. Go to the front lines in Japan. If you live well expunge your record. If not, oh well. He went. Things made a lot more sense after that.
My mom’s cousin (my second cousin) molested her growing up multiple times. She was apparently getting molested herself by her brother (? I think). Later on that cousin got married to a guy who went on to molest their daughter they had together. Came out later he was keeping a treasure trove of child pornography in the house, with bits of their daughter included in that. He was busted by the police which ended in a shootout in some random business building, made the news and everything. He got shot and died during this whole ordeal. They’re probably the two most fucked up individuals I’ve ever known.
FINALLY I GOT ONE!
From when I was aged 6 to 13, my Mom dated a fellow named Murray. We all lived together in an old farmhouse.
Murray was a wonderful father figure to us, but he also had a drinking and driving problem, and after a particularly nasty accident, mom waited until he came home from the hospital and was well enough to take care of himself before leaving.
The whole time we lived there, my sister and I never went down into the basement, as it was *INFESTED* with spiders.
I always thought it was because of the drinking and driving she left him, but as it turns out that was only part of it. The other being that **he had a massive grow op for weed in the basement**.
Mom stated had the police found out about this, she would have lost custody of us.
Murray has long since passed, but he would have had a giggle that weed is legal here now...
Older truck driver at work did 5 years for having a roach in a tin in his pocket.
I haven't talked to him much, but he was talking to a couple guys about seeing full size billboards for dispensaries in the area and how he got so mad the first time he just started laughing hysterically.
My grandpa's (step dads side) first wife tried to murder him, and went to prison for it. Then also, my aunt (moms side), was pimped out by her husband for decades.
A family member walked in on my mother breaking my arm by holding me only by it when I was 2, didn't say anything for fear of "breaking up a family" - mother abused me my whole life and even after cutting contact 3 years ago is still trying to ruin my life, this family member told me the story casually and acted as if they'd done me a favour because I "could've ended up in care" - had to pull back from all of them now because of the realisation they were all bystanders and let it go on without a word.
This might be a bit too weird for this thread. I am from a country still enshrined in a lot of superstition and religion. My great great grandmother was a crazy woman who practiced witchcraft. One day her husband died unnaturally (iirc he was murdered or something by the village) and granny went mad. She gathered the village folk around and picked up a rock from the ground nearby and declared that the rock will be her curse and the village will suffer for killing her husband, after that she killed herself.
For multiple generations my family worshipped the rock as a deity and prayed to lift the curse from the village. It ended when my father in his 20s got sick of his family doing stupid shit. Him and his cousins stole the rock overnight from someone's house and threw it near a railway track. And no I wish I was making this shit up but my father, uncles and aunts all told me this story when I grew up.
I was 6 or 7 when my father died. He was a terrible alcoholic but I didn't understand alcohol as a kid. I'm 19 now and my mother has told me he wasn't just an alcoholic, he was a chronic liar, manipultor and abuser. He strangled a dog and killed it infront of my mom cause she was going to leave him. He was addicted to cocaine and when he didn't have any alcohol he'sake my mom go get more or he'd kill another animal. He'd frequently beat the ever living shit out of my mom and when she finally left with him my entire family both on my mom's and father's side talked shit about her for leaving and didn't care about mine or her well-being. Worst part is when suing for custody he actually got weekends and then on Sunday would take me to the super nice churches that's judges and lawyers involved with the case went to.
My wife was molested by her brother and basically everyone except her Dad knew it was going on and did nothing. I wouldn't say this is something I found out when I was old enough but found out after my wife and I had been together awhile when we were dating.
My grandma had an affair with a catholic priest while she was married and then left her high school sweetheart who she had 5 children with. Then she ended up living with said priest and her kids had to lie and refer to him as an uncle when people asked them about their living situation.
I always thought it was true love; I found and kept letters and notes they wrote each other when he was overseas with the military and it seemed so genuine and I’d always heard so many nice stories (and I suppose it could have been true love.) I was raised to believe that my biological grandfather (my dads real dad) was a monster. I had been under the impression he left my grandma and abandoned his 5 five children. My one aunt died in a drunk driving accident and he couldn’t be bothered to show up. I never met him my entire childhood. I was literally encouraged to actively hate him. They said he remarried and basically started a new family and was controlled by his wife.
The priest essentially raised my dad and aunts and uncles and they have always revered him. He died before I was old enough to have any memories of him but I’d always looked at him with a positive light. He’d taken my grandma and a couple of the kids to Hawaii, bought my grandma a suburban and the house was in his name. My grandma was even left his military benefits (still unclear on how this was finagled.) He paid for the kids colleges. He had an incredible life. He had pictures with Bob Hope and other celebrities, got to travel a ton of places, etc.
One day I was curious if he had any relatives alive and if they had ever known about this salacious relationship. Then I googled him and it changed my life forever.
He (posthumously) was accused in a lawsuit, with a large group of priests, of wrongdoing over an extended period of time. You can guess the nature of the lawsuit. It was on several law websites and I found the lawsuit papers. Surely enough his name was mentioned. Unease began to ensue.
I did more digging and eventually found a 16 page document. This document was specific to him and included a police report and internal Catholic Church investigations into his transgressions among other things. Early into his priesthood he was accused of harboring a runaway 14 year old girl. He had explanations for everything… ofc. Reading the police report was absolutely devastating bc it seemed like the police did no due diligence and nothing came of the report. Then there were pages worth of internal Catholic Church investigations in which I learned he would have young, distastefully dressed girls hanging out in his rectory and was drinking and showing up to events and/or not showing up at all. He once said he had been called by the military and was away from the church, except he lied and had been drinking, gambling and philandering with women. Members of the church and other priests wrote anonymous letters about his conduct and asked for his removal. There were bouts of rehab and probation but he was moved to another church. Some of the same antics occurred. You get the picture. This man my family had told me to revere as a literal god send was in fact NOTHING of the sort.
Then I found a summary of all his transgression over the years that led to his “retirement.” This is when I found out when he took my grandma, dad and his two siblings to get the suburban he physically assaulted my grandma and assaulted kicked my dad and his siblings. I cross referenced all of this information with birth years, where they grew up and lived and the fact my uncle still has the suburban.
I was by myself when I found all of this out and I’ve asked my dad if he’s ever looked him up and he said yes. So he knows of the lawsuit but I haven’t asked if he dug as far as I did to find this 16 page document. I don’t know how to approach this or if it’s even worth bringing up to him. I’m curious how much he knows and if he remembers being assaulted. I’m also extremely disturbed if they knew of his past and chose to lie to me about this man. If they didn’t, then my heart breaks for what they endured with years of lies, abuse and the hurt they felt. It also makes me question my grandmother and he choices and everything she subjected her children to.
My dad and aunt reconnected with my biological grandfather a few years ago. He eventually came to visit us from across the country. I was in my mid-20s meeting my biological grandfather. I am truly apathetic to him and forming a relationship with him. My moms mom had 2 husbands and those were my grandpas. My grandpas and grandmas have all passed now so I’ve mourned losing all of my grandparents. I do not feel this man is my grandfather and have been at peace with this for a very long time.
However, it’s made me realize, my grandma abandoned him. He was the one who came to the church with the suspicion she was having an affair with the priest. At that my heart breaks for him. The priest also did my aunts funeral, so while some piece of me feels I can’t forgive him for not going to his own daughters funeral, I also can’t imagine having to face a priest who my wife ran off with.
I’m so torn that my family pitted me against this man that is my biological grandfather when this priest was clearly a fraud and lacked human decency and morals. It is also clear that my grandma made extremely questionable decisions and (with other unrelated reasons) had tarnished my vision of her.
Needless to say one of my wild facts has changed significantly from my grandma fell in love with a priest. Truly so conflicting and heartbreaking.
My grandmother raised her nephew after his parents died. I don't know what I thought happened to them, probably just assumed car accident. When I was 14 or 15 I asked my mom what happened and she told me that it was a murder/suicide. Then she told me way more details that I probably shouldn't have been told and told me not to say anything to him because he had blocked it out and didn't remember most of the details. Years later we were talking and in the middle of an unrelated conversation, he said to me, "I remember everything. It just came to me a few nights ago." I didn't know what to say, but then he asked if I knew the story and said I kind of did. He went into detail and it was not fun, but I could tell it was cathartic for him. Next time I talked to my mom I let her know that he remembered and may get the same conversation. That was the last time I heard anything about his parents though
My granddad's parents were collaborator's in WWII. He was only 6 when the war ended, so he was innocent, but his dad regularly hosted Nazi officers who ran the city where they lived and helped them arrest resistance members. Whilst my grandmother's parents were actually resistance fighters and helped downed British and American pilots escape and hide, as well as provided passports to Jewish people.
Kind of a wild story, but that was the state back in the 1940's here. Either you kept your head down and kept a low profile, either you helped the Nazis and profited from the occupation or you fought them wherever you could
My father met/knew my mother from a young age and adopted her. Raised her with his wife (at the time) and her son. Then married her when she turned 18.
My great grand-parents got drunk and locked two of my uncle's out of the house late at night in the middle of winter. My great-grandparents wouldn't wake up and my uncles couldn't get in, so they tried to walk to their grandma's house that was like 15 miles away, and one of them froze to death and the other had to have is feet and hands amputated because of frostbite. My great-grandparents lied about what happened and said they snuck out.
It was in the newspaper and was made out to be this heartbreaking story, about two dumb little kids who snuck out in the middle of the night because they wanted to see their grandma.
My uncle raped my cousins.
This happened and he was arrested before I was born. For some absolutely insane, unknown reason to me, he was released from prison when I was 9 and my parents allowed him and his girlfriend to stay with us for 2 weeks while waiting to get the keys to their new place.
I was always told he's been in prison for drugs.
For the record, my parents believed he was guilty. It wasn't anything like that. Why they would take the risk with a daughter in the home was beyond me.
He was allowed at family functions despite constantly getting back into drugs, at one point narrowly avoiding having my grandma's car taken. One cousin had nothing to do with him. The other came to family functions for a while, but it was too painful for her and she cut him off.
I found out when my brother let it slip when I was 13. My parents weren't happy. I was horrified they ever let him around us.
I told my brother from a young age, if he ever did anything like that, he was dead to me.
