April 27, 2023 | Violet Newbury

Real-Life Plot Twists


Life is full of twists and turns, and sometimes, we are hit with the unexpected. Here Redditors share some shocking real-life plot twists that threw them for a loop. It just goes to show one never knows what life has in store for them.


1. Off Without A Hitch

My little brother hitchhikes a lot. He was trying to hitch to Valdez, Alaska, to run a half marathon there before hitching to my parents' house near Fairbanks. He got picked up near Seattle by a woman. They were chatting, and my brother was telling her the story of how he rode his bike from Alaska to Argentina. The woman said her neighbor’s son had done the same thing. It turned out she was my parents’ next-door neighbor.

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2. No Longer A Dead End

When my grandmother passed, we learned some disturbing news. We found out that when she was 13 in Argentina, her older brother—which none of us knew existed—became psychotic and was hospitalized in a mental institution. This was the 1930s. Over time, my grandma lost touch with her brother. It was always her secret shame that she "abandoned her brother". Her brother later passed while still hospitalized, alone.

70 years later, when Grandma passed, my father went to Argentina to meet with family, find and pay respects at said uncle's grave. He started going from cemetery to cemetery, searching for his uncle's grave, but he couldn’t find it. He thought perhaps he had been cremated, so he started going from mental hospital to mental hospital, searching through records.

Soon enough, he picked up on a 70-year-old trail and followed his uncle from hospital to hospital, some of which had closed down decades prior. That’s when he made a shocking discovery. He reached modern times and found his uncle alive and well—96 years old—in a Buenos Aires mental hospital. My dad took him out of the hospital, put him in a supported living environment, and got him off 90% of the meds they had him on. He emerged a relatively stable, but still schizophrenic, old man.

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3. The Quest For The Truth

I played Everquest about 10 years ago and joined a guild. There was this dreamy high elf cleric who was always playing at the same time as me. We always played together, sometimes out slaying things, sometimes just sitting around in the city talking. Over the course of six months, this woman became my reason for logging on.

We eventually got married in the game, which her real-life husband, who also played the game, didn't think was that funny. We were very close, and she told me many details about her personal life and her husband. It felt like I was on one side of an affair if I didn't know any better. It felt great talking to her; my head was in the clouds.

Any time she signed on, my mood improved, and I looked forward to it every day. Eventually, she sent me pictures of herself. She was a pretty blonde-haired 27-year-old woman. She asked me for pictures in return, but I said no because it would be weird for a 12-year-old boy to send pictures of himself over the internet. I don't think she saw that coming, and I don't think I ever saw her again.

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4. A Secret Stashed

My friend, who lives on campus near me, had five other roommates, each with their own rooms. One of the roommates was a Chinese guy who for a while had been acting strangely. He alternated between being really friendly and being cold and unsure. He'd never open his door, completely when people knocked and would sometimes forget things that he'd said when referenced later.

His English skills would fluctuate wildly, and he would sometimes change his clothes oddly halfway through the day. He would also usually spend all his time inside his room and would make himself a rather large number of meals throughout the day. After six months of this strange behavior, one day my friend came back from a class and opened the door. What he saw was so bizarre, it was unforgettable.

There were two of the odd acting roommates staring back at her, deer in the headlights style. It turned out he'd been hiding his twin brother in his room since he'd arrived and thought that the other roommates would report him to the university if they found out. They took turns leaving the room or watching if the coast was clear before they both came out, alternating cooking meals one at a time, etc.

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5. First-Day Blunder

I walked into a new job on my first day and introduced myself to this guy. He said, "No time to waste", and assigned me a few weird tasks, and I started on them. I'd been working for an hour when my phone rang, and it was from the job that I had just started. I answered, and the guy on the phone said, "You are aware today is your first day"?

I said, "Yes, I'm actually here. David gave me some stuff to do". The guy on the phone said, "Who's David"? Apparently, a complete stranger just started telling me what to do and I didn't think twice about it. We had a pretty good laugh.

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6. Doing A Double Take

Someone I knew at university was talking to his new girlfriend about the Glastonbury festival. He went every year, and it transpired out that she did, too, and had been going for years. After a while, they started comparing photos that they'd taken over the years. My friend pulled out a picture from his first visit to the festival; he was sitting on a fence, with his back to a field.

There were only two other people in the picture—a girl, sitting about 20 feet away with her back to him, and her friend, who was taking her picture. His girlfriend realized that she was also there for the first time that year, and pulled out a picture. In it, she was sitting in a field. The only other people in the picture—out of 150,000 other people at the festival—were a guy sitting on a fence with his back to her, and his friend, who was taking his picture.

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7. Who’s The Boss?

I got a friend request on Facebook from this girl I didn’t know. We had some friends in common, and her profile said she had gone to the same university and was in the same program as me just a few years before. I figured we must have met at some party or something and accepted the request. A few months later, I moved to a new city for a new job. When I walked in on my first day, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

There was the girl who added me on Facebook. We ended up dating for a few months, too. She had added me because one of our bosses had literally the exact same name as me, and she thought she was adding him to Facebook. I always thought it was a really bizarre situation.

