" Three years ago , my uncle was dying . He reached out to me and say me I had correctly figured out how grandfather die . He waited until he was pall since there ’s no statute of limitations for murder . "
Recently, Reddit useryanoitsathroawayyanoasked, “What family secret did you suspect in childhood, but weren’t able to confirm until adulthood?” and people had some wildly shocking answers. Here’s what they had to say.
NOTE : There are mentions of sexual abuse and murder .
1.“My uncle was a spy. I knew he worked for the government, and somehow, I picked up that he got paid by the government to fly to Asia and take pictures. But no one talked about it until years after he retired.”
— u / ToomintheEllimist
2.“That my grandfather poisoned my grandmother and that my mother knew. My uncle (her younger brother) helped cover it up by getting rid of the evidence. There were odd rumblings about what my grandmother died of as well as how quickly, but I ignored it because my family was full of gossips.”
" I only recently found out about it , as I had a box of my mother ’s from before she give way . I knew what was in it were scrapbooks , mementos , and thing she wrote down that she want me to know or have . She ’s been gone almost 11ish years now , and I will admit I ’ve never gone through it thoroughly . It suffer too much to see so many thing that she saved or all the pic of now - gone relative .
I finally get through it after sing to my fiancé late about one Halloween when my brother , uncle , and I went out dressed as Luke Skywalker , Chewbacca , and Princess Leia . I could n’t happen word picture of us in any of the albums I had , so I went through the box looking for them . I did find them , but I also found a letter from my mommy in an envelope address to me with the engagement of my grandfather ’s demise under it .
It turn out that my grandpa poisoned my grandmother after she confessed to maltreat my mother for nigh all of her childhood during a fight they were having . He used some honest-to-god rodent toxicant he ’d had in the cellar from the ' 50s and slipped it in her tea . She finally became ill and showed sign of dementia ; she was put into specialised care , where they diagnosed her at that sentence with environmentally caused ALS . She passed shortly after go into care .
He confessed to my mamma and her younger sidekick when it was suggested by the care installation that he get his pipes , groundwater , and land test . He acted agitated , which my mom clean up on and pressed him about afterwards .
My uncle took the poisonous substance to a business he dealt with through his job that did toxic material disposal and would often take people ’s walk - ins of thing like this . He also got disembarrass of the teacup and the spoonful that my grandfather used to serve her every day . What ’s funny is that I inherited the teacup set , and it is indeed a cup short , and the silverware set is a spoonful short .
My mum expressed a lot of guilt over it . She felt horrified that her father , in her eyes , killed for her , and she also felt a luck of guilt trip for not feeling sadness for her female parent .
I ’m not certain how I find about it at all . Everyone involved is long dead , so there is no justice to try , and I only remember my grandmother in vague terms , as rough , mean , and scary . Whereas my grandfather was a stern but loving human being who instruct me many things and loved his kids and grandkids .
I ended up burning the missive just because I felt like my mom would ’ve wanted that . "
— u / skinflakesasconfetti
3.“My dad was in jail for a few months when I was around eight years old. I was told he was at work, and he couldn’t call us because it was a really big project. I heard my mom talking about him being ‘locked up’ and thought he got trapped in the vents somewhere. He did HVAC work. It made sense to me at the time, I guess. When he came back, it was like nothing changed. It turns out he was a drug dealer!”
— uranium / send_me_jokes_plz
4.“My dad was in a ‘relationship’ with my 15-year-old cousin (mom’s side) when she lived with us for a while after her parents died. I was a toddler at the time. My dad was brought in front of a judge, but because my cousin (18 by then) defended him, telling the judge, ‘I know what I was doing; I wanted to be in a relationship with him,’ the whole thing got thrown out. Different times in the ’90s, I guess…I knew there was something weird going on (they were buddy-buddy for a while, and then suddenly she moved out, and they couldn’t be in the same room anymore), but I didn’t know exactly what until my cousin had psychosis and called me at 7 a.m. telling me the whole story. I was 17 when that call came.”
— u / Evening - Dizzy
5.“My mom had a cousin she talked about a lot that died back in the ’70s. She (the cousin) had married a man that abused her. After she got away, she ‘died by suicide’ by jumping off a building. Her husband and his brothers had been seen in the area. Everybody knew they had thrown her off, but nobody could prove anything, so nothing happened to them. Cut to the cousin’s funeral; her husband and his brothers showed up like they wanted to make sure she was dead. For years, that’s where the story ended, as far as I knew. Later on, I found out from another relative who had been there that after the husband and brothers walked into the funeral home’s chapel, some men from my family dragged them back out and didn’t come back in. The men from my family turned up later that day and wouldn’t tell anybody where they had gone; the husband and his brothers were never seen again.”
