23 Skeletons In Families’ Closets, Unveiled By Members Of This Online Community

People like to explore and investigate other people’s mysteries, and this is far from a secret. This is where the success of detectives, thrillers and other mystical stories lies – it’s so exciting to watch how someone’s secret gradually unfolds before your eyes. And as it unfolds, you become involved, because now this is your secret as well.

What could be more exciting? Probably just a family secret that we happen to be involved in by accident. However, there is a downside, because you never know how this family mystery will turn out. It is quite possible that the impeccable reputation of one of our ancestors will collapse like a house of cards in the wind.

Perhaps a person who has always been disliked in your family will appear in a completely different light. Or, let’s say, the reason for this or that act committed by one of your relatives will be revealed in a brand new way. Who knows what other skeletons lurk behind the completely nice and peaceful-looking door to the family closet?

And in general, is it worth opening this door at all, or is it better to remain in blissful ignorance? In any case, sometimes it happens that we learn some kind of family secret quite by chance, because it was not entirely intended for our ears. Like the commenters in this thread in the AskReddit community where the question was asked a few days ago: “What family secret do you know, that you’re not supposed to know?” Today the thread has approximately 5.7K upvotes and about 4.0K comments. A whole repository of family secrets, bright and not-so-bright ones.

Bored Panda has compiled a special selection of the most popular comments from the original thread, so now feel free to enjoy the most unexpected, dark or funny family secrets that suddenly saw the light of day. And if you have your own similar story, we literally beg you to tell it in the comments below.

More info: Reddit

Grandma and Grandpa did love eachother and were married but weren’t “together”

Grandma was gay and grandpa was her best friend. She wanted kids so they had kids but she had her love “Auntie Doreen” we called her. Grandpa was free to do whatever he wanted and to our knowledge never had a dedicated partner besides my grandmother.

Just the times, glad they could make it work for them 🙂

About 2 years before his death in 2018, I was talking to my grandfather and looking through pictures with him when I found the woman from my memories and asked about her. My father had a sister, Karen. She was born in 1948. When she was a baby, my grandfather took her out to his woodworking shop just to hang out with him while he worked. He sat her on a workbench, turned to grab some tools and turned around just in time to see her hit the floor head first. He said that he’d remember the sound for the rest of his life, like dropping a watermelon. They took her to the local doctor, but he said he didn’t find anything wrong. For the rest of her life, she suffered from debilitating headaches and later, schizophrenia. When she was 26, she called him from a city about 6 hours away, from a payphone. She was sobbing about voices that wouldn’t stop talking and that she couldn’t take it anymore. He immediately jumped in his car and made it there in 4 hours, but the police had already found her dead in her car with a hose running from the exhaust pipe into a window.

I am the only one who seems to know she existed. My mother doesn’t remember her, or denies it. My dad passed away. Both grandparents are gone too. But I remember her face and her telling me it was okay to be sad. Grandpa said she was always interested in me. I’m neuro divergent and really struggled with social skills as a child. I think that it made her feel less alone.

Great-grandma getting knocked up saved an entire branch of our family tree!

He also got emotional at one point and told me he really regretted talking me out of going to school for what I originally wanted to do in favor of what I do now. Later on, he punched the glass out of a jukebox because he thought it’d be funny. The whole night was a roller coaster.

The next day, he seemed to have no recollection of telling me that bombshell about my brother and I never brought it up again. I’ll never tell my brother, and I’ll never tell my parents that I know about it. As a side note, it would explain a lot. My brother and I don’t even look related, but we always just shrugged our shoulders whenever friends asked us how we could be siblings when we look so different. I feel the same way my dad does – he’s my brother, not half-brother, no matter what any test might say. I’m at peace with the fact that I’ll never really know for sure.

I took a few ancestry tests to nail down the rest of my mom’s side, not a single percent Irish in any of them. The family name, common in Irish-Americans, is actually a Swiss surname that got translated at some point, according to the genealogy trace I also had done. My now deceased grandparents want their ashes spread into the Irish sea and my mom and her siblings are planning a big trip to do it. I’m taking the secret to my grave.

I found out when he showed up with gifts shortly after I had moved out on my own. He had hired a PI after my mom refused to give him my contact info. He apologized for not being in my life and cried while telling me he was dying of pancreatic cancer and he didn’t want to go without meeting me.

I asked my mom about it and she told me she told him that so she could get money for [illegal substances] after she left my dad.

DNA tests confirmed he was not my dad.(tested myself against the man I was always told was my bio dad)

I only ever met him the one time. I took the gifts because it was such a surreal experience I didn’t know how to tell him anything other than that I forgave him.

My mom is the only other person that knows this happened.

#10

When my great-grandmother (his daughter) was a teenager it was discovered by the rest of the family that he actually abandoned his first wife and three children in Romania and left them in extreme poverty when he came to the states and married my great-great grandmother.

Ya know, real upstanding guy.

EDIT: Wow. Wasn’t expecting this many upvotes. From what I was told he was an abusive alcoholic and paranoid all the time. His mental health suffered a lot as he aged so I’m assuming guilt was factored into that. Another interesting tid-bit, my great grandmother went on to apparently become a matchmaker through her Orthodox church by helping families with young women relatives still in Romania connect with families with young men here in the US to pretty much arrange marriages so they could come state-side.

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-My Great Aunt was in a Mental Institution for most of her life. I never got to meet her. She went crazy after the love of her life was tragically killed. She was only 18 years old at the time. Her family put her in a mental institution thinking that she would only be in there for a year or so. She was in there for 30 years. The day she left there, she disappeared and no one knew what happened to her until they found her at a abandoned house. She had took her own life. Really sad 😢

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To add insult to injury, my grandfather (his brother) was acting mayor at the time and had no knowledge of this, so to say “S**t hit the fan” would be the understatement of the century…

#20

Every single one of my uncles is currently having an affair.

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#22

My mother had an affair on my father that he doesn’t know about way before he had an affair on her that blew up the family.

#23

Having no solid proof that my niece has to be the daughter of a very famous musical artist very active today. Knowing my sister in law is a huge fan of his and that she and my little brother were both cheating on each other during that time. Looking at my niece she looks exactly like the person I’m talking about. Same eyes, chin, lips, and smile, crooked teeth, same jaw, and hair too. Looks nothing like my brother at all. I’m convinced this person is the her father especially when you put pictures of them side by side.