Never The Same: 45 Of The Darkest Family Secrets These People Found Out

My dad’s side of the family has ties with the mafia. Thankfully my mom has long since divorced my dad and they life a decent distance apart. I heard stories of my mom’s parents who lived close by at the time circling the block in their truck late at night soon after the divorce to ensure no one was there to hurt us. I was very young at this point, probably like 3-4 so I really have no memory of this. I do remember one night our garbage can was burned to the ground, and my mom has since told me about death threats soon after the divorce. My mom a couple years ago watched a documentary on prominent mafia families and noted multiple names that were at her wedding.

That my adorable nerdy mom spent 3 years in prison for being an accessory to hiding a body in the late 70s.

My grandpa (15) kidnapped my grandma (14) from a convent. No one even bothered looking for her thereafter cause she was an orphan and didn't even know who her family was. They had 16 children together.

My grandfather had severely scarred legs from burns he got as a kid. Growing up we were told that he was in a fire in an apartment building and sustained the burns while escaping. He died when I was 7, and one of my few memories of him is an image of those scarred legs. Well, when I was 23, my great aunt (his sister), told me that it wasn't a fire. Their father ran a bath with scalding water and put my grandfather in it as a punishment. 

I don't know about dark but here goes. My great grandfather m******d the mayor of the village he lived in. Why? Because the mayor was sleeping with his mom while his father worked on the field. I think he was 15 or 16 when he did that. 

My grandpa can’t have kids, but my mother still has three siblings…

Growing up I always knew my parents had marital issues; constant fighting, a couple times Dad disappeared for a few days living in his car, issues with drinking. But they stayed together and when I asked why didn't they divorce, they always said they loved each other too much. And in the past few years, things seemed to have gotten better. My parents in fact are now so comfortable in their relationship that they make jokes about all the awful stuff they've done to each other in front of me. What I've managed to put together is: -my parents met when they were 14 and my mother was dating an 18 year old and my dad would relentlessly ask her out until she eventually dumped her boyfriend for my dad -my mother went onto university after college (we're UK) whereas my dad dropped out of college and went straight into work while constantly drinking and partying -it was at one of these parties (while my mum was studying) that he cheated on my mum with someone from their old secondary school so she dumps him -barely a year later my dad realises he doesn't know how to do anything for himself, no one else wants him and he goes crawling back to my mum -she agrees to take him back but ONLY if he marries her (not immediately but *eventually* she said), he agrees and a short year after that (aged 22 now) she's already pressuring him to propose, he fumbles it frankly (were in Paris but forgot the ring and proposed back in the hotel room after they'd visited the eiffel tower that day which was her dream proposal) but she says yes -a month after they're married mum pressures him into having a child that he doesn't want and nine months later I was born, they soon realise how hard having a child is and basically drop me off on my grandparents for the rest of my childhood -after me there were two more accidental babies and each time my dad threatened to leave her, but she managed to convince him to stay while keeping my siblings by promising he wouldn't have to raise them (he didn't but neither did she frankly, I did) And that is only what happened before/shortly after I was born, if I carried on into my childhood, we'd be here for years. What they sold to me as the perfect love story (been together since they were 14, proposed in Paris, soon married and had children because of pure love) is in fact a bunch of skewered half truths from a horrible twisted love map of my mother's manipulation and my father disappointing her time and time again.

Husband’s family has a dark secret that still isn’t out to the people who really need to know and I hate that I know. His youngest aunt was “sent away” when she was a teenager and shortly after she returned, the oldest uncle and his wife introduced the family to “their daughter”. Young aunt went on to have 3 more kids who have no clue that their cousin is actually their half sister. What’s even more F’d up is that her “brothers” know the secret!!! I’m dreadful that someone will need a donor or do an ancestry test and all the lies will be exposed. Glad I could get that off my chest. If you’re assuming this is a “good Christian family” you would be correct. It’s all about appearance.

I was told by my aunt (before my parents thought it necessary) that my Dad had cheated on my Mum and slept with a stripper and that I was her daughter and not actually my ‘Mother’s’.
I found out years later that my Dad wasn’t actually my Dad either - though he thought he was which is why he put his name on my birth certificate and brought me home when my birth mother wanted nothing to do with me.
Fun times.

My grandmother married her second husband entirely for money. Her daughters both like to joke about her intentionally giving him a heart attack. He had heart problems but liked to eat unhealthy food, and the rumor goes she would put extra salt and butter on his food until he finally kicked the bucket.

