Skeletons In The Closet: Shocking Family Secrets that Will Make You Curious About Yours

When my paternal grandfather died the federal govt reached out to do a state funeral. He'd been career army and a colonel, so we didn't question it. Then the funeral came and they went ALL OUT! Huge procession, people showing up who are really big names, like heads of dept's, senators, retired senators, people from the CIA and State Dept, it was nuts and we were all super confused. Turns out he was a key dude in the OSI during WWII and when the OSI splintered into the CIA and Secret Service, he went the Secret Service route.

. He wasn't on White House detail, but instead worked in a covert office that dealt with counterfeiting and currency. He went blind when I was a toddler and retired from 'the Army.' For whatever reason, he told no one about all his covert work with the OSI and Secret Service and the only person who knew (my grandmother) was sworn to secrecy and never told anyone. My father grew up thinking he was just a colonel working on base. Only after his death were we given all sorts of cool sh*t like publications by him, lectures given by him, and all kinds of things from various things he did and was known for. All I knew him as was a blind old man who was perpetually smoking, drinking and being a crotchety bastd. Turns out he was a bada and all but none of us knew.

This is kind of messed up, but my parents told me my mom had a bad back because i pushed on her spine during birth. This was what i thought all my childhood. i think i was in my teens when my older brother told me my dad pushed my mom during an argument and she fell and had to have surgery.

I thought I ruined my moms back my entire childhood and those SOBs let me believe it :(

In the 1970s a dead girl was found on my grandpa's property. Everyone including the local police just assumed she was in with a bad crowd and murdered by drug dealers.

In the 90s, some of his grandkids came forward about all the molestation. After that, people started to realize grandpa probably killed that girl.

My mother is kid #7 of 10. My aunt (kid #4) who was born in 1945 did her DNA and found out that she has a different father from everyone else. She was devastated. There was always rumor that there was an affair but nobody talked about it.

She has so many questions but nobody's alive to answer her.

My fathers brother killed 4 girls when he was in high school. My father was the one who found out and told the police. He would go to parties, lure girls into the woods with him, sexually assault them, then strangle them. Happened 4 separate times. Has been in prison since he was a teenager and will be for the rest of his life for all I know.

When I was 5 years old (1988), Santa Clause left a Nintendo on our front porch. It was wrapped in newspaper, and my parents had no idea who gifted it to us. My dad, particularly, tried to figure it out. He was always suspicious that it had been a family friend. It was by far the best gift of the year, and we played it all the time throughout our childhood.

My dad died in 2004. Last Christmas, my mom explained that she was the one who had bought it and surreptitiously placed it on the porch. My dad really liked to be in control of things and had forbidden the purchase. She knew better. She didn't tell a soul for 30 years.

My dad passed away 2 years ago. He and my mom were married for 34 years. He was a good dad and husband, I have no ill-memories of him. Just found out that for the middle 10 years he was living a double life and had many mistresses on the side. Now my whole childhood feels like a sham. I don't know what was real and what was fabricated.

I see a lot of stories about people finding out that who they thought was their parents weren’t the people raising them and this one is a little bit different.

My dad always thought his father who raised him wasn’t his biodad and the father thought the same. He was treated terribly by his father because the father was told he couldn’t have children and my father was born prematurely (but at a healthy weight). So, everyone assumed my grandmother had an affair and got pregnant with my dad. It was to the point that after my grandmother died, my grandfather failed to even mention to his new wife that he had a son and grandchild (me).

Years later, my dad gets an AncestryDNA test for him and me. He find out that his dad was actually his biodad. It was shocking and sad.

That happened to me. I looked forward to having a big brother, but he turned out to be a schmuck and wound up marrying our sister. He had four kids by his first wife, not a relative, and one through artificial insemination with my sister since the blood line was too close. They still won't admit it in public. I'm not good at keeping the secret.

My cousin is actually my sister. Apparently my mom got pregnant really young and her much older sister adopted my sister and raised her as her own. It was actually an amazing moment when we found out. My cousin (sister) and the sister I was raised with and I are really really close. Just happened last year. We're all old now (I'm 50 and my cousin/sister is 58) so it's just a really neat thing that makes us all happy.

After my mom died I found out the real story behind my parent's marriage. She came to my father's country to visit some of her relatives. Met my father and after just one week she asked him to marry her so she could stay in the country. My father accepted because he had no one else and his parents were pressing him to get married already.