— u / IHadAnOpinion
6.“My dad was never a Navy Seal, even though he spent my entire life telling me stories about it. It wasn’t until he died that I found hisDD214(military discharge papers). He was only in the Navy for ten months and was discharged ‘under honorable conditions.’ He never fought in a war. He was never captured or shot. He never shot anyone. He was just a regular guy. I wish he knew that we never wanted him to be anything but our dad.”
— u / artsycraftsy626
7.“My dad always told me that my birth mom left us when I was two months old. Then the story changed to ‘she died in a car crash,’ and that’s why she wasn’t around. I thought he was just trying to spare my feelings, but it still didn’t make sense even to my kid brain. Fast forward a bunch of years, and I got an email from what turned out to be a cousin who found me on Ancestry DNA. My mother had apparently gone to Cali, then ended up in Florida, where she died of cancer. So most of what my dad told me was horse puckey.”
— u/-TheRealFolkBlues-
8.“My grandpa was murdered by my uncle (married to my mom’s sister). My grandpa sexually abused my mother and her three sisters. He died when I was four. I have vague memories of him.”
" Just after he died , my auntie disjoint my uncle . At historic period 12 , I overhear my other uncle ( two were my mom ’s buddy , and one married my mom ’s babe sis ) talking about a vow they had made to keep me from being a victim of Grandpa . At 16 , I figured it out . The uncle who had murdered him was a jewelry maker and insulin - dependent diabetic . He used cyanide in jewelry making . Grandpa booze a 36 - pack of beer every night . I suspected he inject cyanide into a random beer . My aunt saw Grandpa awake at 2 a.m. My uncle wake up up at 5 a.m. , and grandad was dead and stiff . His consistence was cremate , and my uncle fly . I advert my suspicions to my cousin , who relay them to his father .
Three class ago , my uncle was decease . He reached out to me and told me I had correctly figured out how grandpa died . He hold back until he was die out since there ’s no legislative act of limit for execution . "
— u / Somerset76
9.“That my parents were drug users. They sometimes went to the shed in the middle of the night (I heard them and saw the light turned on). Of course, I didn’t question it. Later, I found out at about nine or ten years old, and when I was eleven, my mom died.”
— u / Itchy - Ad-4314
10.“My pop (who died before I was born) beat my uncle (his son) to death when my uncle was three. My dad was the youngest of six. They immigrated not long after. The oldest, at 15, refused to come and stayed in England by herself. My father never knew; he was told his brother fell onto train tracks, and he still denies it to this day. He never saw his father be abusive at all; they had a good relationship. But the oldest three siblings all have the same story. We believe they immigrated to escape scrutiny.”
— u / yotasandbikes
11.“I used to spend the whole summer break with my aunt, uncle, and cousin (a child from his previous marriage) —months without seeing my mom. Come to find out, those were just trial runs to adopt me because they couldn’t have a child of their own. I do believe that would have meant my mom did not want me, the feeling I always knew to be true.”
— [ delete ]
12.“My siblings, cousins, and I were told that two uncles died in a tragic car accident when they were 17 and 20. As an adult, I found out they both died by suicide two years apart and that one of them may have done it because he was sexually assaulted by a priest. No one in my extended family openly talks about it. I’ve never heard my grandma even say their names.”
— uracil / JoeLou28
13.“I was an accident. My parents were already on the verge of a divorce, and my mom suddenly got pregnant despite having tried for over four years. I always felt like I was in the way or not welcome. My feelings were confirmed when my dad threw me out right after high school graduation.”
— u / SpidermanBread
14.“As I was cleaning out my dad’s house after his passing, I found letters that my mom and dad wrote to each other around the time they divorced in the early 2000s, as well as a handful of both their diary entries. I have always suspected that my mom cheated on my dad with my best friend’s dad, which effectively ended my first friendship, but those letters confirmed it. But I didn’t know the full extent of what else my mom had done.”
" She sabotaged him by drain their joint bank account , extort up decade of yard in credit card debt , kicking him out of his menage , and get him fired from his job , finally force him into retreat . With him unemployed , he could n’t afford to pay nipper support , leave only my mom ’s income , which was barely enough to sustain us . Basically , if she had n’t been so vindictive , we would n’t have wound up in such dreadful financial straits .