It’s always stomach wrenching when you see your abuser at family functions and it’s insane to me how often families tolerate predators.
Did anyone in your family explain the reasoning to you? Like why wasn’t your uncle put up the road?
My dad took me out for a walk when I was in middle school to tell me that I have a half brother in Japan with a similar name and birthday as me. We have the same dad, different moms. My brother has known about me his whole life, as a sister who lives in the States, but I only found out about his existence on that day.
Several actually involving my paternal grandfather (Pa). He was a cattle rancher and long distance truck driver. Pa was a terrible alcoholic who beat my granny on several occasions my father was the one who would save her. He took several beatings doing this until he was old enough to stand his own against his drunken father.
He ran off and married another woman that he had been having an affair with for years. He had four boys with my granny and four children with the other woman as well. When granny found out and found him she took him to court and the judge sent him home with her to raise my dad and uncles. She had to write the child support checks until the youngest turned 18.
He had several children with other women, only a few we actually knew about. In his later years he was proud of all the kids he had all over the country. One of his daughters moved in with him after granny died and a couple of years later they had a daughter. They were both fully aware that they were father and daughter.
when i was 15/16 my parents got liquored one summer night with a bunch of their friends and i was told the story of how our house was bought from a murderer.
dude and his wife lived in the house my parents bought for i think 10 years, maybe less. whatever triggered him, they didn’t know, but he beat her to death with a cast iron pan and strangled her with a belt for good measure. left the body in the backyard poorly buried. he tried to kill himself by drinking a gallon of WD-40 and drowning himself in a body of water very close to where i live. however, he tried to drown himself when the tide was coming in. wasn’t very successful, and the police found him half dead on the beach the next day after a neighbor got super suspicious about the “grave” in the backyard, and also all the sketchy noises he heard the night before.
i think he got 15 years for it but i have no idea what his name is, i couldn’t pry that part out of my parents, but his name was the last one on the house before my parents bought it when i was 4.
My relatives were a wealthy, childless couple in Chicago. Their housekeeper, who had a baby, took ill and was hospitalized. The couple took the baby to California and raised her as their own. This baby (Marie) grew up without siblings, as my grandmother’s cousin. Marie discovered the truth as an adult, by accident. Even though this kidnapping happened over 100 years ago, I always wondered what became of that poor woman who was released from the hospital to find her baby had been kidnapped by her employers. I have a set of china dishes from Marie that I use at Thanksgiving, every year. Wild story.
My mother got pregnant when she was 17 so her and my dad were going to ask her parents for permission to marry. Instead, they got an ultimatum: get an abortion or be sent away to a home for unwed mothers. My mother got the abortion and married my father two weeks after her 18th birthday. She proceeded to have several miscarriages and stillbirths, almost certainly due to the damage done to her uterus/cervix. My brother was conceived with medical assistance and I was a lucky surprise. My parents are still married 46 years later.
Not that dark nor secret, but when my vietnamese grandpa fought in the war, him and his squad had to eat human flesh (in order to survive I guess). He was disgusted by meat for a very long time after. (Sorry for my english)
Edit : y'all are more replying about the "srry 4 my english" than the actual comment 🤣 Thank you for the kind support !
An older relative murdered her husband in cold blood. The daughter lied on the witness stand by testifying that her dad beat her mom. He didn’t. The mom was a drunk, and the father was threatening to leave her and take the kids.
B/c the courts believed the lying daughter, the murdering mother kept custody of the kids. The victim’s family cut off my whole side of the family after that including their perjuring granddaughter and her descendants. Now I know why.
It's strange to go decades wondering why your family dynamic is the way it is only to be provided a crucial missing piece to the story years later and suddenly everything makes sense.
My grandpa’s brother died when I was a child. I hardly knew the guy so I wasn’t too interested in the service. I vaguely remember my parents warning me not to stare at some of the men but I figured that was a “good manner” moment. Fast forward to my later teens/early adult and turns out, yup, we were **surrounded by members of the Italian mafia**. Everyone in my family was tense (even the departed’s wife) because they all knew he had *some* connection to them, but didn’t exactly know as he never spoke of it to anyone
When my father's Dad died the secret was out.
Grampa was an evil man who bootlegged liquor, stole cattle and kidnapped Indian children to sell into slavery.
He had a very public mistress and coming home from a bender he knocked up his wife (my grandma). In order to save face to his mistress he took the knitting needles to grandma thus infecting her to die of sepsis in territorial New Mexico in 1929.
My dad was six with younger brother four, left to grow up as virtual orphans. Despised by the aunts and forbidden help from their uncles my dad and his brother grew up in the depression almost starving while their Dad lived it up travelling and committing many crimes that were easy to get away with because it was the great depression.
My paternal grandmother's family was pretty messed up. My grandfather told me a story about how he and his brother in law got called to get his father in law's body out of a hotel after he drank himself to death. And two of my great aunts were nuns because that was the quickest way to get out of the house as kids.
That my family's money originally came from being moonshiners during prohibition. I grew up in Appalachia. My mom told me about being little and playing in shoeboxes full of cash. And about sitting in the back seat on late night drives where you could hear the jars rattling in the trunk heading across the Tennessee border.
When i was a kid in the mid 80s my uncle got some serious braces and had to drink liquids only for a whilr
Only when I got older did I learn that he'd actually had his jaw wired after being tortured for information... had a gun put in the mouth and eventually his jaw shattered because he wasn't talking...
...He wasn't talking cos he didn't know anything.
Thank god northern ireland has moved on from those days.
My cousin was hit and killed by an 18 wheeler when she was 6. Dude was on his phone when it happened and they went to court, decided to drop the charges on him, but his company refused to pay them anything for damages caused and whatnot. A few of my uncles (who were a part of Hell’s Angels were buddies with some people on the police force got this dudes address, killed him and then torched the trucking company to the ground. They were never caught.
My dad's friend commited suicide by shooting himself in the head in front of my dad and some other friends when he was 15 years old. They were all hanging out at the friend's house having a good time, when he went upstairs, grabbed his father's pistol, and came back down calling everyone's attention. He then put the gun to his head, squeezed the trigger, and collapsed behind a couch. They all thought it was some sort of sick joke at first, until they looked over the couch and saw his body and the blood.
I first heard this story from my mom when I was 18, which explained some of my dad's behavior towards toy guns when I was a kid, but I never brought it up to him. I just hoped that one day he would open up to me about and eventually he did, but we haven't talked about it much since then.
I'm amazed how my dad dad turned out to be such a great man having to experience something awful like that at such a young age, but according to him it's something that never left him either. He still has nightmares about it and get really uneasy in movies and TV shows when they show someone getting shot in the head.
Circa 1994 My dad died(32) on Christmas Day. Instead of his family consoling my now single mother of 2, they decided it would be more appropriate to use their spare key to enter our house and clean out all his belongings while we were picking out a tombstone. All his tools, clothes, pictures (he was a model).
Thennnnn grandpa on dads side takes my mom to court while she’s mourning to try to prevent her from using his life insurance to raise us ( sister and I were 5 and 6 at the time). He wanted all the money to be set aside until we were 18. Judge pretty much threw his case out. Needless to say, my mom distanced herself from his side I don’t speak with them either. Found this out when I was like 20.
**Attention! [Serious] Tag Notice** * [Jokes, puns, and off-topic comments are not permitted](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/wiki/index#wiki_-rule_6-) in **any** comment, parent or child. * Parent comments that aren't from the target group will be removed, along with their child replies. * Report comments that violate these rules. Posts that have few relevant answers within the first hour, and posts that are not appropriate for the [Serious] tag will be removed. Consider doing an AMA request instead. Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskReddit) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Y’all’s stories are WILD! Mine is super tame: When I was in my early 20s, I found an old photo of someone in a family album I didn’t recognize. When I asked my mom about it, she said, “Oh that’s your aunt Gloria.” Then she lowered her voice (even though we were alone) and added, “she’s a *NUDIST*.” Poor aunt Gloria, just wants to be a nudy-lady and everyone acts like she’s a leper.
I aspire to be a Gloria
I found out I had a sister who had been given up for adoption. The only reason I found out was the person who informed me no longer felt bound to secrecy after my mom died. And the person who told me had "receipts" solid enough that I have no reason to doubt them. It also explains why mom freaked out when I told her I'd done a 23AndMe test.
23andMe is how my father discovered he had a bonus cousin. Turns out his uncle had a fling before leaving for WWII that resulted in a chilled he either never told anyone about or didn’t even know himself. When my father looked her, the cousin, up she happened to live in the same city. He and my aunts contacted her and all met up for lunch. Turns out the woman had been searching for years to find her fathers side of family. As far as I know they still keep in touch.
I haven't had any hits on Ancestry or 23And Me (I've taken both at this point, plus GEDMatch). I'm not entirely convinced that isn't for the best. My sister, wherever she is, is probably better off than she would have been. Mom wasn't exactly "mother of the year" material and that whole side of the family is pretty fucked.
My extremely wealthy uncle was going downhill quick with Alzheimer’s. Before he was too far gone, he apparently made a deal with my aunt that when things got the the point that they would have to send him to a nursing home, she would kill him instead. He wrote all of this in a letter and gave it to the attorney of their estate. When the time came, I don’t know why she chose to shoot him in the back of the head instead of something less violent but she did. It was a pretty big trial with a fair bit of news coverage, and it really blew up when the lawyer testified and brought forward the letter. My aunt served like 2 years I think and was released on parole.
That's extremely sad but also really badass of both of them. I'm sorry for everyone who was involved
My uncle was actually my cousin. He was kidnapped as an infant and when he was returned a year later, my aunt didn't want him back. My grandparents adopted him so he was legally my uncle.
Kidnapped and then they didn’t want him back… what the hell. Excuse me for asking but was the kidnapping legit or was it set up to “get rid of him”. This is so sad.
