40 Wild Stories Of People With A Secret Life They Thought They Could Hide

My cat. He was a neighborhood stray that started following us home during walks with our dog. Soon he started letting himself into the house when we’d come in from our walks, then spending the night. Then he started hanging out during the day and eating here, but still leaving whenever he pleased. Sometimes he’d leave for a day or two, but it still felt like he was here most of the time.

One day he shows up injured. We took him to the shelter in case he was chipped (when we first met him he had a flea collar on him). If he wasn’t we planned to formally adopt him. During the in between weeks when the shelter healed him up and held him in case his original humans claimed him, the neighbors from across the street reach out to us. Their daughter was sad because they hadn’t seen him in a long time. It turns out he was two timing us. He was also letting himself into their house, eating there, and sleeping there. They also never fully took him in because they also thought he belonged to someone else.

No one claimed him, so a few weeks later we formally adopted him. We now have joint custody with the neighbors and he’s a two household cat with supervised outdoor time so that he doesn’t show up with more surprise injuries. He has double the humans and double the dogs to bully. Can’t imagine how a double life could have turned out better.

My grandmother had a secret husband. She was a public heath doctor, going from town to town doing vaccinations at schools, shutting down restaurants for health violations, testing tap water among other things.  She was a busy, important person with a loving husband, Bert who was an anestesiologist and three grown sons and they lived in the city. Her other husband Jim was previously widowed and lived a few towns over and was a car salesman. Jim had three teenage sons. 

My grandfather,Bert, bought a car off of Jim and they started talking about their wife and you can guess what happened. After the epic court battles my grandmother moved penniless to Juneau. My grandpa and Jim became close and spent christmases together with their boys for decades.

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Around year eight of my marriage, I met my then-husband’s girlfriend of nine months. He told me he was working doubles on his night off (night shift worker), but he was bunking at her place those nights and crawling out of her bed at 5am to “come home from work”. I was packing him lunches for his f*****g sleepovers with her.

Once she and I knew about each other, we swapped photos and stories. Her apartment was full of photos of them together, she even had him on her insurance plan. She had ZERO clue he was married, thought they were end game, the whole thing. Once I filed for divorce, I let her know he was all hers and apparently they stayed together for about two months … then he cheated on her with the next one.

I work in mid town manhattan for a luxury fashion company.

I am homeless.

I shower at the gym and then go back to the office and sleep.
Only the cleaning lady knows I am there so late, the security guards think I am a work aholic.

I make ok money, but I don't have a home.

Not me but my parents.

They rented their old condo to a woman and it turned out she had stolen her ex wife’s identity and was literally pretending to be her on a day to day basis. She had been romancing various women, moving in with them and stealing a bunch of their s**t (including their identity) before disappearing again. She had done this in multiple states and even had a warrant out for her arrest. She had two teenage daughters who she had trained on how to help hide their mom’s real identity if people came asking about her.

My dad figured out she was working at a dentists office and also stealing the identities of various patients, which led to my dad tipping off her employer and she got arrested while she was at work. The dentist who owned the practice was even nice enough to record her getting arrested and sent the video to my dad as a thank you for tipping him off about her scheme.

My Aunt was a stewardess in the 80s. She married a foreign businessman she met while working international flights. He seemed like a nice guy. They were married for like 12 years. I was traveling through Europe and was going to be in a city where he had an apartment, so I had planned to stay with him. Everything was fine, except he wasn't around much. He made some excuse about having to work a bunch. In the 10 days I spent there ne never slept at the apartment and I only saw him for a couple hours every day. I was 17 and I guess my parents were under the impression my Uncle was going to chaperone me. After I told them about my trip, my mom gave my aunt a ration of s**t for letting me roam the streets for 10 days. My Aunt went and had a fight with my uncle over it...and it came out that he didn't really live at the apartment, that was his mistress shack up spot. He had a wife and children. My Aunt was the mistress.

A man messaged me and told me his fiancè and my boyfriend were on a secret trip away together under the guise of work, he'd become suspicious and read her emails. When that was uncovered we both discovered they had a secret flat together. Fun.

My friend was married to a man who traveled a lot for work for several years of their marriage. One day she was watching the news that had a live broadcast of a wounded soldier returning to his fiancée of several years. It was my friend’s husband. He wasn’t in the military. Or wounded. And boy was he surprised that his “future in-laws” called the news station.