But the highlight of the story is that over some time, the two of them fell in love with each other. Their love only grew over the time and they were really happy together. My mother spent her last days very ill, and she would accept only my father by her bedside. He swears to this day that she was an angel sent from god to take care of him. I am shocked that they got married just like that, out of the blue and ended up loving each other so so so deeply. I can only hope to have as good and loving marriage as they had.

About a month ago, my mother-in-law's 88 year old sister revealed on her death bed that her husband's best friend was actually the father of all 4 of her children. Her husband was an abusive grade A jerk by all accounts. While everyone was shocked, no one was saddened by this news.

My uncle served in Vietnam. While over there his troop found a baby that had been orphaned or abandoned, they aren't sure. My uncle was shipping back to Australia soon and wanted to adopt him, but my aunt said no (they'd only been married about 4 months when he was drafted, so while I don't agree with my aunt's actions and generally don't like her as a person, I can understand why she said no). My uncle's troop found a family to raise the baby, and that's the story the whole family knows.

The secret is that my uncle and some other guys from his troop stayed in contact with the family and the kid, sending them money every month to help raise him and then to help him go to university and eventually helped him and his adoptive family move to Australia in the last 90s. My aunt and the rest of my family had no idea all this time, it only came out when my aunt and uncle divorced in 2017 and she had a forensic accountant go through their bank records. She worked at a bank for like 40 years and always noticed the money missing, but his reasons were always justified.

Since we all know now, my uncle has introduced some of us to the guy and his family. They're all really lovely people.

My great grandfather didn't die of cancer.

He died from complications after being shot when one of his businesses was being robbed. Maybe. He also spent a lot of time in Atlantic City. He also had a lot of partners in the Teamsters and other unions in coal country. Also, everyone called him "smiling Tony' but his name wasn't Tony.

He died in the 60s, long before my time, but when my great grandmother died 20 years ago, a very old guy showed up to the funeral in a white suit and all of the oldest people in my family kisses his hand. When I asked, no one knew who he was. My grandfather moved his family away from central PA in the late 60s and disconnected from all of this but, there it is.

When I was 28, I found out that my dad was not my biological father. The news came out via the following: my dad was battling depression and was suicidal, so I had just flown home to try to take care of him and rescue him from my mom's wrath. My mom had verbally and emotionally abused him during their entire relationship. He loved her so much, and he tolerated it.

Well, during a solemn walk w/ my dad, as I tried to help him out, he confided that he's not my biological dad, and he went on to tell me he knew this all along but my mom lied to him and tried to convince him that he was my biological father. He knew he wasn't, but he wanted to play the role. When I was 10 years old, my mom finally confessed this to him, and he was worried that upon hearing the news, officially, he'd somehow let this affect his relationship with me. So, when I was 28 years old, during this walk w/ my dad, as he pours out this story to me, he frames it by telling me that his two most proud items in his life are: (1) how I turned out / his raising me; (2) that he had completely forgot about the news my mom told him earlier in that day (when I was 10), about him not being my biological father, and that it was only upon tucking me in at night (when I was 10), that it briefly crossed his mind. It was at that point that he knew nothing would ever come between us and our father-son relationship would be as awesome as ever.

He also confided that my mom did hard drugs while pregnant with me, and this broke his heart to witness firsthand. They were very poor. My dad grew up in a foster home without parents. My mom grew up w/ 6 siblings and ill-equipped parents. She dropped out of 9th grade, whereas all of her other siblings dropped out earlier -- many of them are barely literate.

I'm now mid-30s, and tragically, my dad committed suicide mid-March 2020, right as COVID was hitting. I was out of the country at the time but immediately flew 30 hours (30-min layover) and made it in time for his funeral. I do everything in his honor.

My grandmother recently died. She was famous in our town for her amazing cooking/catering, in particular her turkey dinners. Notably, her gravy was absolutely amazing. So delicious. She had a heart attack several years ago and her near-death experience convinced her to share some of her secret recipes with me, all except for her gravy recipe. When she died this spring, I was going through her pantry and found an entire bucket of KFC gravy mix. She was literally using KFC gravy mix as a base to make her incredible gravy. Huge scandal. lmao

When my paternal grandfather died the federal govt reached out to do a state funeral. He'd been career army and a colonel, so we didn't question it. Then the funeral came and they went ALL OUT! Huge procession, people showing up who are really big names, like heads of dept's, senators, retired senators, people from the CIA and State Dept, it was nuts and we were all super confused.

Turns out he was a key dude in the OSI during WWII and when the OSI splintered into the CIA and Secret Service, he went the Secret Service route. He wasn't on White House detail, but instead worked in a covert office that dealt with counterfeiting and currency. He went blind when I was a toddler and retired from 'the Army.'