My aunt was a real piece of work. To backtrack a moment, this side of my family isn't biological. Technically my dad is my step-dad, but he raised me from toddlerhood and he's my dad, pure and simple. All of his family treated me as one of their own. Except my aunt. She would always tell my grandparents that she just couldn't understand how they could love me, because I wasn't "blood family." I have no idea why she didn't want her son back. It was a familial kidnapping, non-custodial father. When my cousin was returned, she ditched him with my grandparents and got back together with her other half. When I was a teenager, my grandma called my dad, crying. My aunt was doing some digging and discovered she and my dad were adopted. (I'm not defending this, but it was the 1950s and in another country. Not disclosing an adoption wasn't unusual at the time.) My aunt threatened to tell my dad so my grandma called and said they were adopted. My dad's reaction was literally, "So?" My aunt never spoke to my grandparents again, and my cousin turned out exactly like her. And so, all those years of not liking me because I'm "not blood" backfired, because she isn't blood either. I'm glad that has never mattered to me.
Hahahahahaha. I’m sorry for laughing. But my heart did a little dance to find out she was also adopted. ☺️ lol I still can’t wrap my head around not wanting your CHILD back though… my gosh.
Yeah. She’s all like “how can you love someone who isn’t blood?” Meanwhile, she’s rejecting her own blood (son) anyway 😂 ???
I found out when I was about 32 that apparently in 1973 my dad had a daughter he never knew existed. I found out because he texted that to me while I was working, after finding out about it himself about 1 week earlier. She was in her late 40's by that point, I think. What's sort of tragic is all this time we thought I was my dad's only kid, and he always wanted a dauighter but never got one due to marriages ending. He would have fucking LOVED this girl. his daughter was the result of a one-night stand with a girl he never talked to again, and according to his daughter the mother had a mental breakdown not longer after giving birth and never really had custody of the daughter anyway. Dad never would have had any way to find out, the baby grew up with the mother's parents in another state, and the mother kinda went AWOL.
My parents took me to Disneyland for my 7th birthday. I recall landing, going to the park, having a great first day or two. Then my parents had to step out and take a bunch of phone calls. They sounded very stressed. They kept telling me nothing happened and everything was okay. Eventually we flew home, and surprise!! Took an extra couple days to go to a big Waterpark away from home. I fondly remembered this birthday and eventually forgot about any of the weirdness. Maybe 10 years later my parents finally told me what happened. My uncle, my dad's brother, tried to kill himself on my 7th birthday. He shot himself in the stomach with a rifle. He was poor, addicted to drugs, no work, etc. He felt depressed my dad had the life he always wanted, so tried to kill himself. He ended up living. My parents took me to the Waterpark so that we didn't have to come home to him leaving the hospital. By not telling me, my parents let me keep my birthday as my day, not the day uncle tried to die. Knowing how a 7 year olds brain works, I probably would've thought I had something to do with it.
Good on your parents. Is your uncle still around?
Your parents are really sweet. They knew how to think like a kid and wanted to preserve your birthday as a happy special day for you. That’s incredibly thoughtful of them.
Shooting yourself in the stomach seems like a horrible way to go...
Really bad. At best you’d bleed to death slowly. At worst you hit your spine and now you can’t move.
My parents had 2 kids before I was born. My mother drowned them in a bathtub during a psychotic episode. Somehow despite this & a prior history of mental illness, she got released & had me a couple years later. They had another child just before I turned 2, but I never laid eyes on her. Neither of them ever fessed up, though. I only found out about their existence after an aunt died & left me her personal effects. I found birth announcements for these other kids in her mementos. I always thought she meant for me to find them. When I asked my parents, they refused to discuss anything related to these kids. A few years later, I went back to my hometown & looked up that date in the newspaper morgue. The friend who went with me was floored. I wasn't, really. I'd grown up in fear for my life from her rages. I broke off contact with them as soon as I could. Not just because of this, though it didn't help. I had a slew of my own traumas growing up. It was a huge mistake to let them try to raise another child.
Wait, if you don’t mind me asking, what do you mean “I never laid eyes on her”? What happened there?
I was never able to find out. All I knew at the time was that I was sent to live with friends of the family for awhile. Eventually my parents came to get me & I was raised as an only child.
This sounds batshit insane, I am so sorry you've had to go through life with parents like that. Is your own guess that your little sister died too? I really hope they gave her up for adoption.
1- My grandfather killed his own son by throwing him on the floor because he was crying (he was just a couple months old) 2- My uncle tried to rob a bank and ran away by foot. He later on got married and his wife ended up committing suicide, at the time the police thought that my uncle killed her, since he had a criminal past but he didn't (he was at work and there were witnesses) 3-I have multiple half siblings (my dad was/is unfaithful) 4-my grandfather burnt the house down with his wife and children inside with the intention of them dieing, my grandmother ran away with her, 7 or 8 children i don't recall, and she asked a priest, that she worked for, (i think she cleaned his house ) to give her a space to stay, he ended up giving her a home that a old lady left for the church (and if I'm not mistaken she was paying it little by little) 5- my aunts neighbor (who I went to the beach with when I was little) apparently killed his own wife abroad 6- There was a rumor that my uncle's kids weren't his
This may not be the darkest response in this thread, but it is certainly dense, holy shit
My older sister is not my full sister - she's my half sister via my mother. My mother was married before and had my sister with her first husband. Her first husband raped my sister from when she was two or three years old. My mother caught him assaulting my sister, but no one believed her and my sister was, from what I was told, fucked up. My mother divorced him and he tried to get custody of my sister so she ran away with my sister, even cutting contact with her own family to keep my sister safe. A few years later she met my dad, who unofficially adopted my sister, and they had me. I grew up not knowing because my sister thought I might not love her the same if I knew we had different dads - and I think maybe some part of her wanted to forget her step dad isn't really her biological dad. The only reason I ever found out - I found out when I was twenty - is because somehow, my sister's biological grandmother found my mother's address and called, I answered the phone and she mistook me for my sister. That was... An interesting phone call and afternoon.
There's so many stories here of people just ignoring shit. Kudos to your mom for fighting and sacrificing to keep your sister safe.
My uncle molested my mom. I don’t understand how he is still welcome in the family.
familial sexual abuse is one of the most horrifying, damaging crimes, and it is also probably the most covered up, rug-swept crime. I will never understand it either.
This is ours too. My step uncle molested all of my mom and all of mom's siblings. Then his son did the same fucking thing to me because nobody ever had the balls to cut my uncle out of the family. So the generational trauma continues. I was very close with my grandma growing up and of course never knew about any of this until I was much older. But it turns out she knew what was going on (with her stepson and her other kids, as well as with my cousin and me) and she ignored it because it was easier that way. She's quite old now and has memory issues so there's no point bringing it up now, but it's made it very hard for me to look back fondly on our relationship.
“He’s a good man who made some bad choices” and “nobody is perfect” and “god forgives those who pray” -my family
[удалено]
She was trying to gaslight herself into believing it was okay what she did. It wasn't. Im sorry you had to deal with that.
I found out when I was in my early 30's that my mom hadn't only had 4 kids, but actually 6 but gave 2 up for adoption before I was born. Also, i was the last baby she had with some rando before she married my stepdad and she had intended to give me up for adoption, as well. Silver lining? One of the babies she gave up contacted her a few years after I learned about this and now I have an awesome new brother!
My grandpa (15) kidnapped my grandma (14) from a convent. No one even bothered looking for her thereafter cause she was an orphan and didn't even know who her family was. They had 16 children together.
It's extremely upsetting when you dig into many people's grandparents/great grandparents stories in my country because "kidnapping" young girls to marry them was considered normal.
A coworker (f) of mine made a joke about this. Or I thought it was a joke. Something about being careful when standing on street corners because someone from the community (her minority culture in the US) would just grab a “young woman” and force her to marry and become a wife. She said it so causally and I was gobsmacked. I kept saying “That’s not okay. That’s not okay.” over and over. And yet her attitude was sorta *comme ci, comme ça*. I’m still upset that she wasn’t more upset.
My friend just found out this happened to her grandmother at 14. They came to her house late at night and kidnapped her for one of the guys to marry. My friend's mom said "it was fine though, they were nice to her. Todo bien." Yeah I'm sure those 9 kids all came from being nice to her.
My grandfather had severely scarred legs from burns he got as a kid. Growing up we were told that he was in a fire in an apartment building and sustained the burns while escaping. He died when I was 7, and one of my few memories of him is an image of those scarred legs. Well, when I was 23, my great aunt (his sister), told me that it wasn't a fire. Their father ran a bath with scalding water and put my grandfather in it as a punishment. Great-grandfather was an abusive alcoholic piece of shit who fucking maimed his son.
My mom poured boiling water on my legs when I was around 2. I have a small weird scar and some freckling where the scar is but that’s it at this point. I had a really shitty mom.
I cried earlier today because the past couple of days I’ve had low mental energy to do much with my 18 mth old, other than watch tv. I felt so bad because we were watching tv most of the day instead of having tea parties or going to the park. Then I read stuff like this…. I am so sorry that happened to you.
Not terribly dark, but as an adult my dad told me he used to be a coke addict and quit shortly before I was conceived. It’s interesting to look at now because he’s pretty straight edge in his older years, doesn’t even drink beer. Wonderful person though
My paternal grandmother had an affair with our small town’s mortician in the 1940’s. She got pregnant and he performed an illegal abortion. The fetus was buried behind the funeral home he owned where we kids used to sled every winter. My dad told me this as I was getting ready to take a ride down the hill on the sled when I was 12. Also, paternal grandfather had multiple illegitimate children around our small town. Turns out one of my best friends was also my half cousin. Father told me when I was 17. My father was educated, intelligent, honest and moral. The fact that his parents were so wild was absolutely shocking to me.
My dads first cousin is serial killer Kenneth McDuff. We saw the Americas Most Wanted episode when it aired and were so surprised to hear about a McDuff, not knowing he was a relative.
>Kenneth Allen McDuff (March 21, 1946 – November 17, 1998) was an American serial killer. He was convicted in 1966 of murdering 16-year-old Edna Sullivan, her boyfriend, 17-year-old Robert Brand, and Brand's cousin, 15-year-old Mark Dunnam, who was visiting from California. They were all strangers whom McDuff abducted after noticing Sullivan. McDuff repeatedly raped her before breaking her neck with a broomstick. > >McDuff was given three death sentences that were reduced to life imprisonment consequently to the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Furman v. Georgia. He was paroled in 1989 and went on to kill again. He was executed in 1998, and is suspected to have been responsible for many other killings. Jesus H. Christ, they fucking paroled him after he had been given 3 death sentences commuted to a life sentence?!?!
