People On Reddit Share Their Hometown’s Darkest And Most Scandalous Stories

I live in a Canadian border town. This police officer, nice as heck, that my grandmother cleaned for, would gift her things, and seemed to have a lot more money than your average cop. She would get wine, cheese, and other things. The most gifted item however, was cheese.

Now, at the same time, there was a pizza place down the street from my house. The owners lived a couple doors down, and I was friends with their son, and the parents were pretty cool as far as neighbours go.

They also had a lot of money, for owning a pizza place in decline. After a bit, things got serious. I would see undercover police sitting at the end of my street on my way home from school nearly every day. They weren't very incognito, but neither were the pizza place owners.

Eventually though, things came crashing down. A whole bunch of cops and restaurant owners were taken to jail in the largest cheese bust the town has ever known.

That's right. Cheese.

The price of cheese in Canada is ridiculous, so a few members of the police department decided to use their abilities to smuggle it across the border. They would go across, buy all the cheap, good quality stuff they could get, then use their badge to get back across, as the border patrol and cops all know each other, so the chance of them paying duty was 0%.

Anyways, that was the big scandal in the town. You can probably look it up if you search for cheese smugglers, or cheese scandal

A guy brought a baggie of grass to the police department, saying he had bought it off of the teens hanging around at the downtown park. He wanted them to shut down the drug dealing.

The police politely informed him that it was grass. As in lawn clippings.

Such was the big scandal in our small town.

In 2013 I moved to a very small rural town. I bought a handyman special and proceeded to fix it up.

In the back corner I planted a garden with all the usual veggies and a large portion was dedicated to okra.

One day, a couple of months later I was sitting on my couch when I heard a hell of a commotion in the backyard. I went running out the back door only to be met with dozens of armed men in full tactical gear. All guns pointing at me. I hit the ground spread eagle because I didn’t want to die, but I was thoroughly confused.

As I lie there with my face in the dirt I heard an uproar of laughter coming from the back corner where my garden is located.

It seems the local Leo’s took it upon themselves to call in the DEA for a huge marijuana crop on my property. Turned out some nosey busy body had reported seeing marijuana in my garden and turned me in.

To this day the cops in this town have not lived down the day they called in the DEA to bust me for my okra crop.

It cost this little town 10,000 dollars and was in the local paper for wasting all that money because they didn’t just knock on my door and ask to see my garden.

Was outside on my driveway playing basketball and multiple helicopters flew overhead. My friend in another neighborhood over texted me saying they evacuated all of the houses on her road and there were FBI or bomb squad agents or something there. Later found out some guy on the street tried to taint the town's water supply with blowfish venom and kill everyone.

Back in the 80s, during my senior year one guy in my high school class got 4 girls pregnant in a month long period. None of the girls were his girlfriend. The guy and his family left town during the middle of the night soon after that.

Mayor and several city councillors were taking kickbacks and bribes from demolition/construction/cleaning companies for clean up contracts after a hurricane, funded by FEMA.

The companies would give the mayor and city councillors like a couple grand, then the company would get FEMA funds in the tens of thousands to clean up/destroy a hurricane damaged property, only the address given to FEMA and listed on the contract were fake, or already cleared, so the companies got paid to do nothing.

There was an anaesthetist, who worked at our local hospital and another hospital in a different town. He was rather well known among other doctors and known to be good at what he was doing. He only had a small problem with being addicted to painkillers and anaesthetics.

So to feed his addiction without getting caught he shot up part of his patients' drugs before injecting the same needle into his patient.

Thus went unnoticed until it was discovered that over 60 of his patients got infected with hepatitis. And that he was the source for it. He was fired and his license revoked as far as I know. But the hospital's image still suffered quite a bit.

The mayor went to meet what he thought was an underage girl but was really the cops.

Around the same time, the son of the bazillionare owner of the biggest company in town also got caught with an underage girl. Somehow right before trial she recanted and declined to prosecute.

Something in the water down there.

In 2000. A girl’s body was found on the steps of the local middle school. The officer that arrived at the scene was a rookie officer. Since he was the first in the scene the police department made him in charge of the case. The case was massively botched. The murder had shocked the community and a lot of people were talking.

Several years later, the police marked it as a cold case. A local woman was doing her own detective work. She reached out to a journalist from the UK. The journalist flew to meet the woman and investigate the murder and missteps by the police. They uncovered a massive cover-up. The local police department was hostile towards the journalist and local. To the point that the state FBI branch had to get involved to protect the investigation.

Due to the police departments terrorizing behavior, they ended up getting investigated by the FBI. Apparently they knew who had committed the crime. A local drug dealer, who was cozy with the police. He eventually was arrested and sent to prison for life. The police department got a slap on the wrist. The journalist went back to the UK and the local woman moved to a nearby city.