It ’s pretty telling that my dad never talk ill of her ; he just said that he was blindsided and confound by her pick and jealous of her current partner . On the other hand , my mom only ever said negative things about him , and when she was wild with me , she would compare me to him . Projection 101 . "
— uranium / EmbarrassedEye7745
15.“My dad was cheating on my mom with that woman we met up with when we were looking at colleges in California. He was a headhunter and traveled a decent amount for work, generally to the West Coast, because he did a lot of work for biotech firms. We went out there when I was in high school because I was interested in a few West Coast schools — UCSD, ULCA, Pepperdine — and he had a rugby tournament on Catalina Island with his old club. While we were out there, we met up with her for lunch one day in LA.”
" All I roll in the hay was she was one of the people he had locate with one of the companies that had charter him . While we had lunch , nobody did anything blazing like PDA or anything , but you could edit out the stress with a tongue — I knew something was off . I get out about the affair when my parents ultimately got divorced around a decade later — he basically dropped his whole account of infidelity on my mamma to smart her . She was n’t the only one either — just the only one my dad really had notion for . He was a existent piece of shit . "
— u / max_power1000
16.“I found the identity of my biological father. Nobody in my family would talk about who he was because my mother was 17 when I was born, and I was the family scandal (back in the early ’80s). I grew up thinking he didn’t know about me or care about me if he did know. I was definitely wrong and found out my family threatened him to stay away from me. I did a lot of digging some years ago and found out that side of the family knew about me and would have loved me very much. I also had siblings. It really made me angry at the family I grew up with. My biological father also died before I got to meet him.”
— uracil / ExistentialWonder
17.“The man on my birth certificate says he’s not my father, and I am finally sure he’s not. He told me (as an adult) that my mother fooled around with his brother. The thing is, I’ll never know the truth unless my mother or my ‘uncle’ admit it. Why? Because DNA tests are useless when determining paternity in the case of identical twins. I was always so mad when I was a kid because my birth certificate father said that he wasn’t my birth father, but I definitely looked like him. Then I saw a picture of him with Uncle Freddy in their twenties. Fuck.”
— u / Prior_Alps1728
18.“That my parents cheated on each other. When I was young, my parents both worked at different times and rarely were together at the same time at the house. My mom would always bring over my dad’s older brother. And my dad would bring my mom’s younger sister. They found out about each other’s affairs and laughed it off. … My mom married my uncle, and my dad married my aunt … and I have three half-siblings now, And we all live happily in The Confusing US Of A.”
— uranium / Silly_Storm_5515
19.“That my parents had lived a ‘different life’ before moving us to the middle of nowhere … when we were all kids (I was about 3 or 4), and that the ‘life’ was the reason we moved. And that my dad isn’t my biological dad. I suspected it when I was growing up (he was always super kind, but I just had a feeling he wasn’t, and his blood type with my mom’s wouldn’t have equated to mine), and as an adult, I was able to search up a bunch of stuff and hire a P.I. I know it all, but they don’t know I know. I’d never hurt them by telling them, but at least I know I’m not delusional.”
— u / WitchOfLycanMoon
20.“Pre-Roe (and probably soon to return), my great-aunt performed ‘kitchen table’ abortions at the family farmhouse. When the women in the family got together over some ‘sipping medicine,’ the talk would get pretty ribald, and it was only after I got older that I figured out what they were talking about.”
— u / godlessnihilist
21.“Growing up, I always had a feeling that there was a family secret surrounding my grandparents' sudden move to a different state when my mom was a teenager. No one ever talked about it, but the whispers and hushed conversations always made me curious. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I finally found out the truth — my grandmother had been having an affair with a neighbor, and they had to leave town to escape the fallout. It was a shock to finally have confirmation of what I had suspected all those years.”
— u / virtual - Bend-1740
22.“My grandfather had no past. He had even misspelled a common name when coming up with the fake name, and we were told never to look into it or ask about it. I 100% thought he had robbed a bank or killed someone.”
" After he died , my grandma confirmed that back in the solar day , he and some Friend were making whisky , and a still exploded and killed one of them . And the local report made it the account of the fucking decennary . So my granddaddy and his other two friends scatter and tried to hide from it . He was the last of the group , so I calculate he did . "
— u / stryst
23.“My Nan had a daughter before she married my grandfather, and he made her adopt the child out. The child would have been about three years old by that time. My Nan and grandfather got together by default. They were messing around with each other behind their partner’s backs, and Nan got pregnant. Her partner left. His partner left. They were forced to marry each other. It was a marriage full of regrets, and Grandad eventually left her to marry another woman. She died with her first husband’s photo in her wallet. By luck, I found his family, and it turned out that he also had her picture in his wallet when he died.”
— u/2oldemptynesters
24.And finally…“That was not a tomato plant growing in a pot that I couldn’t tell my friends about.”
— uranium / EnoughPlastic4925
Submissions have been edited for duration / clarity .