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8. The End Was Just The Beginning

I started working at Home Depot after graduating high school and was somewhat of an introvert. I really struggled to break out of the high school mentality and did not have a set group of friends to hang out with. When I started at Home Depot, a guy named Nick, who I worked with, invited me out to drink. We ended up becoming very good friends but hadn’t necessarily breached the emotional stuff yet beyond chicks.

A few months later, my stepmom's mother passed. It was pretty bleak, and I just had my family to talk to, which of course isn't the same at all. I was struggling, and my buddy Nick was drifting away as well. The day of the funeral arrived. It was toward the end, and I walked up to say my final goodbyes. I looked over, and Nick was there staring at me dumbfounded.

We high-fived, hugged, and found out he was my stepmom's nephew, and we were both drifting away because we didn't have anyone to talk to outside of our families. We’ve been best friends ever since.

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9. Secret Admirer Smackdown

I was pretty stoked to open an email from a secret admirer in my senior year of high school. Every day for almost two weeks, I'd receive a new note listing what she thought was my better qualities, how she was too shy to admit her feelings for me in person, and she would finally reveal herself at the big dance coming up that Friday.

The emails became more and more forthcoming as the end of the week approached and finally culminated with a clue about how to figure out who she was. It said, “These are the only species besides humans that have [intercourse] for pleasure”. I was a heavier-set lineman on the football team and kind of a class clown, which meant despite my lack of confidence, I was always in with the popular crowd.

As we pre-drank for the dance, I told a few of my friends to be on the lookout for something dolphin-related. Word spread quickly, and by the time we arrived, I had a huge group trying to help me solve the mystery. As the night went on, a teammate of mine found out that Adrienne, this cute girl I sat next to in social class, had a temporary dolphin tattoo on her left shoulder.

After some prodding by my friends, I went over to her and the group of girls she was with. A slow song started as I sheepishly asked for a dance. With the entire school watching my two-week-long mystery reach its climax, she leaned in close and whispered in my ear. What she said left me shocked. She told me: "You're [a jerk] sometimes", promptly followed with a smack across the face.

I'd never felt that level of confusion or embarrassment. She had orchestrated the whole thing because she didn't like my class clown demeanor.

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10. Three Was A Crowd

My friend’s best friend was dating this guy and they were pretty sure they had found “the one” with each other. This guy was all ready to propose and was picking out rings. So, these two decided to have a threesome and, as a third, he chose his ex-girlfriend. At that point, any guy with a shred of common sense should know this was probably going to end badly. The girlfriend enjoyed it a little too much and broke up with him to date his ex-girlfriend.

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11. It Was All In Her Head

My parents were divorced and I lived with my mother. Life was pretty normal until around fourth grade—that’s when things took a dark turn. My mother began telling me she suspected people had been following us. This happened often and each time her stories escalated. By fifth grade, I wasn't allowed to talk about where we were going after entering the car, and I had to change in my closet because there were cameras in the house.

I began to mistrust my friends after being informed by my mother their parents were plotting against us. We began moving from place to place, evading the stalkers, but each time they followed us to the new city. Finally, two months into sixth grade, I was called to the office from my science class. Once there, I was picked up by my father, who I hadn't seen for months.

He gained custody of me and took me home straight from school. During the ride home, he told me my mother had been a paranoid schizophrenic since she was young and had been neglecting her medication for the past couple of years. It was hard to believe at first that all the hardship I thought we'd been going through was entirely made up, but I grew to accept it as I got older. I haven't seen my mother since that morning I left for school, as she was sent to an asylum shortly after.

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12. I Was Left Floored!

I was job searching in my early 20s. I got to this job interview, and the guy didn't know I was coming. He grudgingly walked me into his office and started asking me questions. I had been on so many interviews, I just wasn't in the mood for someone to make me feel like I wasn't welcome. He asked me why I wanted to work there, and part of my answer was, "I like to help people”.

He told me I was full of it. I was surprised and could tell it was going nowhere. The rest of the interview was a formality, and I ended with a sarcastic, "Sorry to bother you". I got back to my apartment and was feeling down. I received a voicemail asking me where I was for my interview. They told me that if I was still interested, to call back.

That’s when I made a hilarious realization. I compared the name, number, and company with the business card I was given, and it turned out I was on the wrong floor. I just walked into a random company and was given an interview. I didn't get either job.

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13. The Truth Hit Home

There was a kid's baseball league in a town in Texas, and they would have games a few times per week. The head and assistant coaches were dads of kids who played. During a game, the dad of one of the low-skill kids got worked up because his son was only playing the league minimum innings. The coach refused to play the kid more because he didn’t want to risk angering EVERYONE by throwing the game.

The parent got madder until, by the end of the game, he was bursting at the seams. After the game, the guy confronted the head coach in the parking lot and took a swing at him. They started brawling and rolling around on the ground. The wife of the head coach showed up and started screeching at the parent to get off her husband.

She didn’t know the context of the scuffle and, going off the info she had, screamed. "Quit fighting my husband! It's the OTHER coach that's been [sleeping with] your wife"! The expression when that guy froze was priceless.

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14. Life’s Major Swede Bump

My friend had a girlfriend, and their relationship was kind of brutal. After a while, the girlfriend moved back to her hometown, two hours north of Stockholm. Things seemed to be turning for the better as it seemed they were going their separate ways. Then, she told him she was pregnant. Out of guilt, duty, or love, he decided to try to make it work, and he moved to her town and tried to start a life there. Big mistake.

