36 Disturbing Secrets People Hid Their Whole Lives

At my great aunt's funeral, everyone was talking about how sad it was she didn't have kids. My grandma told me that it was because she'd gotten pregnant in the 40's out of wedlock and had a coat hanger abortion. The resulting infection rendered her sterile.

Keep it safe and legal, folks.

I went through a nasty break up with my oldest kids mom that lasted several years. We were never married and she was crazy as hell so she told the hospital she didn't know our kid's father just so she could have leverage over me. You know, like a sane person does. Years later and after several investigations into child abuse she lost custody.

Over the next several years we kept getting oddly specific complaints about things going on in my house and my daughter and her step mom specifically. Dumb s**t like matching clothes or details about how we do time out.

My mom died 2 years ago and when we switched her facebook to memorial mode I saw that she had been talking bad about me for years to my ex and was essentially spying on me for her and twisting information. I'm guessing it's because she felt bad for a mother that lost her kid but it was still a d**k move. It's been 2 years and I still refuse to visit her grave with my siblings and havent shed a tear for her since

I received a phone call from my late husband’s girlfriend the day of his funeral. She was phoning his cell phone which I had turned off while he was in the hospital. She told me that my husband had been paying her rent for the last year. The bank had recently foreclosed on our house. I had no idea he was unfaithful to me but she knew all about me.

Woman in my town, after she died, people were clearing her garden and found what they thought was a model skeleton Yeah her husband went mysteriously missing in the mid 90s... 

My BIL died in an accident, and his wife found out by going through his phone that he was sleeping with several other women. Many of whom were pretty close in our "friend group" and some were also married. It was quite awkward and got pretty messy.

My nana always gave me a kind of uneasy feeling when I was around her, and I didn't adore her or anything, but I definitely thought of her as just a regular old lady up until her death.

Then, after she died, my mom confessed to me that my nana used to be a religious zealot, so much so that she would scream at her for hours for having her fly down, or wearing slightly-tight jeans, because she was "inviting the devil" or something. She would take my mom and her brother into the backyard and force them to brutally beat eachother with sticks. And when my mom's brother was killed in a car accident, my nana openly mocked him at the funeral, stating he deserved to die (because he drank underage, I think? not while driving, he didn't drive drunk. just..... in general), that he was burning in hell, good riddance........ ect,,,

She was a monster. My mother had to run away at 18. My nana only "calmed down" when my mom had kids, because she'd wanted "grandbabies", and being the forgiving person my mom was, she let her back into her life, on the promise she never did to us what she'd done to her.

My mom may have forgiven her, but I haven't. She didn't really change, on the inside......... and looking back I can see just how much my nana's abuse shaping my mother's life/mental health for the worse, how she never ended up 'recovering', in the end. Awful. I wish I could tell my mom what I know now about trauma and all that, wish we could really Talk about it now that I'm an adult..... but it's too late for that now,,, (EDIT: for those wondering, my mother has also passed away. that's what I meant by "it's too late for that now")

My buddy's mom totally killed my buddy's dad. She had taken a $200k life insurance policy out on him 6 months before he died, and he died from not taking his medication that he'd taken no problem all of his life. My buddy was away for the weekend so wasn't home when his dad died. After his mom died, we found out she'd taken a life insurance policy out on my buddy at some point too, and she'd also forged his signature to sign over $100k my buddy's dad had left to him. She also faked illnesses to get prescription drugs and had little books filled with info on what she'd sold and how much she'd made from selling them.

Had a cousin who died a few years ago. Went to his funeral and was walking around hugging his wife and kids and giving them my condolences when a lady and a two teenage boys walked in. Nobody knew who these people were so of course my great aunt asked and she claimed to be his wife and the two boys were his sons.... Turns out all those week or two long work trips he'd been taking weren't actually work trips it was trips to see his OTHER family.

After my father died a few years ago, we learned that he had taken out about 40k of loans on my name. We share the same Initials (and surname obviously). He forged my signature, and kept on applying for loans and credit, got approved and never paid a single dime back. Seeing as he was the main contact, no-one ever called me to ask me why I wasn't paying my debt ... So only after he died we got contacted by institutions informing us that my father owes them money, just to find out it was actually on my name ...

So now my credit record is f****d due to years of payments not being made and I need to pay back all of these loans. Fun times right

Maybe not disturbing, but after my nanas death, I found out that she married my papa, had three kids with him all as a cover story for him being gay. This was during a time of LGBT violence in America.
The kicker is, they really pulled off the married couple routine.

When my neighbour died of old age her adult children were organising her funeral. Her husband had died many years previous. A woman arrived from England upon hearing of her death. It turns out she was their sister. Their mother had had her when she was a teenager and gave her up for adoption. They kept up regular correspondence up until the mother died. No one knew. Her other children were shocked. I’m not even sure if her husband knew.

Her children were really upset that she never told them. On a positive note, I think they all keep in regular contact now. This is Ireland by the way, so there was huge stigma at the time about having children outside of marriage.

My grandpa had stashed what would be worth millions today and proceeded to convince his family they were poor and had almost no money. His family lived in poverty while he lied to them all.

I had a brother who had some paranoid delusions (FBI, CIA following him, spying on his apartment, etc). We (my brothers and I) had tried to get him help and he would just have no part of it. After a few years, it seemed like it had gotten better. He stopped bringing it up and we felt like it must have just passed. After he died, we found his journal and it was just horrifying. Right up until the night he died, he detailed all of the torture that they were inflicting on him - weird s**t that I can't even write in here. It was just incredibly disturbing to read what a tortured life he was living inside his mind while acting relatively normal outside.

Edit: Many people have asked me to go into more detail on what he wrote. I can't go into much detail - it's hard for me to write about. Briefly, he believed that they were using some type of focused energy beam to torture him. They focused on different parts of his body at different times. Every noise that an appliance made was proof of electronic surveillance. Every bump on the wall or person walking in an adjacent apartment was a message from either the "bad" FBI agents or the "good" FBI agents.

That for the first few months my mother was pregnant with me the entire family thought she was dying from an ovarian tumor. She was 41 and it was the 1960s, her doctor at the navy hospital just assumed she was too old to get pregnant.

Family friend that passed was having sex with young male prostitutes, had his wife hooked on drugs that he provided with his doctors license, and had spent all of their money even though they had been rich so that they were destitute and his wife and kids had no idea. She lost the house a month after he died unexpectedly. She and her kids are doing fine now. She's recovered and remarried.

My grandparents were horrible to my mom. Telling her she deserved other kids hitting her or not believing her when it happened, telling her "Good, I'm sick of you anyway" when she threatened to run away, physical abuse, spending as little money as possible on her, NEVER showing any kind of affection, etc... I never knew them that well and I'm kinda glad for it tbh.

An old, rich man my mom use to run errands for not only offered her $5000 to sleep with him, but he also told her he couldn’t wait till I was 18 (I was younger than 12 at the time) and tried to make an arrangement to pay for my presence once I was 18.

My uncle had a son he never told us about for 25 years

She had been cheating on me all through our marriage.

When the shock subsided, it was replaced by rage and betrayal. I lost it and I just started destroying and trashing everything of hers.

The only thing I didn't destroy or throw away was her urn. I gave that to her parents. I seriously thought about flushing her ashes down the toilet, but I decided not to.

I completely got over her in record time.

I had the best grandpa growing up. Like typical movie grandpa. He was perfect. Spoiled us like crazy great corny jokes always had crazy silly story’s. always saved the day. Just the best man I knew. After he passed one of my aunts told me and my little sister he had cheated on my grandma with her own sister multiple times. We never knew. Wish she never told us.