Some secrets are so serious that people will honestly keep them until their grave. They might be scared, ashamed, or just sensitive to whatever it is. But what happens when people find out the truth about their loved one's secrets? Will it make them disgusted or just sad that they thought they couldn't share their truth? Either way, they keep these secrets for a reason, so when it comes out, it is sure to shock.
We were curious to see how many secrets were kept until death, and there was a lot. We looked throughout Reddit and found the most shocking secrets people kept their entire lives and here they are. This content was edited for clarity.
“She Felt Like It Was Something To Be Ashamed Of”
“My grandma had a secret daughter she’d given up for adoption in her late teens before going on to start a family with my grandpa. She would travel out of state every so often to visit with her, unbeknownst to the entire family—including her husband/my grandpa. We only found out because my mom is really into genealogy and keeps up with an Ancestry.com account, and happened to notice a name associated my grandma that didn’t seem familiar. So my mom sent a personal message to the account asking for more information, and it turned out the woman’s adopted daughter had set up the account in hopes of finally tracking down her adoptive mom’s family (a few years after my grandma had passed away).
We came to learn that shortly after my grandma graduated high school, she was dating a sailor from the Midwest who accidentally got her pregnant. When she phoned to tell him she was expecting, he broke the news that he was married and couldn’t raise a child with her. At this point, she had told her parents and they decided to send her down to California for the summer to ‘visit with family,’ aka have the baby and place it up for adoption. Not long after returning home, she met my grandpa and they got married and went on to have three kids. All the while her daughter was being raised by a family friend in California.
Eventually, my grandma started traveling to southern California every now and then to check in with her daughter, give her some money, and just make sure she was doing okay. Since she was raised with a family friend it made, the trips non-conspicuous, and by this point my grandpa was an addict in pretty poor health, so he probably didn’t think twice about what was going on.
It’s crazy to think she knew all about my grandma’s family back home—aware that she had siblings—but no one knew about her existence. I guess that’s the part that feels so dark because it breaks my heart to know my grandma felt like this was something to be ashamed of. To also think of how my aunt must have felt, knowing she was the unplanned/unwanted child who had to be kept hidden away from the rest of the family. Just all around a sad situation.
It was a blessing in disguise though; we gained a new family member after my grandma’s death. She looks so much like my grandma, it’s almost like having a small piece of her back in our lives.”
He Wasn’t So Sweet After All
“My girlfriend’s great-grandfather was a sweet old man that died when she was a very little girl. After he died, the family was going through his things and found his diary.
Turns out that he was secretly a Klan member.”
The Original Mr. Worldwide
“My grandfather was a sailor and cook in the Canadian Navy. While in port down in the Caribbean, he and a friend went around the island exploring both the island and the local women. Well, a few years before he died, he showed me a picture of him, a kid and a woman while he was in uniform. It was ONE of the kids that were his. When he died, I got his big trunk of military stuff and in a wallet in the bottom was another picture, with two more kids and him with a woman.
My grandfather had three families my mother didn’t know about.”
She Didn’t Run Away After All…
“I volunteered at a research library as an amateur genealogist, so I found all the skeletons in the closet. My personal favorite was a woman who wanted to find out about her great aunt. She’d been told her aunt ran away from home at sixteen and was never seen by the family again. Turned out the aunt actually was jailed for stealing a bunch of money from her brother.
While in jail, it came out that she was secretly married to a guy who was wanted as part of a ring of thieves stealing silver cutlery from fancy hotels. That was her third marriage and she was 20 and Catholic, so her family cut her off. She eventually moved across the state and remarried twice more before eventually getting hitched to a farmer. They were married 18 years when she died. Oh, and the great uncle my client had been told died of the flu? He was murdered on his front porch in a fight over a glass bottle.
Also, so many people had two families. Tons of secret adoptions. Lots of moving around for less than savory reasons. Genealogy is fascinating stuff.
Here’s another good one I dealt with:
This guy was told all his life that his great-grandmother was French. I did the research and it turned out Great Grandma’s parents were from Louisiana and Creole. Her father was the son of a French trapper and his freed slave, and her mother was the daughter of a slave and a plantation owner.
Her father owned a construction company and when the Great Depression hit, he couldn’t get work. So he burned his house down for the insurance money. When the insurance company started an investigation, he packed up everything, moved his family to California and listed himself as white and from France on the census. They cut off contact with the remaining family in Louisiana and told all the kids too young to remember the move that they were from the South of France.
I found census records, photos and newspaper articles of the family in both places. A DNA test confirmed that the guy’s great grandma was in fact Creole. That one was pretty interesting.
So, I guess I mostly deal in things that weren’t secrets at the time but are now.”
He Didn’t Know That Side Of His Friend…
“A friend of a friend died and had explicit instructions to his best friend that should he pass on first, that some VHS tapes the person had were to be destroyed immediately. Well, the best friend didn’t destroy them immediately and watched a few. Turned out the guy had some rather disgusting times with boys who were in no way old enough to engage in said times. The tapes were destroyed but the living best friend that was to get rid of them had their opinion of their recently passed friend shattered.