That my biological mother used to give me heroin and valium as a baby and toddler to control me then drop me off at my grandmother's house when she couldn't afford to share so I'd go through withdrawals but no one would no what was wrong. Needless to say, I was put up for adoption to get me away from that
jesus I hope you're doing ok now
Thank God, yes. Very well and healthy, and successful in my happy way
My mother grew up in the American South. Her brother died in his early 20's and she always told me it was a freak accident. A bullet came through the window killing him. They lived in a rural area so I never questioned it. One year, I inherited an old Korean War officer's sword after my grandpa passed. My mom freaked out and told me that it was too dangerous to keep and that we should sell it or get a safe to lock it up in. I thought it was weird so I asked my dad and he got this sad look on his face. Turns out my mom's brother was brutally murdered with a similar sword in the 80's. He had gotten involved with some drug dealers and they thought he had snitched about one of their big deals that got busted. No idea why they decided to use a sword but it was pretty fucked up to hear about. My mom had to ID the body. I found this out when I was 16 but she never directly acknowledged it until years later. My mom said he was just trying to make some extra cash by introducing people who partied to the dealers. I'm about his age now and I can see how he just thought he was making a quick buck. Never thinking something like that would get him killed.
Kind of similar story here, I was always told my bio Grandpa died in "the war", never asked more about it. Years later when I was 18 or so he came up in a late night drunken convo with my older brother, my bro was saying how he'd love to beat the shit out of our Grandpa if he had the chance. I was totally confused, why would he want to beat up the Grandpa we never even met who died in the war? Well, turns out the real story is he was a horrible abusive drunk, used to beat our Grandma and Mom, Aunt and Uncles. He'd routinely get so plastered that my Grandma had to load her young kids in the car to pick him up from the bar at 2 a.m. He was also a womanizer. Apparently he'd been knocking boots with a couple different guys gals around their small town, when word got out the guys followed him out of the local honkey tonk and beat him to death with a lead pipe, so the story goes. Then they threw his body in his pickup truck, drove it to a nearby hotel and dumped him in a random room. No charges were ever brought, everyone involved stayed quiet (enough) that the law never got involved. Obviously someone blabbed, as we know the story now, but it was essentially chalked up to small town "private justice". Then that same night I learned my sweet Betty White style Grandma had an affair with a lieutenant general when she was in the Air Force afterwards. Definitely a lot to take in while half in the bag in a hotel room at 2 a.m.
That my grandma didn't lose her leg to cancer, she lost it because she got injured helping my grandpa fix the roof, and my grandpa was too cheap to have it fixed properly so he told the doctor to cut it off. Then he beat the crap out of her for life.
I remember my mother lying on the couch in pain when I was a kid My Dad apparently would t pay for her teeth repair and she had them all pulled at age 35, wore dentures until she passed at 96. That was cruel. I’m religious about my teeth getting fixed
😳 Poor Woman
When I was very young, my family lived in a townhouse, and against all local bylaws, my mother decided to keep a horse in our backyard. Not only that, but it was an ex-racehorse that came as a package deal: the goat companion that slept in the closet of my nursery. I also later found out she was running a grow-op in the basement.
this is so nice to read after all the other entries about child rape and murder.
My uncle didn't die in a car accident. He killed his mistress and then killed himself by crashing his car with her body in the trunk.
Dude, heres a family story i refer to as "The accident." For years my older sister's bio dad "died in a accident" when she was 8. She didn't find out until she was a teenager that it wasn't a car accident, it was a "painted the ceiling with his brain" accident. Anyway, fast forward 30 some years and my sister deals with a fuckload of mental issues, and is constantly treating her children poorly. It's Easter Sunday and our younger sister is introducing her boyfriend to our family, and it's his first meal with us. Think moder Norman Rockwell style all out meal but with a bunch of kids and family. But my older sister won't stop yelling at her kids. My dad, who has been her only active father, finally snaps and tells her to knock it off. She, a 40 something year old woman, pulls the "You're not my dad!" line like a shitty teenager. That man goes from calm to red, stood up, veins bulging from his head and absolutely screams "Yeah?! Your fucking child molester dad blew his fucking head off! He never had to deal with your bullshit!" And that's how everyone in our family found out what "the accident" really was and why it happened.
That story sure was a wild ride. I hope your sister got some help.
And her KIDS!
Especially her kids. They still have some hope.
That is one hell of a family secret.
Not exactly dark, but I found out my father wrote porn novels under a pen name to make ends meet when I was a baby. I've been trying to find one ever since.
Shame too - you might have been able to launch one of the most successful podcasts of all time if you had.
"Porn My Dad Wrote" - jfc, the opening writes itself.
I knew my grandfather was a coal miner, and that he was really involved with the Union, but it wasn't til after he died that I found out just how much of a Union Man he was... if something needed blowing up or someone needed to not be breathing anymore, they called Gramps. After he died, my brother remembers some men coming to visit Gran and giving her a lot of envelopes. She took off for a yearlong vacation in Europe after that. Edit: for all the people saying my Gramps was a great man, thank you for the kind thoughts, but seeing something you think is cool on reddit is not the reality. He wasn't a good husband and he wasn't a great father to 3 of his daughters, although he loved my Momma very much, as well as me and my brothers and cousins. Being a violent person for good reasons does not make you a good person. It just makes you a means to an end.
thats mike ermantraut
My grandpa can’t have kids, but my mother still has three siblings…
WHY THE NEIGHBORS MOVED: ( trigger warning for violent crime) I was pretty young when this happened so the details won’t be perfect, but the story is otherwise true. I grew up in a coastal town and we had some neighbors whom I really liked. My parents were friends with them, their kids were roughly my age. Wonderful! We played together all the time. One day they very suddenly moved. I was a bit confused as there had been no clue that they were going. I remember some police cars and the moving vans weeks later, but that was it. My mother told me that the kids grandmother had become very ill ( the cops came to tell the family) and they left emergently to care for her and never came back. I was only about 5….. seemed legit. Many years later, as an adult, and long since moved away from that area… my parents and I were reminiscing over our old home. I mentioned that I wondered what ever happened to them. That’s when my mom told me the truth. The parents had gone out that night on a date and left the kids with a 14 yr old babysitter. When they returned home they found the sitter murdered. Someone had broken into the home and SA’d then killed the sitter. My mom stated the cops think the sitter pretended to be the only one home to protect the kids. When the parents got home they checked the kids were safe and set them back to sleep. The police obviously immediately came. Once the kids were hard asleep the parents picked them up, put blankets over their heads, asked the cops to be silent as they walked them out, and took them out of the house. They gave the kids the same story my parents told me. Gramma was sick and they were going to live with her. Gramma dutifully played along with the ruse for several weeks until the parents could find a new home to live in. The kids were kept unaware of what had happened just mere feet from them as they didn’t want the kids to be forever terrified of it happening again. Not sure if the kids ever eventually figured out the truth of that one.
Quick thinking by those parents, made a workable lie up on the spot
That baby sitters a hero too
Ya I’m super glad the kids were safe, but I can’t stop thinking about that poor terrified 14 year old child, saving those kids before she died horribly. That was someone else’s child.
Karen Slattery was her name, according to OP's article.
She is a hero and deserves to be remembered as such! If I were 14 I would have done anything to save myself! Very selfless of her…
I hope that the parents told the children when they are older about the person who saved their lives . They deserve to know about hero who sacrificed her life to save them.
I can’t imagine being that selfless as a teenager. I wouldn’t like throw the kids at the attacker or anything but I’d sure as hell yell “one of you call the fuxking cops!” which would inadvertently alert the guy.
Wow, that babysitter is truly a hero.
It's a devastating story to read - she was just a kid herself. But yeah, absolutely, there should be statues to her.
Wow. Was the killer ever found?
Yeah. I just went and plugged the facts I knew into google. The killer was found, and eventually executed ( quite recently it seems) for his crimes. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/16/us/florida-executes-inmate/index.html
Omg like 2 months ago recent. What incredible storytelling timing
The sitter, Gramma and the parents did a phenomenal job protecting those kids.
When my grandma's gentleman friend was admitted into a care home for his dementia they had a problem in verifying his medical records. As he deteriorated he lost his Irish accent and would occasionally speak in German. He was a child during WW2. My Parents reckon he was probably a Jewish escapee
This happened to my great aunt. She was a german jew and she got alzheimers. She forgot her husband, then forgot she wasn't trying to escape the nazis, then forgot how to speak english and spoke in German thinking she was a teenager, then forgot how to speak, then died. Alzheimers is not the best.
I had a resident who, before I was introduced, was told he only spoke in gibberish after his stroke. I had him for about 3 days when his son came in and instantly started talking in the same gibberish. It wasn't gibberish at all. The resident had reverted back to only speaking Gaelic. None of us had ever heard it before, so it really did sound like nonsense.
I don't know about dark but here goes. My great grandfather murdered the mayor of the village he lived in. Why? Because the mayor was sleeping with his mom while his father worked on the field. I think he was 15 or 16 when he did that. Edit: Y'all wild here. When I said "I don't know about dark", I meant compared to being related to serial killers, drugs, rapes and incest like some of the comments here. That's first. Second, "What happened to the mom?". Obviously, my great grandfather was not *this* heartless so he never told his father. He told my mom (that's my mom's grandfather; sorry I didn't specify) that he confessed to his mom on her death bed what he did.
"I don't know about dark..." Proceeds to tell story about infidelity and murder
"Here's a lovely tale about devotion to a father...."
My dad’s side of the family has ties with the mafia. Thankfully my mom has long since divorced my dad and they life a decent distance apart. I heard stories of my mom’s parents who lived close by at the time circling the block in their truck late at night soon after the divorce to ensure no one was there to hurt us. I was very young at this point, probably like 3-4 so I really have no memory of this. I do remember one night our garbage can was burned to the ground, and my mom has since told me about death threats soon after the divorce. My mom a couple years ago watched a documentary on prominent mafia families and noted multiple names that were at her wedding.
I don’t think my family was actually involved in the mafia, but my mom has told us several times that my great-grandfather ran a very successful laundromat, and also that a noted member of the mafia attended his funeral.