I’m originally from a town called Hyde, a few miles outside Manchester. Unfortunately, Hyde is famous for Harold Shipman, the once trusted GP who killed elderly patients by overdosing them with diamorphine. My grandma’s neighbour (Jack) was one of his many victims. (Side note: he also did my mum’s ultrasound when she was pregnant with me!). RIP Jack, you were a wonderful man.

I'm from a very small town in Canada. Very quiet, nothing big ever came up and it was a fairly tight-knit community. One day, an explosion went off in an apartment building. A 23 yr old, single mother (who also happened to be a quadriplegic) was killed instantly.

The case was eventually solved, the explosion was a gift-wrapped piped bomb left by her former financial adviser. He squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars from her and was convicted for it, he was then released on bail and then left the bomb.

A few members of a scummy local family broke into a bar, stole money, beer and peanuts. When they went to leave, they realized there was a drunk patron sleeping out back on a picnic table. They, thinking he was a potential witness, bashed his head in with a hammer, threw his body into the back of their truck, drove the truck through the old railroad trail and dumped the body in a swamp. They were caught almost immediately because there was a trail of blood and their truck was covered in DNA. All over some cash and beer.

The local drunk got into an argument with another regular at a popular bar, pulled out a gun, and shot the other guy to death.

But that's not the scandal. The guy who died was apparently really nice and well liked in the community. The others in the bar were able to disarm and restrain the assailant until the police arrived. When the sheriff got there, he just said "looks like you all need a few more minutes with him. I'll come back later."

So everyone in the bar grabbed what they could find and ended up beating the shooter to death. The sheriff reported it as self defense and the security tapes disappeared.

But the bar was crowded, so the real story got out. There were a few attempts to reopen the case or charge the sheriff and some of the bar patrons, but they were all squashed pretty quickly.

The really interesting detail, in my opinion, is that there were some pretty strong rumors that the drunk had been sleeping with the wife of the man he killed and that he'd been attacked first. So the original shooting may have been in self-defense. But because there was no camera footage and all the witnesses were involved in killing the drunk, there's no way of knowing the truth.

A few years before that my school was one of the first in an experimental program where they had an undercover female cop act as a student for most of the school year, she had a bf, and was even in the school yearbook. That was big as well. The only person in the whole school that knew was the superintendent. Newspapers even had a small article about it at the time.

At the time I had heard she even had slept with one of the students as well and did take drugs even though the article says the cop didn't.

My home county had a few historic covered bridges. They were quite the pride and joy of the area. Somebody burnt one down. Somebody else saw three young men do the deed. Now we all knew it was a trio of kids in my class. Like most schools we had cliques, two of which were the “preps'' and the “burnouts”. The bridge burners were preps. One’s dad was the county judge. One’s mom was the primary real estate agent in town. This posed a dilemma.

So the parents of the preps, including the judge, hatched a little plan. They gave three burnouts in my class $10,000 each (mid 1980s) and the promise of a light sentence of 6 months probation if they would plead guilty and take the fall.

The burnouts agreed and took their money. The judge figured if the burnouts didn’t hold up their end he would make sure they were found guilty anyway. So they showed up in court in front of the prep’s judge dad. They not only didn’t plead guilty, they had a speeding ticket dated the same day and time as the time the bridge burned. But the speeding ticket was 70 miles away. And since all three were minors, all three were named in the ticket report.

The judge had no choice but to dismiss the case. And the parents of the preps weren’t even mad because that was enough of an excuse to effectively end the whole investigation. Nobody got in trouble for it. It all just went away. The bridge was rebuilt, the placard was changed to say “replica of a historic bridge”, and for $10k those precious little boys didn’t get a black mark in their records.

Our english teacher slept with half the boys track team in high school... AND slept with the vice principal... AND the gym teacher.

Everybody knew about it and we were all fairly certain one of the kids was the actual father of her kid, not her husband.

When I came home and told my dad that a teacher had been arrested for sleeping with students, he responded: "So they finally caught up with Marcie? Two of my apprentices have pictures of her and keep showing the rest of us when we're trying to work."

I don't miss my hometown, lol.

High School kid caught drinking and driving. Local cop pulled him over, told him "go home" so he did. Got some more beer from the fridge and went back to drinking and driving. Hit a disabled (wheelchair bound) neighbor, who later died of his injuries. Kid was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Parents bailed him out of jail to await trial. Kid committed suicide.

I live in a small Russian city named Nalchik. In 2005, we were attacked by terrorists. Mobile groups of terrorists of 5-6 people, with a total number of about 200 people, armed with various small arms, including RPG-7 and RPD, enter Nalchik in cars from two directions.

There are the first shootings between police officers and militants on the outskirts of the city. 14 civilians and 35 police officers and law enforcement agencies were killed. More than 240 people were injured, including 129 law enforcement officers.I was 5 months old then and the stories of my parents are very surprising because now our city is very quiet and almost nothing happens.