She wasn't actually pregnant at the time, and she encouraged him not to use protection. This, in turn, resulted in her getting knocked up for real. A few months into the pregnancy, she revealed that she was a lesbian and had a girlfriend on the side. My buddy was in shambles upon returning to Stockholm to start anew.

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15. Ben Her

I used to know a guy named Ben. Ben was the biggest two-faced jerk I'd ever known. He once met a girl online, went out to meet her, and returned a few days later. When asked about her to his female friends, he said that there was no spark and no chemistry. To his guy friends, he would say that she was so ugly he couldn't stand to look at her. Ben hated ugly girls.

Ben and I lived together briefly, and my overweight girlfriend stayed with us frequently. She was friendly with him, would hang out with him while I was at work, and frequently drove him around if he needed. As soon as she was gone, though, he would laugh about how fat she was. Ben hated overweight girls too. Years and years passed, and I was on OkCupid one day.

I saw a new member who looked vaguely familiar. I looked at her photos, and it hit me. Ben, who was already unattractive, gained a bunch of weight and became transgender. In essence, he became a fat, ugly woman…the very thing he hated the most.

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16. On The Edge Of Desire

In high school, I awkwardly approached a guy for the first time ever. Being stupid and young, it was a dare to go up and tell him he looked like John Mayer. He went to a neighboring high school. So I approached him, told him that my friends and I thought he looked like John Mayer. The girls were all watching and giggling.

He just looked at me, said nothing and turned back to the conversation he was having before I interrupted. Humiliated, my friends consoled me and said he must've been a jerk. I convinced myself he was and never got his name. I would see him in passing near school and think not-so-nice things about him. Four years later, I ended up meeting him again.

He was not a jerk and we hit it off. I found out his name, and I never mentioned the past encounter until a few months into the relationship. That’s when I learned what really happened that day. It turned out he remembered me too. He was incredibly socially awkward with girls in high school and had no idea what to do when I approached him. He froze up because he had a thing for redheads, but had never pursued a girl, let alone be the one pursued by a redhead.

His mind exploded, and he went home that night and lamented to his dad what an idiot he was. Eight years later, we are married, and, since then, countless people ask if anyone has ever told him he looks like John Mayer.

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17. A Forum Without Decorum

When I was 20, I frequented a design forum. This was in the early 2000s when forums were still the most common form of community on the internet. At some point, I mentioned that the congress I was attending in some big city had a huge six-hour gap between events, and I was bored. Another user with the same problem at the same event immediately replied.

We agreed to meet in town to visit some of the museums. She was a nice-looking Asian woman my age. We hung out, made chit-chat, passed the time, and got back to work at the end of the day. It was a several days' long event, so we ended up doing the same thing several times. On the last day, she mentioned something in passing that completely stumped me.

She said, "When I divorced 20 years ago". Apparently, she was not my age but 17 years older. We had a good laugh about that and I mentally had another good laugh because obviously, the thought of asking her out had crossed my mind. With dating off the table, I didn't think anything of it when she needed to pick up some stuff from her hotel room.

We got into her room and in the space of 30 minutes, I got my first proper kiss, heard dirty talk for the first time, and lost my virginity. I was so unprepared. I remember lying there looking at the ceiling afterward, trying to put the last 30 minutes in order while thinking, "What just happened"?!

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18. The Absolut Came With A Twist

Back in my high school days, my friend Joe would always be the one to throw the parties when his parents were out of town. After one such party, we had some booze left over and weren't sure what to do with it. Joe's sister was not 21 yet, but she was in college, so we asked her if she could keep it in her closet. That way if Joe's parents found it, they wouldn't be that hard on her because everyone drinks in college.

A couple of weeks later, Joe woke up to a text message, "Mom found your booze. I told her it was yours". So Joe got up and went downstairs to see the few cans and a bottle of some pretty nice vodka. His mom told him to throw out all the cans. He finished, then got to the bottle. He said, "I guess you want me to throw this out too"?

His mom replied, "Well, I'm not going to make you buy another one". It was an awesome twist, and we were pumped. A couple of weeks later, another friend of ours was throwing a party, and Joe volunteered to bring the windfall that was this bottle. But she had a trick up her sleeve.

We got to the party and poured some drinks, and wouldn't you know…the bottle was filled with water.

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19. Too Much To Handle

When I was 16, my mom took me out to dinner and told me that I had another sibling. In 1984 she had been extremely poor, sleeping on a friend's couch in San Diego, and got pregnant. She gave the baby girl up for adoption and had not seen her since. She told me then because that was the day of the girl's 18th birthday, and she could start poking around for her birth parents if she wanted to.

My mom didn't want to have her just show up one day and have me be very confused. My other sister, who already knew, and I got to work and found her. We talked on the phone and texted. I was thrilled to have found a sibling close to my age. Years later, I invited her to my wedding, where we finally met a few days before it.

She seemed normal but very quiet and shy. She got to meet my mom, and that went well other than being quiet and shy. A couple of hours after she left the house, she called me from her hotel room and said she was going back to Oregon. She was too panicked and overwhelmed. I have not seen or heard from her since.