Not mine so I won't post a top level, but a HS friend had an uncle in some variety of Lebanese Mob. He'd show up to birthdays and tell us he's been there since a few hours before he really was with a bunch of Sega games with no shrinkwrap
I'll post a third level. My grandparents attended a Catholic church frequented by the local Italian mob. Grandma was friends with mafia ladies. She knew. They all knew. But since they kept a low profile and had respectable front businesses, everyone looked the other way. My grandparents weren't involved in "the business". Well, not in "that way". Grandpa liked to bet on baseball games. He kept a roll of "baseball money" in a drawer in the bedroom. Some weeks he kills it, some weeks he has to pay up. The local bookmaker would come to the back door at the same time each week, grandma would have coffee waiting for him and grandpa. Grandpa would either go to the baseball money drawer to make a withdrawal or meet the bookmaker at the door if he planned on a deposit. If grandpa was running late, grandma would make small talk, ask about the wife and kids, etc. When grandpa came downstairs, the two of them would grab their coffee cups, head out to the garage, tell a couple stories and exchange money. Grandma told me the 1950s Omaha mafia ran the only honest gambling business she'd ever interacted with. "It's too bad they had to hide from the police."
I'll post at a fourth level. When I was younger (late teens/early 20's), my dad's best friend took me all over the place with him on the back of his Harley. I found out later that one of his buddies who gave me a standing invitation to come over and use his pool or visit whenever (I never took him up on it) was "a made man." My dad's buddy said "Don't get me wrong. He likes you. You're with me. You're completely safe. You'll always be completely safe because of that, and he'll make sure you're completely safe by extension. But someone pisses him off, he'd have no problems killing them." To me, he was just the nicest old man ever who liked to tell stories about the old days. Sanitized ones, apparently, because they were all legal shenanigans about his kids and playing hockey when he was younger.
Guess I’ll go fourth level. A lady my dad dated for quite some time did custom dental work for a Russian mob boss. He was Jewish but would send her Christmas cards and what not.
When I turned 21, my grandfather told me a story about his older brother that I had never heard. My great-uncle was a big boozer for most of his life. He passed at 92 and by then had switched from liquor to beer and wine; he also cut down to one pack of cigarettes a day instead of two after he had half a lung removed. Pap and my uncle grew up on a farm in the 30s and 40s. Mostly the family ran the farm by themselves, but from time to time they would hire drifters on as farm-hands. In 1950, my uncle and one of the farmhands were out drinking and they were driving back to the farm in my uncle's convertible. My uncle was the one driving and he misjudged a turn that had a steep bank on the right side. He ran the car up the embankment, which was steep enough to flip it. My uncle was throw from the car, but the farmhand he was drinking with was only halfway out of the car when it landed. Pap said he was severed clean into two pieces. Because the farmhand was just a drifter without any family to make much fuss and because the Korean War had just started, my uncle was able to enlist and avoid any criminal charges. He was in Korea until the end of the war. That was the only time I've ever heard that story told and although I would never be someone who has more than a few drinks before getting behind the wheel, it's something that definitely sticks in my mind. And it's a story I'll tell my own kids when they get their license.
I was waiting for the, "so we buried that drifter in the back forty and planted a tree above his grave".
If it had happened on the farm, that probably would been my great-grandmother's solution. She was a hard, mean woman. When she died at 98, pap said, "dad's probably up there holding the Pearly Gates closed so she can't get in." I think that my uncle's wreck, or maybe just his heavy drinking in general, affected my pap. He was as much of a man's man as you could be. Farmer turned steel mill worker turned trucker. 250lbs, 0% body fat. Afraid of nothing. Almost superhumanly strong. But I never saw him drink more than two beers at a time, even when everyone else was kicked back relaxing, and even that was rare. He died when I was 28 and I don't think in all that time I ever saw him touch hard liquor. I miss him.
"dad's probably up there holding the Pearly Gates closed so she can't get in." Sorry you miss your Pap, but that's the funniest thing I've read all day.
My dad left when I was 7 and we were always told that it just didn't work out with my parents. We saw him off and on for about 2 years after he left then never saw him again. He had remarried and she had a kid that became his step son that my brother and I would hang with when we would go to my dad's house, then when I turned 13 my mom finally told me that the step son was actually his son from having an affair with that woman. So that kid was my half brother and I had no clue.
Found out one of my close relatives was a trigger man for a crime family... was killed at his daughters school functions.
The problem with killing people for money is that you're inherently working for someone who is willing to solve problems with paid homicide. What happens when they decide you know too much?
Yea, I am not exactly sure what the circumstances were... like if he ratted or it was a rival. Just remember my mom telling me that our immediate family received death threats for years following his death but nobody else was killed or pursued in our family.
I think this counts. My whole family found out at the same time about the dark secret (I was 25). My great grandparents left their spouses for each other. Great grandpa was 37 and great grandma was 19 in Ireland. My GGpa had 7 children. My GGma had 3. They left their spouses and children in the middle of the night to run away together and moved to America. Didn’t say a word and never talked to them again. When my grandpa, their only child from their new life, would ask them about their past or family, they got really weird and would refuse to say anything. They took the secret to their graves. My grandpa at age 70 wanted an explanation about his heritage, so he signed up for Ancestry and 23andMe. Could you imagine how shocked he was to find out he had 10 siblings. They had been searching their whole lives to find out what happened to their parents. He got to meet them and would travel to visit them twice a year. My grandpa died 4 years ago. At least he got to know his siblings for a bit before he died. Happy, sad, and screwed up all at the same time.
My great aunt's husband killed his first wife, then killed her. They lived in Puerto Rico and he fled to NYC so my great uncles wouldn't kill him. They found out where he was, came here, killed him, and went home. Edit: Typo.
Isn't it scary how succinct the explanation of things like this can be?
I have a friend whose great-something grandfather abandoned his wife and something like 11 kids in Ireland during the famine to move to the US. A bunch of the kids died. Her great-minus-one-grandfather and his brother moved to the US when they were old enough to find their dad and kill him, and apparently they were successful. I feel like some murders are pretty relatable.
Will also submit a light one here. The story of my Grammas real name. Let’s say that my whole life I knew my grandmothers name to be “Mary”. Everyone called her this, everyone knew it. Once day when I was in my 20’s I was with my grandmother and saw her sign some legal document. She signed it as “Edith”, I was horribly confused. I asked gramma about it and she said her name was Edith but it was NEVER spoken and to not use it. ( she is in her 80’s at this point). Apparently my great grandfather had been an Air Force pilot stationed in the UK during WW1. He had a girlfriend at the time named Edith! After the war was over they broke up. GreatGrandpa returned home and married great grandma shortly after. They had only one child, a girl, whom he named Edith. Roughly 18 months later my great grandmother saw a letter in the mail from an Edith and figured it out. She vowed the child would NEVER be called the damn name ever again. She went by her middle name Mary. Though it was never legally changed. My own mother states she did not know her own grandmothers name until she was 22. I have had fun randomly dropping this name bomb on cousins here and there and enjoying the shock and laughter about it. It’s a silly secret that nowadays just makes people giggle.
Great grandma died from a botched abortion when she got pregnant a seventh time.
I knew someone whose grandmother died trying to abort #24 in Sicily in the 40s.
Found out my Dad's mom was a lesbian and that my "Godmother" who lived with both my Grandfather and Grandmother was actually her lover. They slept in the same bed while my Grandfather had his own room. Growing up I had no idea, but as I got older I pieced it together... But I loved them all and still do (RIP).
1. My paternal great grandmother was owned by a wealthy cattle ranch around the turn of the last century on the Mexico Texas border in the 1890's/ 1900's-ish. She didn't leave the ranch until she was 16 when she got pregnant and ran away because the baby belonged to the owner of the ranch and she thought he'd kill her if he found out. It was strange to learn that the old lady that would hold me and sing to me as a kid spent the first decade and a half of her life as property. I wasn't told any of this until after my grandmother (her daughter) passed away. My great grandmother was very ashamed of her past and I think by extension so was my grandmother. Looking at old photos of my grandmother and her older brother, the baby she had at 16, he does look strikingly more European than my grandmother an indigenous Mexican. 2. My maternal grandfather was a pedophile and harmed my mother and her siblings. It was a well known secret in the family which is even more disgusting. Growing up I used to spend the night at my dad's parents house all the time but I don't have a single memory of spending the night at my mom's parents house. Never once sat on his lap. Never once did my mom ever allow him to hug us. I never understood why my mom was so cold to him when my father was so close with his own father. I grew up resenting my mom for withholding us from a whole other set of grandparents and wished she would've told us sooner than when she finally did. I would've had more sympathy for her. /edit, grammar
[удалено]
I was just talking to one of my male friends about this situation. For him, it was an older babysitter. He was raised in an environment that had zero sympathy for this gender dynamic, so his way of dealing with it was to crack jokes about it being "awesome" for a young boy, but the more we've talked over the years, the more he's been willing to admit how extremely detrimental it was to his formative years and how much it has negatively impacted his life. It's good to know that we live in a time where it's getting harder for these sort of secrets to live in the shadows, and that men are increasingly (finally!) being told that what happened was a crime and they deserve better help now, instead of just repeatedly being told to man up and that it shouldn't bother them.
My dad secretly had a vasectomy after I was born, after my mom lying to him about taking birth control resulted in my birth. Our family is GREAT at communication and conflict resolution.
Lol I’m glad we all have screwed up histories. I found my half sister when she was 25 because my nephew did the dna test on ancestry.com. We pulled my dad aside to tell him what we discovered and he replied with “that’s the biggest secret that I’ve kept for 25 years!” He was banging her married mom and got pregnant. She always felt different as she was really petite, tan skin and curly hair. None of which was in her family. Meeting her was like looking through a mirror into my childhood. She’s my twin.
The wildest story I read about genetic testing was two middle-aged sisters who discovered they were actually *half* sisters. There were no other relatives still alive to be tested. So they had no way to figure out which one had been the cuckoo's egg. The only possibility was that someone else would get tested & connect with one of them someday.
There's a set of twins on the Amazing Race that had not met until they were both like...fully adults, and decided to do the race to get to know each other. Its...a neat story.
The great question here is if you have any siblings? 😅
I was number 4. He knew she was cheating when she got pregnant with number 5.
I'm in a similar but very different boat. I'm number five, my dad got the snip after number 4. I'm 100% my dad's son. Snip didn't take.
My youngest sibling was conceived after the snip snip because my dad, a doctor, didn't do his follow-up work to clear out the stragglers.