Kid shot and killed his mom because she told him to clean his room. It happened over summer and everyone returned to school kinda shell shocked, and there were tons of advisory assemblies and notices encouraging people to seek help if they felt they had anger issues, anti-bullying rhetoric, etc. that did basically nothing.

A drunk guy was operating cpr in the middle of the harbour place and yelling. It triggered passers-by to call in an ambulance for help, until they realized he was reanimating an inflatable boat!

I'm from a very weird small town, so this for sure isn't the biggest, just a really funny one I remember from years ago.

My friend was a senior in high school and had a long-time girlfriend who was also a senior. While she was on vacation with her family, he had sex with another girl in his girlfriend's bed. His girlfriend didn't know about it until it came out that the other girl was pregnant with his kid. He admitted to hooking up in her house while she was gone.

His girlfriend ends up forgiving him and gets pregnant about three months later. So my 18-year-old friend has gotten a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old pregnant within a couple of months of each other.

A few months later, before either child is born, he gets arrested for possession of marijuana. The arresting officer was the 17-year-old's dad. He ended up losing a college sports scholarship because of it. He still lives in that small town and is not with either of his baby mamas, and his kids are in the same class.

The town only has a few thousand people, so it was pretty scandalous.

A serial pooper. Yes, you read it right, a serial pooper. So, a few years ago the news media started reporting about this strange incident in my hometown - somebody is pooping in the pools in our local swimming hall, and it didn’t happen once, not even twice, but at least three times in the same pool but on three different occasions.

The swimming hall had to close its doors for around 6 hours after each case.

The perp eventually got caught. Welcome to northern Finland!

A group of zebras escaped a local, legal habitat and have been roaming the suburbs. It’s been weeks and they still haven’t been caught.

Two guys drove home extremely drunk from a bar in a pick-up truck. The driver woke up the next morning in blood spattered clothes. He had driven off the road and hit a wire holding up a telephone pole decapitating his friend who had his head out the window. He didn't realize he had done it until he saw his friend's body (sans head) in the passenger seat the next morning.

Okay not to be a bummer, but when I first moved into a small town EVERYONE had shown me a video of a city council member having a complete meltdown at a meeting.

She crawled under the table, started screaming, and needed to be dragged out. She was a caricature, and people loved making fun of her for it. I eventually got to know her and discovered she had literally miscarried that morning. No one had ever included that in the story retelling - they just used the video to make fun of her. You truly never know what is going on with people.

Some of the member of the dog pound was an avid dog eater and has been using his position to satisfy his craving.

Several small towns in our region were destroyed by a fire and the president came to town and gave a speech afterwards and repeatedly called our town the entirely wrong name. That was probably one of the bigger highlights of scandal besides the fire itself lol

We don't live in a super small town, but small enough at 50k. There was a murder that happened about 20 years ago that has left everyone scandalized.

It was a woman who lived on the wealthy side of town. Her husband was an engineer who worked in a neighboring town about 45 minutes away. He came home to find his wife had been brutally slaughtered. He called the cops, etc.

The man who gets arrested is this no-name drug addict idiot whose only connection to this family is that he installed the security system. No one could ever figure out a motive, however. He had 3 trials, all hung juries. So he got off eventually, but the elapsed time was several years. Poor guy.

Meanwhile the husband moves several states away and says that he is terrified of this dumb punk kid, which is really dumb. No one around town believes that the punk did it. So here's the juicy back story that never made it in the official story.

First, they found gay porn on the husband's computer, which is odd to begin with since he claimed that the murderer put it there. Apparently, there was a group of super wealthy (and I mean 1% of the 1%. Not sure why they want to live here, but whatever) locals who were engaging in swinging. The murder victim and her husband were members of this group. One of the other members of this group is a high powered attorney around here. He is an absolute snake. He ensured that the punk kid trapped himself into a made up confession that never had any merit.

The reason the attorney did that was to hide the fact that it was actually his wife who most likely committed the murder. The murder victim and the attorney were apparently having a private affair separate from the swinging. The attorney's wife found out and lost it and killed the woman.

The last time my town was in the news, a woman started a business "raising mammals"that only ever made losses. When investigated, it turned out she was tax-deducting the cost of raising her kids.

In the 90s, a very unpopular, nerd girl won homecoming queen and the popular girl, who thought she should win, did not win. The popular girl could not fathom how this could have happened to her, so she began a smear campaign against the nerd girl. She maintained that the only way the nerd girl could have won was if she stuffed the ballot box. The popular girl then questioned all the students at this school to see who they voted for. This was so scandalous, that this was talked about for a literal year among adults at the coffee shop, church, gatherings etc. Luckily, the nerd girl graduated and went to college and lived a very normal life. The popular peaked in high school.