He really had no clue. The best friend committed suicide about a year later.
The revelations about his best friend definitely shattered this fellow.
They were really good friends and getting up there in years, so they had known each other for decades. They worked for the same company, enjoyed the same social circle, and even lived within about two blocks of one another in a large city. They were both gay but that really doesn’t have any relevance either way but it was still something they had in common.
When the surviving friend would get into his cups a tad, he would let it all out which is how I found out about it.
It was really a sad thing.
You ever met someone that lost someone really close and they just never seem to be the person they used to be? That was this.
I think he would have been OK with it all had the revelations about the other fellow’s proclivities not come out.
He sort of tore himself up over it all because he felt guilty for not just destroying the tapes and ruining his best friend’s memory. I get that the best friend was a scum bag underneath it all but to this guy he was his best friend and not the scumbag.
Ignorance is bliss.”
Grandma Refuses To Hide Her Bitterness
“After my grandpa died, my grandma, his first wife, told us gave my grandpa gave her crabs when he cheated on her with his soon-to-be second wife. For some reason, my grandma brought it up at a family dinner out of nowhere. She never remarried and lives with my parents now.
She still gets upset when she talks about it, so I’d assume it is still lingering.”
Bitsy Just Went Away One Day
“My great uncle Duke had four kids: one has no disabilities, two have hearing problems, and due to a birth injury, one had severely reduced mental capacity. The one with severely reduced mental capacity was named Bitsy. From what my mom has told me, Bitsy had the level of intelligence of a person that is 2 or 3 years old and could do a limited amount for herself.
Bitsy was a few years older than my mom, I believe Bitsy was 3 or 4 when my mom was born. My mom has memories of Bitsy up until my mother was 15 or 16, making Bitsy 19 or 20 at the time. My mother assumed Bitsy had passed away and had simply been buried quietly. Turns out, when Bitsy turned 20, my great uncle decided she needed more specialized care than he could offer her at home and found someone who could care for her better than he could. He was very, very well off so she would have been sent to the best place he could afford.
I think part of our Bitsy going to an institution was the age of my great uncle. He and his first wife had Bitsy a little later in life and I think it just got too hard for him to do it himself. He was well into his 80s when she passed.
She ended up living well into her 40s before passing away. If I remember correctly, she made it to 46.”
He Was Loyal, But He Loved Someone Else
“My grandfather served in Korea. After he died, we found some old pictures of an unnamed Korean woman in his belongings. My family was shocked and a little disturbed, as he had always been faithful to my grandma as long as they can remember. I did some thinking and it doesn’t make much sense. He served BEFORE he met my grandma, not after, so there was no affair. You’d think my mom and aunts would realize that. Maybe they were upset because he kept the pictures? Seems rather tame considering their reactions.
My grandparents didn’t really have a good marriage. He stayed by her side no matter what, but she is and was a bitter woman with no great love of life. He just had this thing about loyalty.”
“It Went From Secret To Open Secret To Just Open”
“My wife’s grandparents were born in the 1930s and they were both gay. They used to go to gay social clubs when they were still underground and illegal. They got married because they wanted to have a family and a normal life, but they were only ever best friends, having their actual romantic partners separately. Apparently, it satisfied their very pious and conservative parents, who were totally unaware, but was an open secret among their friends. Grandma’s girlfriend of 40 years was called ‘Auntie Melanie’ by the kids and attended all the family functions. Even my wife called her Auntie Melanie growing up.
They never had an actual coming out of the closet moment. As the years went by, their parents died and the social/political situation got better, so it gradually went from secret to open secret to just open. It is funny to think back to how naive people could be about it. I like to imagine the newlywed groom explaining that they decided to take separate honeymoons with a friend or how he’d need a double bed for his wife’s bedroom because Melanie sleeps over a lot and no one finding that strange. I don’t think that actually happened, but in my head it did.”
His Dad Wasn’t The Man He Thought He Was
“My dad committed suicide when I was 11. He had longstanding issues with all kinds of dope, and I always had a soft spot for him because he was my dad and I felt like my family just hated him because of some questionable choices, even though he wasn’t that bad of a guy. I was strongly considering getting a tattoo to memorialize him when I turned 18.
When I was 17, I found out that he used to beat and violate my mom on a regular basis. She said he would literally corner her when she came out of the shower and force himself on her. He was also physically abusive toward my brother (we have different dads). Also, while my mom was pregnant with me on her due date, he pushed her down our basement steps, which are the most jagged, stiff, wooden steps leading to our concrete basement.
She kept that from me until I was old enough to handle it but trashed him on a regular basis about many many other things.
I only saw my dad on scattered Sundays until the last year or so before he died. That year, I started going for weekends and also started bringing friends. It was weird that we got so close just before it ended. It was always this weird double life I felt like I had. But then the worlds started to merge and he came to my 11th birthday party and he taught me how to drive while seated on two phone books for my birthday. Then bam suicide. I’ve always felt very unsympathetic towards people who commit suicide ever since.