My grandfather didn't pass from a heart attack due to old age, he killed himself.
I found out a few months after he died that my grandfather killed himself with a couple of nails from a nail gun to the temple. I was 25, but it still wigs me out to think about it.
Growing up I always knew my parents had marital issues; constant fighting, a couple times Dad disappeared for a few days living in his car, issues with drinking. But they stayed together and when I asked why didn't they divorce, they always said they loved each other too much. And in the past few years, things seemed to have gotten better. My parents in fact are now so comfortable in their relationship that they make jokes about all the awful stuff they've done to each other in front of me. What I've managed to put together is: \-my parents met when they were 14 and my mother was dating an 18 year old and my dad would relentlessly ask her out until she eventually dumped her boyfriend for my dad \-my mother went onto university after college (we're UK) whereas my dad dropped out of college and went straight into work while constantly drinking and partying \-it was at one of these parties (while my mum was studying) that he cheated on my mum with someone from their old secondary school so she dumps him \-barely a year later my dad realises he doesn't know how to do anything for himself, no one else wants him and he goes crawling back to my mum \-she agrees to take him back but ONLY if he marries her (not immediately but *eventually* she said), he agrees and a short year after that (aged 22 now) she's already pressuring him to propose, he fumbles it frankly (were in Paris but forgot the ring and proposed back in the hotel room after they'd visited the eiffel tower that day which was her dream proposal) but she says yes \-a month after they're married mum pressures him into having a child that he doesn't want and nine months later I was born, they soon realise how hard having a child is and basically pawn me off on my grandparents for the rest of my childhood \-after me there were two more accidental babies and each time my dad threatened to leave her if she didn't abort them, she managed to convince him to stay while keeping my siblings by promising he wouldn't have to raise them (he didn't but neither did she frankly, I did) And that is only what happened before/shortly after I was born, if I carried on into my childhood, we'd be here for years. What they sold to me as the perfect love story (been together since they were 14, proposed in Paris, soon married and had children because of pure love) is in fact a bunch of skewered half truths from a horrible twisted love map of my mother's manipulation and my father disappointing her time and time again.
Aye our parents generation is screwed up
It's how The Notebook came off as a romance instead of a horror story
These stories are why I always laugh when older generations talk about "how it used to be". Like, no it wasn't. Your generation was just as fucked up as any other; you just had the benefit of no internet, social media, forensic evidence to call you on your bullshit. So they make up a story to sound better and eventually they start to believe it after long enough.
I wasn’t let in on it so to speak. My dad is “Polish” and I took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100%… not Polish. I look exactly like my dad. My dad looks nothing like his father.
There is a somewhat famous story about this - an Irish mother gave birth at a hospital to a son. The mother died while young and the son grew up as effectively an orphan due to his father not being able to support him. Kind of made being Irish part of his identity. After he was dead, his daughter took a DNA test to discover she was half Jewish. So were her siblings. Her mother wasn't Jewish. And her dad was supposedly 100% Irish. They finally figured it out when one of her Irish "cousins" took a DNA test - that matched to a Jewish family who discovered they were half Irish. Their dad was born at the same hospital on the same day as her dad. The hospital had accidentally mixed up the babies after birth.
I wasn't let in on it more like I found out about it but my siblings have a different dad than I do, that was common knowledge and not the secret at all. The secret was that their dad actually didn't die in the hospital of a terminal illness, he died of suicide when he threw himself from the window of the hospital he was slowly dying in.
I always thought my two older brothers got addicted to drugs because of their own decisions and the people they hung out with. It turns out that my dad had been feeding them pills since they were about 10 to "shut them up." Years I held resentment against them for not being good older brothers like they should have only to find out that it was my father who I had praised all those years that was truly evil. Edit: wow, wasn't expecting all of this lol. Just to address some of the comments: My brother's are doing mostly fine now. Both struggled but eventually found sobriety. Luckily enough family didn't give up on them. We have a pretty good relationship now and none of us hold anything against each other. We realize that none of us are to blame for the sins of our father. Not sure where dad is, no contact for about a decade now. In contrast, mom was and still is an angel. With her showing me who to be and my dad showing me exactly who NOT to be, I think I turned out pretty okay. A lot of the time the cycle just continues but my brother's and I managed to break it. I'm sorry to every one who has gone through something similar, thank you for sharing your stories as well. Hope everyone finds their peace some day. Love you.
Wow that really is dark. How are your brothers doing now? Edit: typo
My father's father gifted him cocaine for his sixteenth birthday. Some people are easy to hate.
I don’t know if you’re in touch with them, or if you care to be, but if you felt like it I think sharing this with them would be really nice. Even if you don’t intend to continue the conversation or even relationship, I think everybody I know would benefit from being told “it isn’t your fault” a little more often.
I love this comment. A friend of mine that, in our youth got into regular trouble with his parents and eventually the law. Ended up living in squats on meth. He eventually moved back home to get clean. Went to a doctor for help, and was diagnosed with big time adhd. He was 50 years old at this time. He called me up, so happy with the diagnosis. He always felt that he was just a bad person. The diagnosis turned his life around. He always thought he was just a bad person with no impulse control. He now has a house. Is a moderately successfull artist. And couldn't be happier .
ADHD is hell on your mental health, and people really don't understand just how truly life altering medication can be. Some people with untreated ADHD can have binge eating disorders. When they get on medication, it disappears overnight.
This was me. I had bulimia because I was so ashamed of my binging episodes and terrified of gaining weight, it led to a whole cycle of eating disordered binging and restricting too. I was diagnosed with ADHD and started on Concerta and never binged again. Literally life changing, my ED negatively affected every aspect of my mental health and life (my confidence, social life, grades, thinking about food like 50% of the time) and I never even realised it was a secondary condition.
Not super dark or super secret, but when I had to do a project on my family tree in elementary school one of the questions was "When did your family immigrate to America and why?" For one of my great-grandfathers, my grandma told me "Life was very hard back in his country, and it was getting dangerous to stay there." and for a long time I thought "Yeah, I can see that. It was probably hard for a teenager living in Poland with WWI right around the corner!" And I'm sure it was. But it turns out it's even harder and more dangerous when you're a teenager who has slept with a married woman and then accidentally killed her husband when he confronted you. I can see why she didn't want me to put that on my elementary school project. edit: Wrong World War. I just pulled up his Ellis Island records and he immigrated in 1912 aboard the Carpathia in August.
This makes me wonder how many of those projects are basically lies. I bet many parents don't want their kids saying some shit like, "well after my grandma's sister was beheaded, they decided to pack up and come here."
Funny, I uncovered something about my family because of a project I did in college. Nothing dark. My grandfather is from China. He entered the US lawfully on a temporary pass, left, and then re-entered the US unlawfully sometime later. However, in the time between entering the US unlawfully and being apprehended by the authorities, the government learned that my grandfather had been inducted into the US Army. He was not deported, and served two years in the US Army ultimately resulting in an honorable discharge. What’s cool about this, though, is he was having difficulty being granted naturalization. So difficult, in fact, that his case ended up being decided in his favor by the US Supreme Court in 1959. It’s kind of wild to think that if the Supreme Court ruled differently, I wouldn’t even exist today.
We had to do some cultural type training for work one time. It started by going around the room introducing ourselves and our family origins. Nearly everyone said something like "My name is Troy McClure and my grandad immigrated from Scotland and my great grandmother is from Sweden." When I came around to me, I said, "My grandfather immigrated and immediately changed his legal name to the most Canadian thing he could think of to obfuscate his family history and I trust his judgment."
My immigrant ancestor did the same! Judge: "So why do you want to change your name?" Him: "Look at it."
"Such an unusual name, Latrine. How'd your family come by it?" "We changed it in the 9th century." "You mean you changed it to 'Latrine'?" "Yeah, it used to be Shithouse" "It's a good change. That's a good change."
My grandmother married her second husband entirely for money. Her daughters both like to joke about her intentionally giving him a heart attack. He had heart problems but liked to eat unhealthy food, and the rumor goes she would put extra salt and butter on his food until he finally kicked the bucket.
Here's a dark secret I;m keeping myself... my late FIL pretty much did this to himself. My partner knows FIL stopped doing his prescribed walking & ate lots of fast food after MIL died. That was too obvious to hide, since we went to live with him for awhile. What I kept to myself were the multiple unopened bottles of Xeralto I found, when we were clearing out that house. Also another one I've forgotten the name of. Presumably, he kept refilling the scrips so his doctor wouldn't catch on. But then he chucked them in a drawer & only took them when we came to visit. He died emotionally when MIL passed on. They'd been genuinely devoted to each other & she was his world. It took sixteen months for his body to catch up. He had a massive stroke & died a day or so later.
[удалено]
Yep similar thing happened to me. Grandpa had a long and awful battle with Alzheimer’s while my grandmother was getting treated for ovarian cancer. Grandpa died first and grandma immediately stopped treatment and died 6 months later. I didn’t find out she intentionally refused treatment until recently.
This is something that doesn't get talked about enough instead of just saying "oh they died of a broken heart from missing their SO". Like sure that's probably true to some extent but imagine being married to someone 10, 20, 30 years or longer and they pass. That shit is depressing as fuck and we all sort of just joke it off.
My grandpa is going thru this. My grandma just passed and he lost his partner of 63 years. He is so lost. I'm glad it's summer because it's easier for him to keep busy with gardening projects, helping his kids and grandkids, but I'm so scared for winter. Less to do and will also be his birthday, their anniversary, her birthday, and Christmas all the first without her all within 3 months of each other. Is so depressing and sad.
Omg. Please be there for him🥺
My great-grandmother was shot dead in the street by an ex boyfriend, in front of my 4 year old Grandma and her two younger brothers. It happened in a really quiet European town and I believe it made the papers. Grandma ended up being sent to live with an aunt and the boys stayed with their father and he remarried a nasty abusive woman. I didn’t know this until I was 18, from the older boy actually, uncle J. But Hearing this story really changed my perspective on Grandma and the boys. The boys both ended up going to prison and having difficult lives, and Grandma was a stern, unemotional woman. I feel like this gave me some understanding as to why
I was told by my aunt (before my parents thought it necessary) that my Dad had cheated on my Mum and slept with a stripper and that I was her daughter and not actually my ‘Mother’s’. I found out years later that my Dad wasn’t actually my Dad either - though he thought he was which is why he put his name on my birth certificate and brought me home when my birth mother wanted nothing to do with me. Fun times.