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20. Obsession Had No Boundaries

I was engaged to be married to a guy when I was only 20. We broke things off at 22, met my now-husband, and within three months, got pregnant and married him. Thirteen years later, my husband was in construction, and we became very good friends with his foreman and his wife. It was pretty good, except the wife was more than a little unhinged.

She had weird self-esteem issues despite being very pretty and was really fascinated by everything I did. She constantly asked tons of questions about my ideas on parenting, makeup, movies, housewifery, etc. Then, she started copying things we did. I would tell her about an argument my hubby and I had, and she and her husband would have the same sort of argument right in front of us. My sons were long-haired little skater dudes, so her son grew his hair out, and so on.

Then, she started to flirt a little too much with my husband, and it started to bother me, so I politely brought it up to her. She went bananas, and we didn’t talk for months. One day, my husband came home from work and said he heard our friends were splitting up. I was curious, so I sent her a supportive email thinly disguising my curiosity. She called the next day, and we talked.

It took her a while, but she eventually admitted to infidelity and started apologizing to me for betraying our friendship by sleeping with the man I loved. I hung up in a fury and drove straight to my husband's work and accused him. He was astonished. Then, he was mad and tried to deny it. Together we crossed the job site and started in on this woman’s poor husband.

The man was horrified that his wife had told me what had happened. I screamed at my husband and started to run away when the foreman stopped me. He didn’t understand why I was angry at my husband…that’s when I put it all together. She hadn’t slept with my husband—she had become so obsessed with me that she tracked down my ex-fiancé and seduced him.

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21. The Evil Stepmom?

I was in this really contentious child-custody dispute with my wife's ex and his wife over my stepson. My stepson had always had behavior issues at school. They had never been reliable or supportive. Then, after they suffered a house fire and lost their daughters, things got worse and worse. After a visit to their home that nearly ended in my stepson being interrogated by CPS, we decided it was no longer safe to send him over there.

We ended up in court, with me representing my wife at the hearing. I basically accused her ex of being negligent and dangerous and his wife of being mentally ill, obsessive, and a danger to the child. I accused her of spitting in my stepson’s food, framing him for harming her baby, and causing the fire that ended the lives of their daughters and profiting off their demise.

The judge must've thought we had some good points, but not enough to keep my kid away from his father and stepmom. We finally agreed to allow him to move in with his father permanently because the situation was too disruptive to our family. So, my stepson moved in with his dad and stepmom, and everything worked out fine. He did well in school, made friends, and joined the band.

I really started to question my own paranoia and whether it was all in my head. Then, less than six months after the move, my stepson got sick enough to go to the doctor for antibiotics. He was home alone with the stepmom with a 103-degree fever, but she still made him do chores. When he didn’t do them to her liking, she withheld his medicine—both his prescribed antibiotics and Tylenol.

Then, she tried to give him a double dose of Adderall. When the dad came home, my stepson's fever was 104. The dad went crazy and yelled at her. The stepmom called the authorities and accused the dad of threatening her. The dad was taken into custody for seven days, losing his job and PhD, which he was months away from, and the stepmom filed for divorce. Since then, the dad told us that the stepmom really did spit in my stepson's food, and he knew about it. I was right about them all along.

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22. Lovers And Fighters

When I was in high school, I was dumped by my then-first girlfriend. It turned me into a bitter 14-year-old who proceeded to love and hate her. We ended up both hating each other and got into an argument where I was rather mean. She got mad and said she was going to get her cousin to beat me up. I went on MSN a few days later and he added me, but didn’t seem to want to hurt me.

He just wanted to find out why his cousin wanted him to beat me up. I explained and he laughed it off and started to befriend me a bit. We ended up talking for a while and I met up with him with other friends. I never expected that it would go the way it did. We hit it off a little too well, and within a few days of hanging out, the guy who was supposed to beat me up ended up getting busy with me.

I realized I was bi and got into a semi-serious relationship with him. My ex, who thought we made a nice couple, stopped hating me and we became friends.

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23. One And Done

I fell in love in high school and got pregnant my senior year. After much discussion and counseling, we decided to place our son in an open adoption with a family in town. We became close with the family and got together with them a few times a year. After dating for five years and living together for two, I got married to my high school sweetheart without our birth son and his family in attendance.

We were married for 11 and a half years and we were dealing with secondary infertility for six and a half. I'm pretty sure we can't have any more biological children.

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24. Our Friendship Reached An Embarrassing Finish

About ten years ago in college, a girl who I was friends with in high school said she wanted to take the train up to my college to visit me for a weekend. She got off the train, we went straight to the bar and drank two pitchers of Natural Ice. We were both hammered and stumbled back to my dorm room. I was passing out in bed and she came out of the bathroom in just her underwear.

It was strange considering we had been friends for so long, but I just assumed it was because she was trashed. Then, out of nowhere, she hopped in my bed and we started hooking up. But I couldn’t save myself from some youthful embarrassment. We started going at it and I lasted about 30 seconds.

It was embarrassing, and we both just passed out. The next morning, we woke up and she told me she was hopping on the next train to go back to school; it was awkward. After that episode, we lost contact. Then, I ran into her in our hometown at a party about three years later. She was there with all her friends and I was thinking how they were all probably laughing at me because she told them the story.

