My family is pretty tame, to the point where I was always a little surprised when my friends told me stories about their crazy parents. Growing up, I never understood quite how lucky I was to have a boring family – at least until I had already moved out. And reading these 29 AskReddit users stories about their family’s deep dark secrets only serves to reaffirm me. Because THEY CRAY!
1. NAZIS!
“I married this woman a few years ago. After dating her a while, I could tell there was something strange about her family. She claimed that she didn’t know what part of the world her ancestors were from, didn’t know where her last name came from, her parents had blonde hair and blue eyes, but had Latino accents. I later found out their first language was Portuguese and they were from Brazil.
Anyway, about a year after we were married, she sat down with me and explained that her grandparents were avid Nazis who fled to Brazil just before the war ended. She obviously didn’t like for people to know this, and had a hard time finding a way to tell me. I didn’t really care. I told her that I loved her for who she was and it didn’t matter who her grandparents were, all that mattered was who she was.
Anyway, it seemed important for her that I meet her relatives in Brazil, and apparently, her parents went there to visit every few years. So we planned the most bizarre trip of my life. When you first arrive, nothing seems off about the colony. They speak Portuguese and German, they have jobs, they drive cars, they don’t stand out in any way except that they look different than other Brazilians. The colony is isolated, and the few locals who are around don’t seem to care of really quite grasp what’s going on.
But once you start talking to people, you realize that they are deeply disturbed and have a deep-seated hatred for anyone who is different from them, especially Jews. I remember one conversation I had with her great uncle, a man who, I kid you not, had a Hitler mustache.
‘If you are going to be a part of this family you have to understand what we are planning. This is not some sad, little nursing home for the Nazi way of life to die, it is merely an incubator.’”
2. Angry Venting
“Found out through an angry vent given by my mother, that most of my cousins aren’t legitimate, and most of my aunts had lied to their husbands about the true father of their children. Also found out that there was a very large niche of the family I had never met and that no one really admits to – because they’re all inbred.”
3. Premarital Sex
“When I first started dating my girlfriend, I was invited to her very conservative Catholic parents’ 25th wedding anniversary party. I was hanging out with her and her 24-year-old older brother afterwords, and she was talking about how her mom found her birth control earlier that week and lectured her about how wrong premarital sex was (we weren’t having sex). I quick did some mental math and said, ‘She shouldn’t talk since your brother’s birthday is in 5 months.’ They both looked at me with a crazy amount of shock on their faces. They had never figured that out.”
4. Postmortem
“My grandmother’s cousin married a man she met in college. They had a daughter and were married for maybe 40 years. 3 years ago, he passed with cancer. We were not shocked at this. After all, he was approaching 70 and had a bad form of cancer, and it was spreading fast. We were prepared for this.
What we weren’t prepared for was that after he passed, his wife found a journal of his which explained that for 35 years, he was having a another relationship with a man.
It was a shock to all of us. He was so committed to his wife, that he never left. But at the same time, it must have killed him to stay silent for such a long time.”