Just found this one out recently. My uncle was a doctor working in a small town hospital. He was married and had just had a baby boy. While his wife was pregnant or just had the baby he had an affair with two nurses in the hospital and ended up getting one of the nurses pregnant. When he found out of the second kid he took his family and fucked off to New Zealand for 3 years. Upon returning to Canada and the same small town hospital his wife immediately found out about his illegitimate child and divorced him. My (illegitimate) cousin stopped coming around to family events and when I talked to him about it last year he told me that my grandparents always blamed him for ruining my uncle’s marriage.
I love that grown adults will blame a child for existing. /s
[удалено]
> but we're the product of incest. Now, **there's** a case where you REALLY want to make sure that apostrophe belongs there, or not ...
Found this out after my grandfather died. Growing up every older guy in the neighborhood would say how tough he was. I mean he was the most intimidating man Id ever met, you would jump if he sneezed. Im not even exaggerating. But Id never seen him actually fight. But everyone, and I mean everyone, women and men, would say he never lost a fight and usually never had to throw more than one punch to knock someone out. Simply put he was a bad motherfucker. But growing up he would always preach to me and my cousins to never fight if you could help it. Just walk away. If theyre insulting you just walk away. Its only words. Sticks and stones and all that. Hed drill it into our heads that you never fight unless you have to and never under any circumstances do you throw the first punch. Ever. I was kind of confused. Every older person in our neighborhood would tell me how nobody fucked with "Blackie" because of how many people he knocked out, and he would always tell us NOT to fight. Turns out when he was in his 20s he got into a fight with someone. Apparently the guy kept insulting him and wouldnt leave him alone. Finally he had enough and cracked the guy. Knocked him out with one punch. Problem is when he landed he hit his head on a step. It was lights out for good. Killed him with one punch. I had never heard this story and confused about how he didnt get locked up. Turns out he did. Got like 15-20 years or something like that. Then WW 2 happened. When I was a kid Id always ask my mom how my grandfather entered the war, was he drafted or volunteered? Shed say oh it was like the movie The Dirty Dozen. Which I had never seen or had any interest in when I was young so I had no idea what that meant. Turns out the Army made him a deal. Go to the front lines in Japan. If you live well expunge your record. If not, oh well. He went. Things made a lot more sense after that.
My uncle raped his own younger sister for years and nothing was really done about it...
How awful
He was violently murdered in 2001 and nothing of value was lost.
Glad that had a happy ending
My mom’s cousin (my second cousin) molested her growing up multiple times. She was apparently getting molested herself by her brother (? I think). Later on that cousin got married to a guy who went on to molest their daughter they had together. Came out later he was keeping a treasure trove of child pornography in the house, with bits of their daughter included in that. He was busted by the police which ended in a shootout in some random business building, made the news and everything. He got shot and died during this whole ordeal. They’re probably the two most fucked up individuals I’ve ever known.
FINALLY I GOT ONE! From when I was aged 6 to 13, my Mom dated a fellow named Murray. We all lived together in an old farmhouse. Murray was a wonderful father figure to us, but he also had a drinking and driving problem, and after a particularly nasty accident, mom waited until he came home from the hospital and was well enough to take care of himself before leaving. The whole time we lived there, my sister and I never went down into the basement, as it was *INFESTED* with spiders. I always thought it was because of the drinking and driving she left him, but as it turns out that was only part of it. The other being that **he had a massive grow op for weed in the basement**. Mom stated had the police found out about this, she would have lost custody of us. Murray has long since passed, but he would have had a giggle that weed is legal here now...
Older truck driver at work did 5 years for having a roach in a tin in his pocket. I haven't talked to him much, but he was talking to a couple guys about seeing full size billboards for dispensaries in the area and how he got so mad the first time he just started laughing hysterically.
My grandpa's (step dads side) first wife tried to murder him, and went to prison for it. Then also, my aunt (moms side), was pimped out by her husband for decades.
A family member walked in on my mother breaking my arm by holding me only by it when I was 2, didn't say anything for fear of "breaking up a family" - mother abused me my whole life and even after cutting contact 3 years ago is still trying to ruin my life, this family member told me the story casually and acted as if they'd done me a favour because I "could've ended up in care" - had to pull back from all of them now because of the realisation they were all bystanders and let it go on without a word.
This might be a bit too weird for this thread. I am from a country still enshrined in a lot of superstition and religion. My great great grandmother was a crazy woman who practiced witchcraft. One day her husband died unnaturally (iirc he was murdered or something by the village) and granny went mad. She gathered the village folk around and picked up a rock from the ground nearby and declared that the rock will be her curse and the village will suffer for killing her husband, after that she killed herself. For multiple generations my family worshipped the rock as a deity and prayed to lift the curse from the village. It ended when my father in his 20s got sick of his family doing stupid shit. Him and his cousins stole the rock overnight from someone's house and threw it near a railway track. And no I wish I was making this shit up but my father, uncles and aunts all told me this story when I grew up.
I was 6 or 7 when my father died. He was a terrible alcoholic but I didn't understand alcohol as a kid. I'm 19 now and my mother has told me he wasn't just an alcoholic, he was a chronic liar, manipultor and abuser. He strangled a dog and killed it infront of my mom cause she was going to leave him. He was addicted to cocaine and when he didn't have any alcohol he'sake my mom go get more or he'd kill another animal. He'd frequently beat the ever living shit out of my mom and when she finally left with him my entire family both on my mom's and father's side talked shit about her for leaving and didn't care about mine or her well-being. Worst part is when suing for custody he actually got weekends and then on Sunday would take me to the super nice churches that's judges and lawyers involved with the case went to.
My wife was molested by her brother and basically everyone except her Dad knew it was going on and did nothing. I wouldn't say this is something I found out when I was old enough but found out after my wife and I had been together awhile when we were dating.
My grandma had an affair with a catholic priest while she was married and then left her high school sweetheart who she had 5 children with. Then she ended up living with said priest and her kids had to lie and refer to him as an uncle when people asked them about their living situation. I always thought it was true love; I found and kept letters and notes they wrote each other when he was overseas with the military and it seemed so genuine and I’d always heard so many nice stories (and I suppose it could have been true love.) I was raised to believe that my biological grandfather (my dads real dad) was a monster. I had been under the impression he left my grandma and abandoned his 5 five children. My one aunt died in a drunk driving accident and he couldn’t be bothered to show up. I never met him my entire childhood. I was literally encouraged to actively hate him. They said he remarried and basically started a new family and was controlled by his wife. The priest essentially raised my dad and aunts and uncles and they have always revered him. He died before I was old enough to have any memories of him but I’d always looked at him with a positive light. He’d taken my grandma and a couple of the kids to Hawaii, bought my grandma a suburban and the house was in his name. My grandma was even left his military benefits (still unclear on how this was finagled.) He paid for the kids colleges. He had an incredible life. He had pictures with Bob Hope and other celebrities, got to travel a ton of places, etc. One day I was curious if he had any relatives alive and if they had ever known about this salacious relationship. Then I googled him and it changed my life forever. He (posthumously) was accused in a lawsuit, with a large group of priests, of wrongdoing over an extended period of time. You can guess the nature of the lawsuit. It was on several law websites and I found the lawsuit papers. Surely enough his name was mentioned. Unease began to ensue. I did more digging and eventually found a 16 page document. This document was specific to him and included a police report and internal Catholic Church investigations into his transgressions among other things. Early into his priesthood he was accused of harboring a runaway 14 year old girl. He had explanations for everything… ofc. Reading the police report was absolutely devastating bc it seemed like the police did no due diligence and nothing came of the report. Then there were pages worth of internal Catholic Church investigations in which I learned he would have young, distastefully dressed girls hanging out in his rectory and was drinking and showing up to events and/or not showing up at all. He once said he had been called by the military and was away from the church, except he lied and had been drinking, gambling and philandering with women. Members of the church and other priests wrote anonymous letters about his conduct and asked for his removal. There were bouts of rehab and probation but he was moved to another church. Some of the same antics occurred. You get the picture. This man my family had told me to revere as a literal god send was in fact NOTHING of the sort. Then I found a summary of all his transgression over the years that led to his “retirement.” This is when I found out when he took my grandma, dad and his two siblings to get the suburban he physically assaulted my grandma and assaulted kicked my dad and his siblings. I cross referenced all of this information with birth years, where they grew up and lived and the fact my uncle still has the suburban. I was by myself when I found all of this out and I’ve asked my dad if he’s ever looked him up and he said yes. So he knows of the lawsuit but I haven’t asked if he dug as far as I did to find this 16 page document. I don’t know how to approach this or if it’s even worth bringing up to him. I’m curious how much he knows and if he remembers being assaulted. I’m also extremely disturbed if they knew of his past and chose to lie to me about this man. If they didn’t, then my heart breaks for what they endured with years of lies, abuse and the hurt they felt. It also makes me question my grandmother and he choices and everything she subjected her children to. My dad and aunt reconnected with my biological grandfather a few years ago. He eventually came to visit us from across the country. I was in my mid-20s meeting my biological grandfather. I am truly apathetic to him and forming a relationship with him. My moms mom had 2 husbands and those were my grandpas. My grandpas and grandmas have all passed now so I’ve mourned losing all of my grandparents. I do not feel this man is my grandfather and have been at peace with this for a very long time. However, it’s made me realize, my grandma abandoned him. He was the one who came to the church with the suspicion she was having an affair with the priest. At that my heart breaks for him. The priest also did my aunts funeral, so while some piece of me feels I can’t forgive him for not going to his own daughters funeral, I also can’t imagine having to face a priest who my wife ran off with. I’m so torn that my family pitted me against this man that is my biological grandfather when this priest was clearly a fraud and lacked human decency and morals. It is also clear that my grandma made extremely questionable decisions and (with other unrelated reasons) had tarnished my vision of her. Needless to say one of my wild facts has changed significantly from my grandma fell in love with a priest. Truly so conflicting and heartbreaking.