After a while of just avoiding each other, she finally came up to me and we awkwardly chatted about nothing. She finally said to me, "Things got weird after I came to visit you". I was like "Yeah, about that", and before I could get another word out she said, "I just have to ask you one thing. Why did you stop"? I was confused by the question at first but quickly realized that she didn't even know what had really happened. I replied, "Well, I just thought it was going to be bad for our friendship. I guess I was right".

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25. Parental Pride

Growing up, my siblings and I always suspected that our dad was gay. We would even joke about it sometimes. When I was a teen, my mom asked me how I felt about gay people in general and how I would feel if someone I was related to was. I rolled my eyes and said, "We know Dad's gay"! She looked surprised for a second and said, "No, I am"!

I was shocked. I would never have suspected, and we always kind of thought of her as just Mom anyway. After the shock wore off and I gave her a big hug, I asked about Dad again. She said she couldn't speak for him. He came out a few months later.

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26. The Whim Of A Wonderhunk

I was a 22-year-old girl intensely in love with a man named Jason on the internet. I knew something was wrong because he would never speak to me or ANYONE on the mic or over the phone. We had all known Jason for years, and it had become a common thing that we just didn't talk about. I honestly didn't care because I was so incredibly in love with him.

Eventually, I was too in love to keep my mouth shut and came at him full force, in tears, repeatedly begging and promising to him that NO MATTER WHAT it was that I'd accept him and still love him. He refused to disclose himself and broke up with me. I was shattered for five years. In that fifth year, I returned to the program where we met, and I ended up messaging with him.

We talked and talked for hours, and it took less than a week for us to be in love again. We had never had any closure from the whirlwind before. A week later, I got him on the phone. A week after that, I found out the twisted truth. My 6'2” tall gorgeous 25-year-old personal trainer Wonderhunk named Jason was a five-foot 15-year-old Vietnamese girl.

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27. A Lucky Lifeline

I was working a terrible job for six years with no way out. Two years into my employment, my boss was fired and replaced with someone who could barely function. The boss who got fired was somebody who I respected, and we got along REALLY well. Four years after he was fired, I was still at that job, and it was taking a toll on my home life.

I was drinking a lot, and my wife had no idea as how to help me through my depression. I had some pretty dark thoughts some days, and I still don’t know how I lasted that long. As I was at the end of my rope, my former boss called me up and offered me a job that I was not qualified for. However, he told me he would spend time teaching me since he knew I was electro mechanically inclined.

It was a good $40K a year increase for me, and I got a work vehicle that I could use for personal use whenever I wanted with all the gas paid for by the company. I'm a guy who never cries, but when I got that call, I broke down in tears of joy. Even if I don’t retire there, I am picking up skills and experience that will make me desirable to any future employer.

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28. Young Love Lost

In high school I had my first girlfriend; I was 15 and she was 14. Eight months into the relationship, she had a best friend who had a huge crush on her, and she had a huge crush on him. She decided to break up with me to be with him for a while. Being in the same school, I got to see her every day, and we would still make out constantly.

Apparently, her best friend was OK with having an open relationship. After a week or two, she started to get really quiet and nervous around me. It turned out that her best friend was hurting her. She came in one day with bruises on her neck. This went on for a while, and I gave her all the support I could and tried to get back together.

Finally, she broke up with the dude and came back to me. From that point on, the relationship went pretty much downhill. She got colder and colder as I grew tired of being emotionally manipulated to stay with her, and we finally broke up. After breaking up, she was the sweetheart she was at the beginning and was around me all the time trying to make out with me.

For the first weeks, I was OK with it, but slowly, she started getting colder again, so I backed off and got out. After a while, I saw she was getting lonely, and I began to worry about her, so I tried to be her friend. Then, she missed school for a week. I called her parents and everybody refused to let me talk to her or to tell me what was going on. She tried to take her life and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

She came back to school and told me she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolarity, and borderline personality disorder—but that’s not the most shocking part. It turns out the “best friend” was part of her schizophrenia and never really existed.

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29. Things Were Not Quite Black Or White

I live in Europe. A close friend of mine met an American guy named Jeff who was Black in some online game and fell in love with him. Eventually, things progressed into an intercontinental long-distance relationship. I got to know the guy over Skype, and everything was cool. After two years of dating, my friend finally had the means to visit him in the US.

About a week before they were going to meet in person for the first time, he told her that he was not Black and his real name was Scott, among several other things. This dude had taken over some Black guy's Facebook and sent my friend his pictures to keep up his story.

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30. Cooking Up Some Crazy

I was in a relationship in high school with a girl, Cheryl. She was a Stage 5 clinger, a crazy nut job. I met a girl and was seeing her as a friend. I never cheated, but I did admit to her I liked her, and she liked me. I talked to her about how I wished I could end my relationship painlessly. A few days later, I dumped Cheryl during an argument, which she took pretty hard, but it had to be done.

A couple of days passed, and I went over to the new girl's house and made a disturbing discovery. I found a familiar car in the driveway. I walked inside, and the two of them were baking cookies. Cheryl found the girl on Facebook, somehow befriended her, and convinced her to help us get back together. Even though the new girl knew all of the stuff Cheryl did, said, etc, Cheryl was still able to convince her she was the one for me.