For whatever reason, he told no one about all his covert work with the OSI and Secret Service and the only person who knew (my grandmother) was sworn to secrecy and never told anyone. My father grew up thinking he was just a colonel working on base. Only after his death were we given all sorts of cool stuff, like publications by him, lectures given by him, and all kinds of things from various things he did and was known for.

All I knew him as was a blind old man who was perpetually smoking, drinking and being a crotchety SOB. Turns out he was a bad motherfker and all but none of us knew.

We went to my grandmother's for Christmas dinner like we did every year and my uncle drank too much, and kind of hinted that he had an affair with my mother. A couple of months and two DNA tests later we found out my sister is actually his daughter. My dad never spoke to his brother again. And of course, my parents got divorced. And I needed a lot of therapy... and chocolate. Gosh we are trash!

After I was molested by my uncle, it came out he had done this to another one of my sisters and my family covered it up, particularly my mother. Now I know why my sister didn’t like how close my uncle got to me when I was younger.

My Mom cheating on my dad with my now stepfather. My Parents divorced when I was really young (about 1 year old), so I don't remember anything about that. When I would ask as a curious kid why they split up both said that they just fell out of love. I already had a feeling that this was not true because through my grandma i knew the divorce was in 1996, but my Mom and stepfather started dating in 1995. On my 18th Birthday my stepfather confessed to me in private that they had an affair all that time ago and he still feels awful, because he feels like he broke Up that family.

I told him that all is fine, because everyone is happy now and i already kinda knew it. Some years later my stepmother told me that my mom actually kicked out my dad without telling him why. She just "needed a break" (remember she just had a newborn and my dad could barely see me at the beginning). My dad later found out through the landlord that my stepfather had moved in. In the house my dad rented with his wife where his newborn daughter was living with a Stranger.

To this day i don't know how my dad managed to overcome this without starting a huge fight. I never talked with my parents about it. Just once when my mom was having a rant about a neighbor who left her husband for another man, I told her to stop throwing rocks while sitting in a glass house. I hope you know what this saying means. She definitely does.

When my mother fell ill and I took over her finances I found thousands of pounds of gambling debt on her credit cards. Then I found adoption papers for a child she’d had before me that she’d never mentioned. Then another family member told me my dad didn’t die in a car crash but committed suicide in prison.

My grandma didn't drive. I thought she couldn't, but it was just never discussed.

One day when I was maybe 7-8, I'd been trying to get someone, anyone to drive me to the store for candy. We were visiting my aunt and uncle, grandma lived with them. They had Bit-O-Honey at the local store, which I could no longer get at home. But no one would take me to the store.

Finally I said I'd just ask grandma, and my cousin chimes in with, "Grandma can't drive."

"Oh you bet your sweet ass I can drive. They just don't let me!" Grandma had overheard and she was in high dudgeon.

But that's all that was said about it, and my aunt finally took me to the store, so I forgot about it. Years later, when I'd just gotten my license, I asked my mom what was up with Grandma not driving.

She explained that during prohibition grandma boot-legged alcohol for moonshiners. She was very successful at it. She was so successful at it that when the moonshiners were finally busted, even though the revenuers never caught my grandma, her license was suspended by the state "to never be reissued."

Later in life she was told she could petition for it back but it came with an admission of guilt or some such. She told 'em to go to hell.

I started having problems with my teeth. Spontaneous abscess that resulted in multiple root canals. My dentist did some looking into what the cause might be and found some really odd abnormalities with my incisors roots and nerves ( the teeth that had been afflicting me). So he sent out requests for help to a couple of professors he knew in the field. When my next appointment came up he was really quiet for a bit before verbally stumbling about.

It turns out that what was happening with my teeth was a classic sign of inbreeding and he was super uncomfortable giving me the news. I brought it up to my mom and she just was like: "Oh well yeah, didn't you know?" WTF!? of course I didn't know!!!

Turns out that not very far back in the family tree, several of my relatives decided that it was a good idea to get married to one another....and no one bothered to mention it...ever. The small town where I live is 85% my relatives, no joke. I hadn't even met all of them, that's how many there are.

My mother often had stories like:

"At your age, we got up at 4am to work on the farm, after the job, we went home to have lunch with your grandfather, then we walked 10km to go to school, and when we were back , we used to work in the field in a tractor until it was 6pm to go and cook dinner for your grandfather."

And me like "Yeah but ... he didn't work the farm with you in the morning?" and she was changing the subject.

