Imagine growing up in a healthy, happy family where you live with both of your biological parents and are harmonious with all of your siblings. Then, one evening at a typical family gathering, granny consumes too much alcohol and begins to air all of your family's dirty laundry. What she says destroys everything you believed to be true about your childhood and current reality. You can't even make eye contact with your parents anymore. By this time, you're 18-years-old and your choice is obvious... RUN!
Here are the top 25 of those moments found on Reddit. Stories with such a shock factor, you have to read them more than once to even start to believe them.
These stories will cause you to call a family meeting to ensure you (unlike these individuals) haven't been duped all of these years. Here lie real accounts of the moments people who thought they were "normal", discovered they were not.
Don't forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!
#25 He Died Twice
Not my family, but I thought I'd contribute.
Friend turns 15, and she's told she's adopted. Turns out that both her parents died in a car crash when she was just a baby, and her uncle adopted her and raised her.
A year later, a man messages her on Facebook saying that he's her half-brother. Turns out the dad lived through the car crash and later remarried, her adopted parents were lying to her as they knew all along, the dad just didn't want to keep her.
That's the "secret", so to speak. However, the story continues, as her biological father wanted to meet her. She flies out to meet him, stays with him, meets his wife and her half-siblings. Struggles with the idea of reconnecting with him, because she both loathes and loves him. Loathes him for not wanting her and getting a new family, loves him for wanting to make a difference in her life and reconnect. She takes the plunge anyway. 6 months later he dies from lung cancer. Life's cruel joke on her.
Pexels
#24 And All This Time, I Just Thought My Uncle Was Cool
My favorite uncle cheated on my auntie. Ended up knocking the woman up. She had the child and my uncle was forced to tell my aunt. Aunt divorced my uncle. He became an alcoholic and I had absolutely no idea.
I thought all the times we were going for car rides as a kid, he purposely drove crazy because it was entertaining for me and my cousins but it turned out he was just plastered.
#23 Sister-Mom
I recently found out that my "mom" is actually my grandma, my "step-grandpa," and my "sister" who is 13 years older than me is my actual mom. And that my biological dad was 21 when he got her pregnant.
#22 The Hypocrisy
I didn't find out until recently, in my thirties. So at this age pretty much nothing shocks you. But it would have shocked me in my teens, when my mother was super religious, warning us against premarital intercourse.
In my early twenties, she tried to stop my girlfriend and me from living together when we moved to a city where we knew no one. (Obviously, we lived together, but we had to hide it from her when she came to visit.) When some unmarried friends of mine had a baby unexpectedly, and the child was born with a physical handicap, she insinuated to me that it was a punishment from God for having a baby out of wedlock.
So guess what... a few months ago, my aunt mentioned in passing that the reason my parents got married after only knowing each other four months was because my mother was pregnant. (She ended up miscarrying, which is why we'd never figured it out before.)
#21 This Didn't Use To Be My Face
That my aunt wasn't born looking like that. When she was younger some kids in the neighborhood ganged up on her and attacked her with a 2x4. I never knew, and once I found out, I just felt so sorry for her. I was never told what happened to the attackers.
#20 Getting Granny Tipsy Has Its Perks
My father had an affair with his brother's wife. This means that my cousin is also my brother. My cousin doesn't know this yet though. Our grandma let it slip whilst heavily intoxicated.
#19 People With Crazy Stories Tend To Find Each Other
One is mine. One is my friends'.
Mine: Uncle killed a man in the old country. Gang fight. Picked up one of those big cigarette garbage things and hit another dude in the head. He did time in jail and was disowned by his family. My mom is the only person to visit him.
My friends': He was told his parents died. Turns out his dad is his uncle and the woman who raised him (his "aunt") is actually his mom.
Edit: Old country is Taiwan Edit 2: It's a smoking can. Thanks!
#18 We're All ONE
You might need to draw a diagram to understand this one.
My dad was born when my grandma was 18 and my "grandpa" was 14. He never looked like his "dad" and always thought his mom had an affair (for context, my dad's family is all Lebanese but he is very fair-skinned, which was partially why he assumed it had been an affair). When his "dad's" father, my great-grandfather, was on his deathbed due to cancer, a relative confessed to my dad that his "grandfather" was actually his father. My dad had my stepmom take hair out of his real father's head and had it sent for DNA testing which confirmed it (yeah, little morbid if you ask me).