They both started pampering me, asking me if I would please get back with Cheryl. I was in shock; this was real life. I softly muttered, "No thank you", and left. I never talked to either of them again.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

31. Dr. Dodge-y

When I was about 15, my parents went away for a week, and I was left home alone. They had a good relationship with a family a few streets away, who invited me over a few evenings to have dinner. The family consisted of a doctor, his wife, and their identical twin daughters. The mom would pick me up in her Dodge Caravan, then drop me off back home at the end of the evening.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I spent most of it with the twins watching a movie. I was supposed to be back home for dinner as my parents were arriving home around 5:00 PM. This time, the father was set to bring me back in his shiny red Dodge Viper convertible. I hopped into the passenger seat and the guy drove—past my street.

I said, "Hey my street was that one". He replied, "I know. Just warming up the engine a little". Some distance later, he turned around and stepped on it. I became one with the leather seat and everything flappable on my face opened up like Alex in Clockwork Orange. The dude turned into my street at a speed I will forever judge as physically impossible, before screeching to a halt in front of my home.

He said goodbye, I thanked him for the ride, and ran inside. A while later, I moved to the other side of the continent. My parents were still in contact with a few people from back there. A few years later, I learned that the father was taken into custody and incarcerated. I said, "I guess he got one too many speeding tickets for driving like a maniac". I was told that he was put away for having a computer stuffed with inappropriate pictures of children.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

32. They Started Singing Another Tune

I snagged a job as a teller at a local credit union over the summer. It was only meant to be a seasonal position, but my supervisor told me that I would be offered the same position next summer again because I was so great. I got along quite well with all my coworkers, who told me that their favorite characteristic of mine was my unconventional sarcastic sense of humor.

To these coworkers of mine, I was a young fresh wild card who lived by my own rules and made inappropriate jokes. By the summer's end, I was preparing to leave the credit union and return to university. The entire credit union crew decided to treat me and my girlfriend to dinner on my last day; it was a good end to the summer.

A few of my coworkers expressed a desire to become friends with me on Facebook, apparently, to keep in touch while I was away at school. One of my only two male coworkers warned me that I should maybe think twice before adding these ladies on Facebook, but I shrugged it off and added three of them. A few days later, I was relaxing at home, listening to some new music.

As I often do when I hear a cool new song, I decided to share it on my Facebook for my friends to see. The song had a bizarre name, but I didn't think twice about posting it. The song was entitled “Kill Your Coworkers” by Flying Lotus. Well, I was in for a surprise. The next day, I was awakened by two officers at my front door. Someone at the credit union had called the authorities because they believed the posting of that song was a threat directed toward my coworkers at the credit union.

Needless to say, I was shocked. I insisted to the officers that it was a misunderstanding and all I did was post a harmless song in hopes of broadening my friends' music tastes. The officers seemed to understand, told me to be careful about what I put on the internet, and went on their way. When I called the credit union afterward to ask if they wanted me to work there again, I was told that "Due to the event that took place at the end of the summer, I will not be able to seek employment with the credit union in the future".

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

33. The Benefits Of Marriage

I grew up with my two parents. I noticed they weren't close like other kids' parents seemed to be. They never kissed, not once. It seemed like they were housemates. I also carried my mother's last name and my parents didn't get married until I was a teenager. When I turned 18, I was moving out into my own place, so I requested all of my vital data from my parents, such as birth certificate, etc.

I'd asked to see my birth certificate before as a kid and my mom always refused, saying I would lose it. As I was sitting on my empty living room floor filing this stuff away, I read the birth certificate. I saw a redaction and an edit, with a time stamp almost a year after my birth. The edit was the addition of my father's name. Confused, I asked my parents what it was about.

It was revealed that I was conceived out of wedlock, and my mom didn't intend to keep me. She'd had a miscarriage a few years prior and preferred abortion to, what she feared would be, a repeat. She and my dad went their separate ways, with my father assuming I was never born. My mother's father got word and told her that she could move in with him if she kept me.

She agreed and I came into existence. My grandfather knew my dad and they came across each other a few months after I was born. My grandpa told my unknowing father he had a new grandson. My dad inquired as to who the father was. My grandfather didn’t know at the time, and he thought that my mother didn’t know either. The timeline eventually clicked for my father, who asked to see my mother.

They met and all was revealed. My dad didn’t much care for my mom but wasn’t comfortable bailing on me. So what became my family was essentially an arrangement to raise me, which was why they always seemed like mere housemates. They were. They only got married for tax benefits.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

34. The Case Of The Brew Burglar

I worked barbacking, and while bussing a table off, one of my co-workers came up to me and asked if I had been drinking stuff out of the walk-in freezer in the basement. Of course, I had denied the idea as I wouldn't dare do such a thing, especially being fairly new at the job. He responded with assurance, saying he didn't think it was me but that he wanted to make sure before my boss approached me on the subject.

The next day I worked, my boss did confront me about it. He didn't make a point of whether or not I did it, just that it was both against the law due to my age and theft from his business. I understood fully and went about my day. But it didn’t stop there. Over the course of that day, several other co-workers came up to me asking if I had been doing it, mostly jokingly, saying things like, "Just be more careful next time".