When I found he died, I was waiting on the couch to get picked up to go to his house for the weekend. My mom came downstairs and said his friend found him dead in his apartment of an ‘asthma attack. I knew it wasn’t true immediately. I asked her where his body was and where his inhaler was because I knew that wasn’t it. Although to be fair, she didn’t know he was actively using because she never went to his house. I didn’t know it was that bad to watch someone shoot up but I knew she wouldn’t let me go back.
I’m glad I did not get that tattoo.”
He Kept Them In Poverty For His Own Selfish Reasons
“My grandfather was a jerk his entire life. He was abusive and cruel. The family lived in poverty, very hand to mouth, and scraped for everything they had, which was not much. On his deathbed, he told my grandmother that he had been hoarding money his entire life. He’d saved a couple of million. Grandma took herself on a trip around the world and then gave the rest of the money to a zoo. She gave none to her children.
He decided the kids had all they needed and lied to them for their entire lives. He denied them anything beyond basic education, food, and clothes. Grandmother assumed he was drinking and gambling it all away, as he did both. He was a massive jerk and remained physically abusive to his children into adulthood.
They were very large people. Grandpa was 6’7 and chucked my 6’6 dad down a set of stairs when we were there once. My grandmother kept a ‘cry jar’ in her kitchen. In their house, if you cried you had to cry into the jar to water the plants.
My grandfather and grandmother had a fourth child, who was born with disabilities. Grandfather declared he would not have made a child with disabilities, therefore the child had to be a product of an affair. He allowed the child (whose life expectancy was a few years) to come home but demanded his wife ignore the child. My dad and his siblings (who were still young children themselves) provided all the care until the child died in toddlerhood.
Thankfully, we visited rarely and eventually not at all, as my mom and dad wanted to shield us. They also didn’t allow either grandparent to treat anyone badly when we were in the home. I only saw a few incidents, including my grandfather showing up at my 5th birthday to which he was not invited. He was trashed and starting a fight when my dad, my dad dragged him away. However, two young cousins were living in that house and my parents wanted to engage with them as best they could for the benefit of the two kids.
My dad tried so hard to overcome, but it was eventually just too much. When my sister was little, she hit the dog; my dad (who had never so much as yelled at us) picked up a two by four and hit her with it. My mom said he collapsed to the ground sobbing. It was just his natural reaction. He was devastated and refused to engage in discipline ever again. She said it was that day that he disconnected from all of us. He knew he was too broken and was scared about what he might do. A lifetime of abuse and two tours and Vietnam has ruined him. He was a big, tough dude in the 60’s and 70’s, so he didn’t go looking for therapy.
He hung around trying to parent the best he could, but eventually wasted so much of his life drowning his pain and working every second he was not hammered. No pain if you don’t stop moving.
My poor dad. Between his home and Vietnam, he was so messed up. He couldn’t rise to the challenge of sticking around and parenting but after all, he experienced, I give him credit for never laying a hand on us, trying his best and then leaving when he knew he just couldn’t.”
He Understood His Grandpa A Little Better
“My grandfather on my mother’s side was very abusive. He yelled and insulted my grandmother and my mom, was a misogynist, always hammered, etc. He was a cop most of his life in a small town, and he abused his power there as well.
After he died from a combination of cancer and MS, I learned more about him from a family friend. Apparently, my grandfather had autism. He was mocked as ‘Dumb Dale’ in school and was bullied pretty bad. He only got a job in the police department after graduation because someone else vouched for him. The childhood abuse and mental disabilities don’t excuse his treatment of my mom and grandma, but I do understand him more.”
Ancestry.Com Revealed It All
“My great grandmother always thought her father died in WWI. She was a baby when he left and he never came back. About fifteen years after she died, my aunt found out that he had gone off to the war, but made it back, settled down in Ohio, and started up a new family. My aunt had made contact with one of them on ancestry.com.
They figured out what happened, discussed some details, but I think that’s pretty much where the story ends.”
His Grandma Was One Strong Lady
“My grandma, a lovely, sweet, chubby old lady who cooked great meatballs, was apparently a total boss when my dad was a kid. She let her sister take care of my dad when she was working three jobs and couldn’t take care of him herself because she was a single mom. My great aunt tried to keep my dad though. She moved with my dad without telling grandma and tried to cut off communication with grandma. Grandma was no dummy, caught wind of this, and showed up for a ‘surprise visit.’ Then basically kidnapped my dad back from her sister when she wasn’t looking. They just got in a taxi and drove off when the three of them were out on the town. They got away really quick, they were out of the country the same day. My grandma was an edgier lady than I thought.
I never knew this until after she died. I also didn’t know that she was apparently told she was going to die of cancer two months after I was born. Due to sheer willpower and a healthy diet, she survived until I was 13 years old. And I never knew she had cancer the whole time, I wasn’t told, and she never showed it.”