He’s in prison now. I don’t know the details, but it had to do with defrauding the government.

Ran into my Regional manager at a party. No big deal right?

Well he was in full drag, drunk and leading a gimp around by the collar. I didn't recognize him at first but then I heard his voice. I snapped my head around and called out his name.

He spun around and locked eyes with me. He walked over in his best supermodel walk and said, "what you want b***h?"

The realization dawned on him and before he could spiral out I assured him I wasn't going to say anything and then the gimp talked, "Thanks man"

Took me a second but I recognized the voice, it was my Supervisor. I knew he was gay but the whole gimp suit was a shock.

I assure them again I wouldn't say a word. Had a pretty good time with the Drag Queen and Gimp for the next few hours.

Retired lawyer here. I once represented a widow who was seeking survivor’s benefits from her husband’s military pension. Turns out the old goat was a trigamist who somehow managed to juggle three families without any of them learning about the other two, although there were enough unexplained absences and such that none of the three were terribly surprised.

I've told this story on here before but I met a guy on Tumblr (back when it didn't suck) who was working in the area as a contractor for the army. We had a couple week long fling. Good company, great s*x.

When he was headed back to upstate NY I said thanks and wished him well. He insisted this wasn't a fling, we could make it work. I was hesitant but said we'd try.

Long story short, after he was gone I got the feeling he was married and started digging but couldn't find evidence of his existence *at all* (red flag.)

Then one day a friend wanted me to reinstall Snapchat. When I did, it imported my phone contacts - including his. His username was a little different. I googled and up he came on what was then ratemyex.com which revealed his *real* name and the motherlode of info - including a military.com article.

Not only was he still married, but that was his 2nd wife, who he'd married while still married to wife 1.
He'd dropped wife 1 and their 4 kids off his military benefits, too. Doctored divorce papers to marry wife #2 and they now have 3 kids. Wife #1 had to sue him through military court over the benefits and to get a real divorce. (That's the military article I found.)

I messaged him to congratulate him on actually surprising me. I'd expected him to be married, but bigamy was a fun twist. No response. (shocker)

I then posted about him on Tumblr as a warning. (I was part of the kink community, which is smaller than it might seem.)

THE F****R LIKED THE POST.

Several other women messaged me that they'd either been involved with him or at least messaged with him. I'm still friendly with one of them.

We had neighbors who lived directly next door that we became great friends with. We had children together and almost an open door policy of wandering into each other's homes. They were both really great people. His parents were great people who lived nearby. He seemed to be a good person raised by good people.

Their daughter was 2 and our son was three. We had fun together and pretty honest conversations about life. Or so we thought!

THEN. . . One night, the four of us are sitting on their back porch like we always do. Around midnight, the husband tells us they have some news to tell us. Wife looked clueless.

He proceeds to say "We are getting a divorce and in a month I'm moving 5 states away. I've accepted a promotion and I'm moving."

My entire body went numb. What?? Is this for real?

The wife stayed calm the entire time and just went along with it but we found out later that he had never told her they were getting divorced and that most of this was news to her and he just dropped it on her in front of us!

What a nightmare! After this, she basically let us know how different he is behind closed doors. She showed us all these complicated spreadsheets he would put together for her to do house chores. She's a lawyer. She worked a job, just like his corporate a*s.

It was really upsetting for my husband and I because this was a couple that we identified with and we were raising our kids together and we found out that the husband was just a psychopath pretending to like all of us.

Ultimately, they both moved. The husband and the wife are both remarried and the wife is doing fantastic and married someone she knew from high school and they have a pretty fabulous life and the dad of the (now) teenager is basically a deadbeat but sends the money..

My friend's mom died. She was a hoarder. I helped them deal with the house and that was a world unto itself.

Her husband's business was largely in Asia, and there was nowhere for him in the home anyway, so he was rarely there and when he came, he stayed with a relative. Same with my friend, who also didn't live there full time because they were in grad school in another state.

I had a really hard time believing the dad would just let the wife he loved live like that and asked my friend, "Are you super duper for sure certain your dad doesn't have a secret family in Asia" and they were like, "No dude, my dad loves my mom too much to do that."

