19 People Who Died Thinking They Took Their Secrets To The Grave...Only To Be Revealed After Their Death

Note: Discussions of death, suicide, and abuse.

Recently, on a midnight scroll, I stumbled upon this old thread that asked: "What disturbing fact came to light about a family member after they passed away?"

From long-kept family secrets to disturbing discoveries to heartbreaking realizations, here's what everyone shared:

1."That my uncle passed from AIDS and not cancer like he said. Turned out he had been sick for a really long time. Gutted he never felt like he could share with us and went through it alone."

—imperator-paloma

2."My great-grandfather had another family that wasn't revealed until after he passed in his late 90s. He lived 'til I was in my mid-20s, and not once would I have ever suspected it. He was present at every family party, took me for haircuts once a month, and cut their lawn every week. It turned out my great-grandmother knew but hid it from everyone in the family. She actually knew his other kids and families. She told my dad while in hospice."

"The real kicker was one time when I was doing a family tree on one of those [ancestry] sites, it kept suggesting a public family tree I did not recognize. Turns out it was his other family."

—sideofricepilaf

3."My grandfather always kept the door of his home office locked. When he died in 1987, my grandmother just left the door closed and locked and eventually misplaced the key altogether. When she moved into assisted living last year, my mom and I cleaned out her house. I live closest, so it was on me to wait for the locksmith to come and open the office door. The room was like a time capsule, complete with Winston cigarettes still on the desk, butts in the ashtray, bills, and a newspaper from 1987 stacked neatly. And the office was filled with photographs. My grandfather was a photographer, so this was no surprise. Mostly, they were from his job, family, the house, vacations, etc. But then I found a locked file cabinet drawer and got curious/suspicious."

4."In 2009, I got a Facebook message from a guy saying, essentially, 'Hi, I think we have the same dad.' My dad died in 2004. I knew my dad had been married way before he met my mom, but none of us knew he had a son that he abandoned. When the baby was 6 months old, he left to join the army, never seeing his son again. So I have a half-brother about 20 years older than me."

"Since I was the first to find out, I was tasked with telling my mother. I called her up, and she basically said, 'Meh, your dad was bound to have some more skeletons in the closet that we didn't yet know about.' The whole thing makes me incredibly sad when I think about it. Sad for this guy who didn't have a dad (he had been looking for him on and off since he was 17). But also sad for my dad that he carried this secret with him for so long and died without ever having told anyone. It must have haunted him."

—frenchbritchick

5."Well, this is not so much disturbing as it is awesome. My grandfather kept a big safe in the basement of his house. About six months after his death, we bought a diamond blade saw to get it open as we had no idea where the key was."

6."My grandfather, who we called Opa, was a carpenter his entire life. He built half the houses in my hometown and loved to give them away AT COST to young couples getting a start in life. When my grandmother passed...[CLICK TO CONTINUE READING]