Even though I know I didn't do it, it was still a nuisance because I didn't want to look bad in the eyes of my boss, especially after working so hard to display my work ethic. At the end of the night, I started my barback closing ritual, in which I evened out the ketchup, rolled up excess silverware, and refilled the upstairs stocks.

The booze required separate rooms, across from and within eyesight of each other in the large basement. I decided to first fill up the box with Captain Morgan, Jose Cuervo, and the usual bottles that get used up the fastest. Upon exiting the room, I looked across into the walk-in cooler, the door of which was open. Sitting inside was my co-worker, drinking a brew, looking right at me.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

35. Midwest Migration

I used to play Xbox Live with one of my best friends from school all the time. We grew up together and eventually amassed a huge group of online friends. After high school, I had gotten into the local community college, and I asked my friend what he planned to do. He was into guitar and bass, wanted to play the drums, had a family completely involved in the service, and had no desire to go to college.

He told me, "I'm gonna move to Ohio". When I asked why, he told me he was going to rent a room with one of the guys from our online gaming group, and possibly a second and third guy was going to join as well. He told me he was going to drive down with the Xbox guy as well. The day after graduation, after I had been up partying until 7 AM, I took a short nap.

I woke up a little after noon and send him a text, “Hey, where are you? Wanna come hang out”? He told me, "Oh, sorry, bro, I'm on my way to Ohio". And that was it. He left his life at home to move across the country with people had had never met.

Real-Life Plot TwistsPexels

36. This Wedding Was Up For Debate

When I was five years old, I remember going to a wedding reception for one of my friend's older sisters. I vaguely remember that it was scandalous because the bride was 18 and had just graduated high school, and the groom was much older. That's all I knew, and it didn't come up much in conversation with my friend or their family. Ten years later, I was in high school on the debate team.

I was chatting with the coach about random stuff when we got to talking about the team before he was coach. He told me that before him, another teacher was the coach who got fired for having a relationship with one of the students on the team. He told me their names, and my jaw hit the floor. That was the wedding reception I was at.

Real-Life Plot TwistsPexels

37. Whodunnit?

The husband of an elderly couple near me passed about a year ago. The wife, for most of her adult life, had a pretty serious drinking habit, and her husband kept her on track. A month or two after his passing, she found someone new off the internet. He quickly moved in, but something wasn't right about him. He'd often be seen buying multiple bottles of booze and taking them home with him.

Soon after, the authorities came asking people in the local area to see if anyone had seen the elderly woman and her new partner, as they believed they had recently gotten married. He kept buying booze, presumably for her, until two cruiser vans, an ambulance, and CSI investigators were seen outside the house. No one has been seen in or around the house since.

At first, I thought he was trying to end this poor woman through her drinking habit, but according to neighbors, she offed him to stop the torment he'd been putting her through.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

38. A Valentine’s Day Doosie

My girlfriend of two years moved a couple of hours away to go to school. We saw each other most weekends. The weekend before Valentine's Day, we were together, and it was great. The next weekend—Valentine’s Day—I went to see her at her parents’ home. As I walked up to the house, I looked through the window—and what I saw made my blood run cold.

I saw through the window that she and her fiancé were showing her parents an engagement ring. They eventually got married, and after six years, she discovered his other wife and kids.

Real-Life Plot TwistsPexels

39. Looking For Acceptance

My uncle went through a bad divorce a few years ago when his then-wife came out as a lesbian and left him for a woman. He was extremely heartbroken and devastated. Then a few years after that, he revealed that not only was he gay, but he had a serious boyfriend the entire time he was married.

The reason the divorce hit him so hard was that she was able to finally be honest about who she was, but he didn't think our conservative Catholic family would accept him. When he finally did come out, though, the general family reaction was, "Oooh, that explains a lot".

Real-Life Plot TwistsPexels

40. A Mix-Up For Some Mary Jane

I wanted to buy some weed, so I texted my friend Matt who said he was going to stop by. Sure enough, a guy came by, but it was no one I knew. He said his name was David, and for some reason, WE ARE IN EACH OTHER’S PHONES as the names of friends WE ALREADY HAD. Somehow, some way, two complete strangers had one of their friend’s contact info switched to two strangers, one who happened to sell weed, just like the friend I was originally trying to contact.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

41. Childhood Sweethearts

My mom was in a Mother Of Multiples group when I was around four years old and met a woman with twin boys who were only a year and a half older than us. They became friends and started making us go to play dates together. Two to three years later, my mom's friend’s husband was transferred, so we had to say our last goodbyes. My twin and I had gotten Power Ranger toys from McDonald's that day and handed it to the twins as we were leaving.

They asked, "Will you marry us"? I said yes, but my twin said, "No, I think we should just be friends". I thought I’d never see them again—but I was so wrong.

Years later, my mom tricked me into visiting this set of twins that I barely remembered from childhood. I started dating the older twin and ended up marrying him two years later.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

42. Long-Distance Lunatic

I live in the US. I once spent about six months attempting to court a girl who I'd had a crush on for the previous few years in high school. Things seemed to be going just swimmingly, and then she and her family took a six-week trip to Vietnam. When she came back, something was up. After a few more months of me trying to pursue her, I finally gave up and asked her what was going on.

She had a boyfriend for a few months from Australia, who she met briefly while in Vietnam and apparently fell madly in love with. Eventually, she realized how crazy it was to date a guy she barely knew who lived literally halfway around the world, who was several years older than her, and who presumably had a drinking problem. So, they broke up.