So basically, my grandma had an affair with a married man when she was 18, had one, possibly two, children with him, then married his SON and had another 4 kids. So my dad's siblings are both his siblings and his nieces/nephews, and the man who raised him is actually his brother.
Yeah, I don't talk to that side of the family anymore.
#17 Madness In The Backwoods
My great grandpa murdered one of his own children. The family was a bunch of poor backwoods hicks and having trouble feeding their kids. My great grandma was pregnant and didn't learn until delivery that she was pregnant with twins. Great grandpa's solution was to only "keep" one.
My grandpa wrote a letter to my mom on his deathbed and this was one of the things he wrote about in the letter. When my mom told me my blood turned to ice water. The sheer evilness completely shocked me.
#16 Where Did All That Money Go?
Maybe an inverse sort of deal, but my family was apparently millionaires in the late 1800s. I guess they had always been very wealthy. But between that wealth getting split up every generation and my family living on the run for many generations, all that money was gone by the time I came around. The only thing left was a chunk of property in Mexico that is completely worthless aside from a small bit of money from it cause there's a highway going through it.
This totally shocked me because in my lifetime my family has been quite poor. Full on redneck on top of that. And lots of issues with addiction.
#15 He Who Smelt It, Dealt It
My aunt with a very "holier-than-thou" attitude has been having a 40+ year affair with a childhood sweetheart. This is a person that was always quick to criticize other people's family issues and tried so hard to present her and her family as "perfect." Her husband is horribly rude to our family and she lets him completely get away with it. I guess we know why now.
#14 Lost At Sea In My Mind
My great-grandfather was a quiet kind man and treasurer for his chapter of the Elks Lodge in Texas. He was attacked on his way home from an Elks Lodge meeting. He suffered amnesia and regained consciousness as a sailor on his way to Haiti. After landing, he lived in the country for a few months before getting into a bar brawl with a police officer and getting knocked out.
He regained consciousness in jail, with a new-found memory of who he was. He told this tale to a priest from jail, who believed him and wanted to help. The priest wrote my great grandmother and the American government and somehow convinced the Haitian government to let him return to America.
He returned to my great-grandmother, had two children, and was a law-abiding citizen for the rest of his life.
This story is so UNBELIEVABLE that when my mother told it to me 6 months ago, I was convinced it was a hoax. She has documents (the letters from the priest and others) and testimonials of his friends that say this behavior was uncharacteristic. I don't know, crazy man...
BBC
#13 And All This Time I Thought My Family Was Special
When I learned our "family secret," it wasn't so secret at all.
Growing up, my grandparents would make popovers for every family gathering. For whatever reason, my parents told me that popovers were our family's secret recipe, or maybe I was just a stupid kid and thought a secret recipe meant nobody else made that food at all.
Anyway, fast forward about 20 years when my wife and I were at a restaurant and they had popovers on the menu. I wondered out loud how this restaurant knew our family's secret recipe. My wife got confused and asked me to explain, whereupon I immediately realized how dumb I was. She will never let me forget that.
#12 The Deceit In This Family Is On Another Level
Our family is ultra-Catholic, religious, and adept at family secrets.
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When I was 11, I found out one of my uncles, his wife (my auntie) and their daughter (my cousin, then age 10) died the year before I was born, killed by an under the influence driver. Their surviving children, my two cousins, were adopted by another aunt/uncle and being raised as their own biological children.
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When I was 14, I found an old wedding album at my Grandma's house. Of my mother's first wedding. She was married in 1959 when she was 19 to a man from a wealthy family. I had no idea that my father was her second husband.
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When I was 17, my mother revealed that my older brother and sister were adopted. And not just adopted, but adopted during her first marriage. I had no idea they weren't my biological siblings, and they had never spilled the beans either.
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When I was 19, I found out that my father had harmed my oldest sister. My sister told my mother when it happened, and my mother chose to call her a liar and had her placed in a foster home. When she was in foster care I was about 7. My mother told me at that time that she was placed in foster care because "she was a bad girl." My mother chose my father over her daughter and exposed me and the rest of my siblings to possible abuse by keeping him with us.
#11 Just Take The Cash And Don't Speak Of This
My grandma inherited several hundred thousand dollars from her stepdad.
The juicy part is that to this day, no one knows how he got it. No one even knew he had that kind of money until he died. Since I'm from the south, my guess is rum running or something like that but we don't know and likely never will.