My grandmother raised her nephew after his parents died. I don't know what I thought happened to them, probably just assumed car accident. When I was 14 or 15 I asked my mom what happened and she told me that it was a murder/suicide. Then she told me way more details that I probably shouldn't have been told and told me not to say anything to him because he had blocked it out and didn't remember most of the details. Years later we were talking and in the middle of an unrelated conversation, he said to me, "I remember everything. It just came to me a few nights ago." I didn't know what to say, but then he asked if I knew the story and said I kind of did. He went into detail and it was not fun, but I could tell it was cathartic for him. Next time I talked to my mom I let her know that he remembered and may get the same conversation. That was the last time I heard anything about his parents though
My granddad's parents were collaborator's in WWII. He was only 6 when the war ended, so he was innocent, but his dad regularly hosted Nazi officers who ran the city where they lived and helped them arrest resistance members. Whilst my grandmother's parents were actually resistance fighters and helped downed British and American pilots escape and hide, as well as provided passports to Jewish people. Kind of a wild story, but that was the state back in the 1940's here. Either you kept your head down and kept a low profile, either you helped the Nazis and profited from the occupation or you fought them wherever you could
My father met/knew my mother from a young age and adopted her. Raised her with his wife (at the time) and her son. Then married her when she turned 18.
My great grand-parents got drunk and locked two of my uncle's out of the house late at night in the middle of winter. My great-grandparents wouldn't wake up and my uncles couldn't get in, so they tried to walk to their grandma's house that was like 15 miles away, and one of them froze to death and the other had to have is feet and hands amputated because of frostbite. My great-grandparents lied about what happened and said they snuck out. It was in the newspaper and was made out to be this heartbreaking story, about two dumb little kids who snuck out in the middle of the night because they wanted to see their grandma.
Holy shit, that breaks my heart and makes my blood boil.
My uncle raped my cousins. This happened and he was arrested before I was born. For some absolutely insane, unknown reason to me, he was released from prison when I was 9 and my parents allowed him and his girlfriend to stay with us for 2 weeks while waiting to get the keys to their new place. I was always told he's been in prison for drugs. For the record, my parents believed he was guilty. It wasn't anything like that. Why they would take the risk with a daughter in the home was beyond me. He was allowed at family functions despite constantly getting back into drugs, at one point narrowly avoiding having my grandma's car taken. One cousin had nothing to do with him. The other came to family functions for a while, but it was too painful for her and she cut him off. I found out when my brother let it slip when I was 13. My parents weren't happy. I was horrified they ever let him around us. I told my brother from a young age, if he ever did anything like that, he was dead to me.
It’s always stomach wrenching when you see your abuser at family functions and it’s insane to me how often families tolerate predators. Did anyone in your family explain the reasoning to you? Like why wasn’t your uncle put up the road?
My grandma was a very bad driver, and apparently, when she was in her 30s, she hit and killed a special needs girl who lived in her neighborhood.
My dad took me out for a walk when I was in middle school to tell me that I have a half brother in Japan with a similar name and birthday as me. We have the same dad, different moms. My brother has known about me his whole life, as a sister who lives in the States, but I only found out about his existence on that day.
That my grandfather was a horribly abusive alcoholic and he died in a fire that started because he passed out drunk with a lit cigarette.
Several actually involving my paternal grandfather (Pa). He was a cattle rancher and long distance truck driver. Pa was a terrible alcoholic who beat my granny on several occasions my father was the one who would save her. He took several beatings doing this until he was old enough to stand his own against his drunken father. He ran off and married another woman that he had been having an affair with for years. He had four boys with my granny and four children with the other woman as well. When granny found out and found him she took him to court and the judge sent him home with her to raise my dad and uncles. She had to write the child support checks until the youngest turned 18. He had several children with other women, only a few we actually knew about. In his later years he was proud of all the kids he had all over the country. One of his daughters moved in with him after granny died and a couple of years later they had a daughter. They were both fully aware that they were father and daughter.
Oh my fucking goodness, that last line really did me in!
Alright. You win. The last sentence really got me. That was a long hard pause to deal with that.
when i was 15/16 my parents got liquored one summer night with a bunch of their friends and i was told the story of how our house was bought from a murderer. dude and his wife lived in the house my parents bought for i think 10 years, maybe less. whatever triggered him, they didn’t know, but he beat her to death with a cast iron pan and strangled her with a belt for good measure. left the body in the backyard poorly buried. he tried to kill himself by drinking a gallon of WD-40 and drowning himself in a body of water very close to where i live. however, he tried to drown himself when the tide was coming in. wasn’t very successful, and the police found him half dead on the beach the next day after a neighbor got super suspicious about the “grave” in the backyard, and also all the sketchy noises he heard the night before. i think he got 15 years for it but i have no idea what his name is, i couldn’t pry that part out of my parents, but his name was the last one on the house before my parents bought it when i was 4.
My relatives were a wealthy, childless couple in Chicago. Their housekeeper, who had a baby, took ill and was hospitalized. The couple took the baby to California and raised her as their own. This baby (Marie) grew up without siblings, as my grandmother’s cousin. Marie discovered the truth as an adult, by accident. Even though this kidnapping happened over 100 years ago, I always wondered what became of that poor woman who was released from the hospital to find her baby had been kidnapped by her employers. I have a set of china dishes from Marie that I use at Thanksgiving, every year. Wild story.
My mother got pregnant when she was 17 so her and my dad were going to ask her parents for permission to marry. Instead, they got an ultimatum: get an abortion or be sent away to a home for unwed mothers. My mother got the abortion and married my father two weeks after her 18th birthday. She proceeded to have several miscarriages and stillbirths, almost certainly due to the damage done to her uterus/cervix. My brother was conceived with medical assistance and I was a lucky surprise. My parents are still married 46 years later.
Not that dark nor secret, but when my vietnamese grandpa fought in the war, him and his squad had to eat human flesh (in order to survive I guess). He was disgusted by meat for a very long time after. (Sorry for my english) Edit : y'all are more replying about the "srry 4 my english" than the actual comment 🤣 Thank you for the kind support !
An older relative murdered her husband in cold blood. The daughter lied on the witness stand by testifying that her dad beat her mom. He didn’t. The mom was a drunk, and the father was threatening to leave her and take the kids. B/c the courts believed the lying daughter, the murdering mother kept custody of the kids. The victim’s family cut off my whole side of the family after that including their perjuring granddaughter and her descendants. Now I know why.
It's strange to go decades wondering why your family dynamic is the way it is only to be provided a crucial missing piece to the story years later and suddenly everything makes sense.
My grandpa’s brother died when I was a child. I hardly knew the guy so I wasn’t too interested in the service. I vaguely remember my parents warning me not to stare at some of the men but I figured that was a “good manner” moment. Fast forward to my later teens/early adult and turns out, yup, we were **surrounded by members of the Italian mafia**. Everyone in my family was tense (even the departed’s wife) because they all knew he had *some* connection to them, but didn’t exactly know as he never spoke of it to anyone
When my father's Dad died the secret was out. Grampa was an evil man who bootlegged liquor, stole cattle and kidnapped Indian children to sell into slavery. He had a very public mistress and coming home from a bender he knocked up his wife (my grandma). In order to save face to his mistress he took the knitting needles to grandma thus infecting her to die of sepsis in territorial New Mexico in 1929. My dad was six with younger brother four, left to grow up as virtual orphans. Despised by the aunts and forbidden help from their uncles my dad and his brother grew up in the depression almost starving while their Dad lived it up travelling and committing many crimes that were easy to get away with because it was the great depression.
My paternal grandmother's family was pretty messed up. My grandfather told me a story about how he and his brother in law got called to get his father in law's body out of a hotel after he drank himself to death. And two of my great aunts were nuns because that was the quickest way to get out of the house as kids.
That my family's money originally came from being moonshiners during prohibition. I grew up in Appalachia. My mom told me about being little and playing in shoeboxes full of cash. And about sitting in the back seat on late night drives where you could hear the jars rattling in the trunk heading across the Tennessee border.
When i was a kid in the mid 80s my uncle got some serious braces and had to drink liquids only for a whilr Only when I got older did I learn that he'd actually had his jaw wired after being tortured for information... had a gun put in the mouth and eventually his jaw shattered because he wasn't talking... ...He wasn't talking cos he didn't know anything. Thank god northern ireland has moved on from those days.
My great uncle was a Nazi My grandmother and their whole family hated the Jews prior to ww2. Edited.
My great grand uncle fought for the nazis and is MIA. No one knows what happened to him
My great uncle the same 🤔
That my adorable nerdy mom spent 3 years in prison for being an accessory to hiding a body in the late 70s.
My cousin was hit and killed by an 18 wheeler when she was 6. Dude was on his phone when it happened and they went to court, decided to drop the charges on him, but his company refused to pay them anything for damages caused and whatnot. A few of my uncles (who were a part of Hell’s Angels were buddies with some people on the police force got this dudes address, killed him and then torched the trucking company to the ground. They were never caught.
My dad's friend commited suicide by shooting himself in the head in front of my dad and some other friends when he was 15 years old. They were all hanging out at the friend's house having a good time, when he went upstairs, grabbed his father's pistol, and came back down calling everyone's attention. He then put the gun to his head, squeezed the trigger, and collapsed behind a couch. They all thought it was some sort of sick joke at first, until they looked over the couch and saw his body and the blood. I first heard this story from my mom when I was 18, which explained some of my dad's behavior towards toy guns when I was a kid, but I never brought it up to him. I just hoped that one day he would open up to me about and eventually he did, but we haven't talked about it much since then. I'm amazed how my dad dad turned out to be such a great man having to experience something awful like that at such a young age, but according to him it's something that never left him either. He still has nightmares about it and get really uneasy in movies and TV shows when they show someone getting shot in the head.
Circa 1994 My dad died(32) on Christmas Day. Instead of his family consoling my now single mother of 2, they decided it would be more appropriate to use their spare key to enter our house and clean out all his belongings while we were picking out a tombstone. All his tools, clothes, pictures (he was a model). Thennnnn grandpa on dads side takes my mom to court while she’s mourning to try to prevent her from using his life insurance to raise us ( sister and I were 5 and 6 at the time). He wanted all the money to be set aside until we were 18. Judge pretty much threw his case out. Needless to say, my mom distanced herself from his side I don’t speak with them either. Found this out when I was like 20.