A few months later, she got a text from him saying that he was still coming to the States to see her and he was going to kill her. The authorities were called, responsible adults became involved, and everything blew over, at least, I think. She is still alive, so I assume things are peachy keen.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

43. Was It Real Or Just A Dream?

A few years ago, I started having this dream. It always started with me as a kid skipping toward a tree in the middle of a field. I would then see myself suddenly standing under the tree, looking up at a lifeless body hanging there. The dream seemed eerie to me, but it was clear that it was just a dream and nothing more.

A few months later, I had the same exact dream, and I knew that I had this exact dream before. I would then get this dream every other week, then a few times a week, then every other day, and even consecutive days in a row. After a while, the dream seemed so familiar and real that, even though I KNEW it started as a dream, I started to doubt myself.

I started to ask myself if it was just a dream or if it actually happened. It just seemed too real to be a dream, and it started to bother me. One day, I decided to tell my mom about my dream. That’s when I found out the dark truth.

It turned out that when I was a kid, my neighbor hung himself on one of the trees in my backyard, and I was the first one to find him along with some other kids from my town.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

44. Caught With My Pants Down

I was on my way to a job interview in London, and I was running a little late, as always. It was pretty tight to make it to the train station, so I started to jog a little. Unfortunately, I had diarrhea at the time, so the movement caused me to poo myself. By that point, I was panicking because if I missed the train, I would be half an hour late for the interview.

I looked around and saw a clothing store, so I dove inside, ran up to the till, and panted, "Thirty-four waist, medium length, quickly"! The girl stuffed it in a bag, and I just left the money without waiting for change. I ran as fast as I could and just made it onto the train before the doors closed. It was pretty full, so I hobbled up the aisles through a few carriages to the toilet so I could change my trousers and clean up.

I took off my trousers and pants, rolled them up, and poked them out the little toilet window. I cleaned myself up, then opened the bag…only to find that it was a jacket!

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

45. Not Just Some Kid

Throughout my childhood, I always thought to myself, "This is just a normal boring life, nothing different", until I went through my old baby pictures. There was always this other kid, but I never knew who he was. My parents always told me it was a kid we babysat, so that's what I went with. When I was 19, I learned that he was my older half-brother, whom we had stopped talking to.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

46. Playing Games

My friend had been feeling lonely for months and had found a guy she really got on with after meeting him gaming. Sadly, they lived too far apart to meet face-to-face. After months of them getting closer, he asked her out and they started e-dating. She confessed to me that she really really liked him, and she was saving money to go visit him. Fourteen months later, she had saved up the money and she booked the flight.

Everything was perfect, and she was flying out the very next day. Then late at night, I got a frantic phone call from her. It was hard to decipher what she was saying. I got her to slow down and she said, “He's not him”. I asked for clarification, and she just cried, “He's not him”! I was confused. I asked if he lied about what he does or his age, or something.

She replied, “No, he lied about who he is, what he is, HE is not HIM, HE, is SHE, HE is not Michael, SHE is Michelle”! It turned out the guy was a lonely lesbian who looked masculine when dressed up for the webcam and had been using pictures of her brother the entire time for everything else. Sadly, my friend almost had a nervous breakdown and has ended up with serious trust issues since.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

47. A High-Stakes Meeting

My mother told me that my two-year-older brother Jeffrey had passed two weeks after birth. One day, I met a guy in the lobby of The Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We were hitting it off really well; we both loved and wanted to become physicists, and we loved Doctor Who. The only problem was he was 22, and I was 20. We told each other our names—his was Jeffrey, mine was Lucy—and gave each other our phone numbers.

A couple of days later, we went to dinner on a date. He told me that he was adopted into a family at only a couple of weeks old. I told him about my older brother passing at around the same age. He asked for his name, which I politely gave him. He became worried and started to sweat. We went back to my house to call my parents. They said to do a blood test. The very next day, we went to the doctor…and so it turned out my date was my supposedly deceased brother.

Real-Life Plot TwistsPexels

48. The Long And Short Of It

A few years ago, I was in a longboarding accident and got a pretty bad concussion. The concussion caused me to forget pretty much that whole day, but my friends explained to me what happened. They told me that I had gotten scared of going too fast, and tried to jump off the longboard. They ridiculed me for jumping off because jumping off a longboard is not the smartest thing to do when you want to get off. But then I learned the twisted truth.

I was living with that ridicule for two years…until my best friend told me that I was pushed off by one of my friends.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

49. On The Hunt For A Father

My ex-girlfriend's mom was in hospice care after having cancer when she told her son—my ex's brother—that the man she was married to and who raised him his entire life was not his biological father. This was news to everyone involved and was later confirmed through testing. The man who raised my ex's brother was not the most attentive father or all that warm and kind.

They had a typical broken home story. He was a bit of a lush, they got divorced, and the kid was a big-time troublemaker. The final twist came after their mom passed. The non-biological dad took the kid hunting and told him that he didn't care and that he was his son. He said that nothing and no one was going to take that away from him. Those words coming from that man were huge, and no one expected it. They became extremely close after that.

Real-Life Plot TwistsShutterstock

 

Sources: Reddit,


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