He did tho. A woman/wife and two sons. He eventually came out of the closet as it were and tried to have them live in the United States. It was a failed experiment and they all went back to Asia and my friend is an orphan basically.

My aunt did 23andMe. . . and that's how we all found out about the second family my late grandpa had, and abandoned, in the 1960's. Turns out I have two extra uncles.

My mom's family moved to the other side of the USA in the late 1960's. My mom now believes that they moved because my grandma found out about my grandpa's mistress.

My grandpa always doted on me and his other grandchildren from the kids he had in wedlock. It's been hard to wrap my head around the fact that he straight-up abandoned two of his kids ,and might even have grandchildren that he never met.

Back in the early 90s, I was about 6, and a nice family with 2 little girls moved into the neighborhood. I was thrilled to have a playmate close to home, and even more thrilled when the youngest girl joined my grade.
Naturally, our parents spent time with their parents and hung out during our playdates. The family appeared wealthy and was a bit overgenerous, offering gifts and inviting us along to expensive outings.

Around this time, a series of violent bank robberies hit my tiny, peaceful country. They were an organized gang, and the violence was shocking and unprovoked. I seem to remember they shot security guards before even making demands.

My family was terrified when the gang hit our small local bank. It made no sense. A friend of the family had been about to exit her parked car at the bank when she heard gunshots and was forced to cower in fear, ducking into the car’s footwell as best she could. This sort of thing was unheard of in our town. All the adults were scared.

It wasn’t long before my two playmates and their parents disappeared, and not long before their dad’s face was on the newspaper. The bank robbing gang had been tracked down by a tollbooth receipt left behind in a rental car. It was my friend’s dad and his friend, and the mother was well aware. They’d fled their own country for similar crimes, apparently.

My mom always said my dad got a weird vibe from them. They were vague about their past, their jobs, and a bit too invested in keeping up appearances.

I always wondered what happened to the two little girls. I remember we used to play princess dress-up, and one day they leant me a pair of gold ballerina flats I absolutely adored. Their mother laughed and said I could keep them. My mom frowned when I came home with them and wanted to wear them everywhere. She said gold shoes were tacky.

As an adult, I have a special fondness for gold shoes, and have bought a pair or two over the years 🥰.

My coworker’s “devoted husband” had a whole second family three states over. Found out when his “business trip” lined up perfectly with his other kid’s soccer schedule on Facebook.

When I lived in San Francisco's tenderloin district about 20 years ago a well loved actor would come through in the dead of night to buy rocks. Sometimes the dealers would make him do bits before they sold to him. It was really sad, but there was also a wall next to a 7-11 a lot of street kids hung out at, he would always buy them food and talk to them and was very kind.

You would not have thought that looking at this actor, in fact in interviews he said he'd been clean since the 80's. I always wondered what type of pain he had that he would continuously haunt back streets like that late at night and hang with street kids rather than sleep or be with his family.

But, very very kind man. Great listener.

My dad had a mistress for a decade or so and a secret child. After he’d been dead about 15 years, my teenage sibling reached out to my full sibling and me to let us know we had a half-sibling and see if we wanted to get to know each other a bit. To say this threw me for a loop is an understatement… my dad was an a*****e a*****e and an alcoholic, but after he’d been dead for so long I figured I knew most of the stuff about him. It was like I time travelled back to my high school years and I remembered all these things I hadn’t thought of in decades (like when I called him and he was drunk and there was a drunk woman talking loudly over him). I knew he was a cheater but I didn’t think he had anything long-term/serious and obviously I didn’t know about any half-siblings. And I literally found out on my 6 month sober anniversary haha. But I stayed sober! He messed us all up good and left a trail of destruction in his wake, but overall we’re doing pretty well now.

My office hired a new admin/receptionist. He seemed nice and normal in the interview, but then stopped showing up to work, always leaving voicemails with more and more elaborate and dramatic excuses about why he was out (e.g., he was in a car accident and in the hospital fighting for his life: “….pray for me”).

Turns out he had accepted multiple other jobs and wasn’t showing up to any of them either. But he was getting paid by all of them!

Found out that a successful man at my kids private school actually had another family at the same school. Original wife apparently never knew- kids found out when their mom accidentally died in her garage. He married the other woman a few weeks later.