Think you know your family? You might have to think again. In a recent Reddit post, people revealed the secrets they only discovered about their family members once they’d died and were cleaning out their homes. Here are 12 of the craziest stories from the thread…
12. The Grandma With Many Marriages
“My step-grandma had been married 5 more times than she told my grandpa she had been. He was her 9th husband, not her 4th.”
“Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived…Uh…Beheaded, beheaded?”
11. The Bullets Meant for Steve
“I found a hidden 38 revolver in my late stepfather’s bookshelf. Every bullet in the gun had the name Steve written in sharpie. No one had ever heard of him.”
“It’s your turn to find Steve and settle the score.”
10. The Adoption Papers
“My dad passed away in 1994 (I was 28). While going through his safe I found some adoption papers. While reading through them I got excited at the prospect I might have a brother out there somewhere (I was raised as an only child) but couldn’t understand why my parents never told me that they’d adopted a child but never told me. After rereading them, I realized that they papers were about me. After confronting my family about this turns out everyone – family, close friends, I mean everyone, knew I was adopted. Except me. That was a fun day.”
9. The Hidden Money
“That my dad hid money all over the house, not huge amounts mind you, but $60 here, $120 there. Felt like a bit of a scavenger hunt when we were cleaning out his stuff. He was always a bit of a sneakily generous guy, always gave me and my brothers a secret handshake with money tucked in his palm when we’d go back to school after a weekend home, etc, so wouldn’t be surprised if he’d done it intentionally. Made us smile every time we found some…I think the final total was somewhere around $800.”
8. The Secret Letters Between Husband and Father
“I’m African American and my husband is white. My father faced a lot of prejudice during his lifetime and I was terrified of telling him that the ‘white guy’ I’d been on a date or two with I was getting serious with…Miraculously, by the second time my father literally gushed all over my husband. Even my siblings were shocked…
My mom died in 2014 and my father in 2021. When my siblings and I went to clean out the house, in his safe along with other important documents, we found letters that my husband had written to my father 24 years before about how he felt about me, how he was serious about his relationship with me, how he was planning to go to law school (he did, he’s an attorney now) how he respected that he’d gone through so much in his lifetime, and eventually how he loved me and how with his blessing, he was going to propose. My husband never told me he’d written my father and my father never told me he’d been corresponding with my husband. It was so emotional finding those. I still tear up when I think about it. When I got home, my husband finally showed me the letters my father had written back.”
7. The Guilt-Ridden Grandpas
“Grandpa did drawings of the faces of the people he killed in WW2. Nobody knows why but my grandma said he had a lot of guilt over the things he saw so my guess is he didn’t want to forget them or didn’t feel like he should be allowed to forget them.”
“My grandfather, who was in Italy, on Omaha and in the Bulge did something similar. Every evening before bed, he’d visualize the German soldiers he had killed and would say a prayer for each, and ask for forgiveness from them. In a way, I think he felt feeling the pain of remembering them every day was his penitence.”
6. The Old Note
“My dad kept a handwritten note in his wallet containing my mom’s old address, phone number, and directions to her house from when they first started dating in the 70s. He had moved it from wallet to wallet over the years. He just died this past March and that was one of the first things we found.”
5. The Hoarding Grandfather
“My grandfather, who spoke English as a third language, was a bit of a hoarder. Lots of old **** stockpiled in his basement, but well organized. Imagine a generic episode of Hoarders, but with a prepper OCD vibe. Everything was sanitized, stacked/nested, and grouped logically. It was like the stock room for a store that wasn’t yet sure what products it was selling and wanted to be ready.
So we find a cylindrical container that was kinda heavy for its size, and it had the label “OLD P*NIS”. It was one of those black plastic film containers. Hesitant, but curious, we removed the lid. It contained a collection of one-cent pieces which had been minted in the first half of the 20th century. Part of me was disappointed, part of me was relieved.”
4. The Secret Love Letters
“This isn’t ‘cleaning out their home’, but when my husband died a few years ago I found several notes/letters he had scattered in various places around our home, written to me in advance (he had terminal cancer & knew he was dying). Some were marked ‘open when you can’t stop crying’ ‘open when the holidays are too rough’ ‘open when you have to put one of the cats to sleep’. They didn’t contain any secrets but they are heartbreakingly beautiful.”
3. The Uncle’s Unexpected Family
“We all knew this one uncle had a second family. We expected drama at the funeral. No one was expecting his third family to show up. Wife. Three kids. This new family knew the rest of the family by name from pictures. How we are all related, names, hobbies. That was a wildly bizarre experience.”
2. The Scattered Handgun
“Cleaning out my grandpa’s apartment we found different pieces of a handgun scattered around. He struggled on and off with depression, and apparently he did it so that if he was thinking about suicide, he would have to go find all the parts and give himself time to talk himself out of it.”
1. The Drug Dealing Aunt
“[My] Elderly aunt had a hidden room with staircase to basement area no one knew about. She and her son had a meth lab. This was in the 90’s in Philly. Blew us all away.”
“It could’ve blown the whole neighborhood away.”
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Source: Reddit.