#10 And That's How You Came To Be, Son
Not mine, but in my wife's family, her great uncle was killed by his wife and the hired hand. (Poison was assumed as he was just found dead in the field. They were farmers.) His wife married the redheaded hired hand and 8 months after the death, birthed a red-headed son. Everyone in the family and the neighborhood knew except, I guess, the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). This was around 1935 in rural Alberta.
#9 When Your Family History Is Like A Movie
That Great-grandpa was a decorated soldier who fought in the Indian regiment of British troops in WW1.
In reality, he was a cook who deserted after seeing men sent to attack automatic weapons with their bodies. He and a bunch of others got the heck out of there while stealing a bunch of supplies.
This was corroborated by the other deserters who returned with him. Took them a few years to get from France to Vadodara in the current state of Gujarat, India They sold the weapons and rations along the way for money and great grandpa picked up an STD from an Iraqi lady (lucky grandpa was born before he left). They blame the STD on why he went "funny" in the head towards his end.
Also, the little bit of money he brought back from the stolen and sold army gear helped my grandpa buy some land and kick start my family fortunes so that we could move out of the untouchable class.
#8 Just Think, Grandma Could Have Been Besties With The President's Daughter
I had always known that my grandmother, while president of her sorority in college, threw a girl's application in the sewer because the girl was overweight and socially awkward. Grandma then lied to the rest of the sorority that the wind blew the application into the sewer.
Only recently did I learn that the girl whose application she "lost" was Lynda Bird Johnson, the daughter of the president of the United States.
#7 Pink Will Always Be My Color
So, ever since I started living in apartments for myself, I've had these big pink towels, and every time someone brought it up I've told this story. When I got the first apartment, I went to visit my grandparents with my mom so we could raid her basement for stuff she had lying around that I could use in my new home. And among the stuff that we found were these giant boxes of big pink towels and jasmine incense. Now, the towels I didn't question, but my grandparents didn't seem like the type to use incense, let alone in bulk, so I asked about it. And when I did, my mom and my grandma shared a look and one said to the other "I guess he's old enough to know."
So the story goes that my grandpa, amongst other things, ran two shopping centers. At one point, one of these shopping centers had a massage parlor. They seemed alright and always paid their rent. Then one day my grandpa gets a call...
Apparently, this was a "full-service" massage parlor and the owner split once the cops got wind of it, leaving behind the whole operation. So my grandpa technically became the owner of a very large supply of pink towels, jasmine incense, baby oil, and tissues. And, never one to throw things away, he kept all of it in his basement. And they were pretty good towels, so I took a bunch and some of the jasmine incense. I may call them for more at some point.
#6 Oh, The Guilt
That my grandmother didn't get a bad neck/back from poor posture. Grandfather beat her for spending his savings while away working out of town.
She turned into a cripple over the course of 30 years and took her life last February.
Grandfather has been heavily depressed witnessing it all unfold.
#5 When Religion Is A Mask To Hide Crazy
My grandmother as I knew her was a hyper-religious Christian woman who had every bit of conservative 1950's social viewpoints.
I found out she was pimped out at 16, got pregnant by the pimp, but didn't want the kids as her father would not be okay with them being mixed-race, so the pimp took custody and moved to a different state.
She was also the door kicker in a motorcycle gang. Her brother killed a guy and is serving life in prison.
My uncle. being a murderer, wasn't a shock as he's been imprisoned since before I was born and I had visited him when I was young.
First Baptist Church of Albion, IL
#4 The Lengths We Go To To Keep Food On The Table
I'll submit one because I think it's totally nuts, but it wasn't my family's secret. Family that I've known my whole life lived across the street, the daughter of the family married a cousin of mine, etc. Learned just a couple years ago that the dad of the family didn't go away to the Peace Corp for those years he was gone in the '80's when we were kids. He was in prison for trying to rob a bank because the family hit such hard times when their second child was born. The dad is the sweetest person ever and we never doubted for a second that he would do something like join the Peace Corp (that kind of guy), but the prison thing was a real what in the entire world moment for EVERYONE.
#2 Don't Join The Military If You Have An Anger Problem
My grandfather supposedly fought in WWII. He never talked much about it, though. After he died, one of our relatives enquired about death benefits. Well, it turns out you don't get any benefits if you strike an officer in basic training and go AWOL. They never really looked for him because they knew he was under 18.
Technically, none of us were really all that shocked...
#1 Dad?!
Ages ago, I arranged a meeting with the local substance dealer through a friend and surprise surprise it was my dad. Needless to say, major questions were asked on both sides.
My god, the look on our faces must've been priceless!