I learned in Easter that my grandfather was alcoholic, got drunk every night, didn't get up in the morning to go to work, or was in fake jobs to lie to the family and go to drink, while the children had to go. in elementary school and manage a farm.

Then he was in prison because he touched the neighbour's children.

When he got out of prison, he took out a loan of $ 30,000 in my grandmother's name, and ran away with the money.

Then he died a few years later.

My grandmother bought herself a used Ford LTD, and no one cried at the funeral. 30 years later, I learn who my grandfather was.

That my grandfather was an atomic soldier. Instead of sending him to fight in the Korean war, they sent him to Nevada, where (after having him turn away from the initial flash) he witnessed the mushroom cloud. After that was over, he was ordered to march to the detonation point, where he was unwittingly exposed to high amounts of radiation.

Luckily for my family, my grandpa is now in his 90s (even after a few cancer scares) and the rest of us (my mom, aunt, cousins, sister, and I) are cancer-free and fairly healthy, but this is medical information that we really should have known earlier!

My dad fathered a child in highschool. His side of the family knew, and my mom. We found out years after he died that we have a half-sister.

Dad got a girl pregnant and she decided to go it alone. She moved across the state and had my half-sister. She met a guy, married, and he raised her like she was his own. They had no other children. She didn't reveal my dad's identity until after he died.

Apparently, she contacted my Grandma and Mom, but they kept it from us. Years later, half-sister has a kid with medical issues and needs to know family medical history. She contacts mom and grandma, who, again don't tell us. Meanwhile, after Dad died, my uncle had prints made of a favorite picture of dad.

He gets them framed and gives them to all us kids, as well as my grandma, aunt's and uncles. Mom gets a picture to our half-sister after their secret meeting. Fast forward another few years. My brother and his roommate live in a nearby large city and hit a bar and pick up and bring home some ladies to "sleep over".

The next morning, my half-sister sees a photo of my dad on the mantle, turns white, and asks "Whose picture is that?" "That's my roommates dad. He died a long time ago." "I need to talk to your roommate."

She lived her entire life across the state. Hundreds of miles. Her friend was going to school in a large city near our hometown. She was visiting, and they decided to go to bar. They get picked up by my brother and his roommate. That's how we found out. My brother went to my grandma and asked about her, and grandma first denied it, then gave in and spilled the beans. Small world.

Uncle had tried to commit suicide over a love triangle. He survived.

He survived, and left the country afterwards. This was a huge hush hush story and ironically, I heard it from my aunt, who was the woman with whom he was in love with. Yes, I’m from one of those countries where cousins can legally get married, but it is discouraged due to the obvious. But yes, from what I was told, he changed into a bit of religious freak afterwards. And no one ever spoke of what happened ever again

I grew up in a Mexican family and have 2 younger cousins. My aunt married another Latino guy who basically looked white. The oldest child was a girl and came out looking exactly like her dad- full stop. The second was a boy and came out looking like.... his mom? Maybe? He was dark dark. Like, I’m half-Black and this kid is darker than me. But his mom was pretty brown as well. So we thought nothing of it. Kid looks like his mom.

Well fast forward 16 years later. They’re divorced and hate each other. The daughter was always treated like a princess- the boy was rather spoiled too but very much sought out his dads approval- which he just wasn’t getting.

He couldn’t figure out why. He’s acting out, getting in trouble, running with gangs. Boohoos about his dad all the time. Well ‘dad’ had enough and flat-out told him, ‘you’re not my kid. You’re mom is a h*e, and I don’t know ‘who’ your dad is’. He even was kind enough to offer up a paternity test. His mother never said anything about it. She took the ostrich approach and hoped it would go away.

We know now his dad was a Pacific Islander- and while there IS one who has always been a family friend for many years, he took a paternity test too and was completely cleared. So the mystery remains on who she cheated on her ex with. She says she doesn’t even know.

My aunt wasn't my grandfather's child. He met my granny when my aunt was a very sick infant, she had polio and wasn't expected to survive. My grandad married my granny so she could get on his insurance and move to an area that had proper medical support. My aunt was the first infant to survive open heart surgery at Yale new haven hospital, and although she had to be in leg braces most of her childhood, she had a great (although not long enough) life. My grandad loved her like she was his own, and I never knew until she went to her bio dad's funeral when I was a teenager.

After my grandfather passed, we found out he had fathered a child when he was posted in Italy during WWII.

He never knew. His mother intercepted any letters from the Italian girl. He came home, met and married my grandmother and had 4 children.

I forget who in the family found out and how. It's crazy to think we have a whole Italian family out there!