My paternal grandmother had an affair with our small town’s mortician in the 1940’s. She got pregnant and he performed an illegal a******n. The fetus was buried behind the funeral home he owned where we kids used to sled every winter. My dad told me this as I was getting ready to take a ride down the hill on the sled when I was 12. Also, paternal grandfather had multiple illegitimate children around our small town. Turns out one of my best friends was also my half cousin. Father told me when I was 17. My father was educated, intelligent, honest and moral. The fact that his parents were so wild was absolutely shocking to me.

FINALLY I GOT ONE!
From when I was aged 6 to 13, my Mom dated a fellow named Murray. We all lived together in an old farmhouse.

Murray was a wonderful father figure to us, but he also had a drinking and driving problem, and after a particularly nasty accident, mom waited until he came home from the hospital and was well enough to take care of himself before leaving.

The whole time we lived there, my sister and I never went down into the basement, as it was *INFESTED* with spiders.

I always thought it was because of the drinking and driving she left him, but as it turns out that was only part of it. The other being that **he had a massive grow op for weed in the basement**.
Mom stated had the police found out about this, she would have lost custody of us.

Murray has long since passed, but he would have had a giggle that weed is legal here now...

Fidel Castro was my moms cousin.
Which is why we moved to Los Angeles instead of Miami.

When I was very young, my family lived in a townhouse, and against all local bylaws, my mother decided to keep a horse in our backyard. Not only that, but it was an ex-racehorse that came as a package deal: the goat companion that slept in the closet of my nursery. I also later found out she was running a grow-op in the basement.

My dad took me out for a walk when I was in middle school to tell me that I have a half brother in Japan with a similar name and birthday as me. We have the same dad, different moms. My brother has known about me his whole life, as a sister who lives in the States, but I only found out about his existence on that day.

Just found this one out recently. My uncle was a doctor working in a small town hospital. He was married and had just had a baby boy. While his wife was pregnant or just had the baby he had an affair with two nurses in the hospital and ended up getting one of the nurses pregnant. When he found out of the second kid he took his family and f****d off to New Zealand for 3 years. Upon returning to Canada and the same small town hospital his wife immediately found out about his illegitimate child and divorced him.

My (illegitimate) cousin stopped coming around to family events and when I talked to him about it last year he told me that my grandparents always blamed him for ruining my uncle’s marriage.

My father is from small working town in Eastern Ukraine. And most of our lives we've been poor.

But my mother always praised my father for his ability to know the parfume by smell, and not only that but also he can recognise many famous parfumes my smelling them.

Once, when i was 20-something years i asked, why is that so? Where he obtained this skill? My father asked me to not ever tell this story to my mother.

And here's the story: my father had a close friend who was actualy a secret lover of one of the most famous soviet singers, who officialy had wife. But it reality he was gay and did a lot for gay community in soviet union. He brought a lot of expensive things from abroad, like new music, clothes and parfumes. And a lot of that parfumes has been met at secret parties.

This gay-friend of my father also gave him all the fresh music releases vynill and he sold it and they shared the profit, unofficially of course. That's why my dad knows release years of most hits from 60s and 70s.

And more of that, he told me about special square in Sochi (the place of Olympic games 2014) where gays of ussr met each other and what secret signals they had.

Nice

UPD: I was probably misunderstood. That secret-gay friend of my father was the only gay my father knew. All info about gays of USSR he know from that friend.

Parties, that i mentioned above, were not for gays, they were just normal parties for counter-culture youth. Gayness of his friend was a secret. Everybody on this parties was wondering where did he gets all this goodies rare in USSR, but he never answered. My father was allowed to know, only because he knew that friend from childhood. They were like relatives.

Okay, even if my dad had some gay experience, it's fun to know, lol.

I found out when I was about 32 that apparently in 1973 my dad had a daughter he never knew existed.

I found out because he texted that to me while I was working, after finding out about it himself about 1 week earlier. She was in her late 40's by that point, I think.

What's sort of tragic is all this time we thought I was my dad's only kid, and he always wanted a dauighter but never got one due to marriages ending. He would have f*****g LOVED this girl. his daughter was the result of a one-night stand with a girl he never talked to again, and according to his daughter the mother had a mental breakdown not longer after giving birth and never really had custody of the daughter anyway.

Dad never would have had any way to find out, the baby grew up with the mother's parents in another state, and the mother kinda went AWOL.

My grandma had an affair with a catholic priest while she was married and then left her high school sweetheart who she had 5 children with. Then she ended up living with said priest and her kids had to lie and refer to him as an uncle when people asked them about their living situation.

I always thought it was true love; I found and kept letters and notes they wrote each other when he was overseas with the military and it seemed so genuine and I’d always heard so many nice stories (and I suppose it could have been true love.) I was raised to believe that my biological grandfather (my dads real dad) was a monster. I had been under the impression he left my grandma and abandoned his 5 five children. My one aunt died in a drunk driving accident and he couldn’t be bothered to show up. I never met him my entire childhood. I was literally encouraged to actively hate him. They said he remarried and basically started a new family and was controlled by his wife.

The priest essentially raised my dad and aunts and uncles and they have always revered him. He died before I was old enough to have any memories of him but I’d always looked at him with a positive light. He’d taken my grandma and a couple of the kids to Hawaii, bought my grandma a suburban and the house was in his name. My grandma was even left his military benefits (still unclear on how this was finagled.) He paid for the kids colleges. He had an incredible life. He had pictures with Bob Hope and other celebrities, got to travel a ton of places, etc.

One day I was curious if he had any relatives alive and if they had ever known about this salacious relationship. Then I googled him and it changed my life forever.

He (posthumously) was accused in a lawsuit, with a large group of priests, of wrongdoing over an extended period of time. You can guess the nature of the lawsuit. It was on several law websites and I found the lawsuit papers. Surely enough his name was mentioned. Unease began to ensue.

I did more digging and eventually found a 16 page document. This document was specific to him and included a police report and internal Catholic Church investigations into his transgressions among other things. Early into his priesthood he was accused of harboring a runaway 14 year old girl. He had explanations for everything… ofc. Reading the police report was absolutely devastating bc it seemed like the police did no due diligence and nothing came of the report. Then there were pages worth of internal Catholic Church investigations in which I learned he would have young, distastefully dressed girls hanging out in his rectory and was drinking and showing up to events and/or not showing up at all. He once said he had been called by the military and was away from the church, except he lied and had been drinking, gambling and philandering with women. Members of the church and other priests wrote anonymous letters about his conduct and asked for his removal. There were bouts of rehab and probation but he was moved to another church. Some of the same antics occurred. You get the picture. This man my family had told me to revere as a literal god send was in fact NOTHING of the sort.

Then I found a summary of all his transgression over the years that led to his “retirement.” This is when I found out when he took my grandma, dad and his two siblings to get the suburban he physically assaulted my grandma and assaulted kicked my dad and his siblings. I cross referenced all of this information with birth years, where they grew up and lived and the fact my uncle still has the suburban.

I was by myself when I found all of this out and I’ve asked my dad if he’s ever looked him up and he said yes. So he knows of the lawsuit but I haven’t asked if he dug as far as I did to find this 16 page document. I don’t know how to approach this or if it’s even worth bringing up to him. I’m curious how much he knows and if he remembers being assaulted. I’m also extremely disturbed if they knew of his past and chose to lie to me about this man. If they didn’t, then my heart breaks for what they endured with years of lies, abuse and the hurt they felt. It also makes me question my grandmother and he choices and everything she subjected her children to.

My dad and aunt reconnected with my biological grandfather a few years ago. He eventually came to visit us from across the country. I was in my mid-20s meeting my biological grandfather. I am truly apathetic to him and forming a relationship with him. My moms mom had 2 husbands and those were my grandpas. My grandpas and grandmas have all passed now so I’ve mourned losing all of my grandparents. I do not feel this man is my grandfather and have been at peace with this for a very long time.

However, it’s made me realize, my grandma abandoned him. He was the one who came to the church with the suspicion she was having an affair with the priest. At that my heart breaks for him. The priest also did my aunts funeral, so while some piece of me feels I can’t forgive him for not going to his own daughters funeral, I also can’t imagine having to face a priest who my wife ran off with.

I’m so torn that my family pitted me against this man that is my biological grandfather when this priest was clearly a fraud and lacked human decency and morals. It is also clear that my grandma made extremely questionable decisions and (with other unrelated reasons) had tarnished my vision of her.

Needless to say one of my wild facts has changed significantly from my grandma fell in love with a priest. Truly so conflicting and heartbreaking.

Not super dark or super secret, but when I had to do a project on my family tree in elementary school one of the questions was "When did your family immigrate to America and why?" For one of my great-grandfathers, my grandma told me "Life was very hard back in his country, and it was getting dangerous to stay there." and for a long time I thought "Yeah, I can see that. It was probably hard for a teenager living in Poland with WWI right around the corner!" And I'm sure it was. But it turns out it's even harder and more dangerous when you're a teenager who has slept with a married woman and then accidentally k****d her husband when he confronted you. I can see why she didn't want me to put that on my elementary school project. edit: Wrong World War. I just pulled up his Ellis Island records and he immigrated in 1912 aboard the Carpathia in August.