Last-minute revelations. Big family secrets. Disturbing discoveries. Sometimes life throws us such huge curveballs that the only response is to sit there numbly and say, "Wait—what"?!
1. Spoiler Alert
Two sons of a really wealthy couple go to the family lawyer to have their recently deceased parents' will read. The lawyer is super nervous because he has known them both since they were kids. One son gets the entire inheritance, and the other gets nothing. The explanation was that it should be passed through to blood relatives only. So that was the day he found out he was adopted.
2. Scandalous Great Grandma
Great-grandma ran a "hotel" in the late 1800s near a train depot and army fort in the Oklahoma territory. Turns out it was a "house of ill repute". Great-grandma was a madam! She must have been good at it, because she left a lot of money to my grandma.
3. Clean Them Out, Girls
We found out that our cleaning ladies got involved with a smuggling ring and set us up for a robbery that totally emptied our house out. How's that for a real-life plot twist?
4. I Guess That's One Way To Deal With Your Problems
I'm a divorce lawyer, and there's always some "wait...what"?! moment in the worst cases I have. This one couple separated 10 years ago, but didn't officially divorce until a couple years ago. She was going to get his house, so he burnt it down then faxed her the transfer of ownership forms. He might be going to the slammer for arson, though, so joke's on him.
5. Real Enough To Us
My friend was about to get married when a woman busted the doors down and screamed at the top of her lungs, "I'M THE REAL WIFE, STOP THE WEDDING"! Amazing.
6. Nailed It
I'm an ER nurse. One day, a man comes in after a car accident, we do a brain scan for safety and find a 3-inch nail embedded in his brain. We ask him about it and get this, he says he has no idea. He admits he was once shot with a nail gun but HAD NO IDEA A NAIL HAD BEEN LODGED IN HIS HEAD. It had been there for well over 4 years.
7. J’Accuse!
At my cousin's wedding, everything had been going great. Then, all of a sudden, his son from a previous marriage interrupts the vows to announce that the bride has been cheating on his dad with their drug dealer and that he can't let his dad marry her. My other cousin yelled at the son to either sit down or leave. The son left and the wedding continued. Five years and one baby later, he finds out it was all true. They are no longer together.
8. Secret Sister
When I was a kid, I knew my grandfather was odd. He'd call me his grandson even when I was wearing a dress and clearly female, but my parents would tell me to ignore it. Then I found out that when my dad was a kid, grandpa had sold my dad's sister Barbara to someone, and kept my dad and his brother because he didn't want a girl in the family.
My dad found his sister Barbara around the time I was in middle school, through making some calls and getting access to records. They were reunited, and she's my favorite aunt now. No one liked grandpa.
9. Not The Best Way To Go About It
My friend's father is an Orthopedic Surgeon who recently told us his best "wait...what"? story from work. Apparently, on a regular, quiet Wednesday, a boyfriend and girlfriend came in because they tried an at-home abortion. The method they used? It was...unique. They ran the girl's pelvis over with a car... The abortion worked and I hope to god they actually never reproduce.
10. Some Things Should Stay On Basic Cable
A buddy of mine is a hotel manager in a large downtown hotel. They had a "lady of the night" come down to the front desk with no clothes on, screaming in hysterics to call 9-1-1. She had just woken up in one of their rooms strapped to the bed like it was Dexter's table. The whole room had been draped in plastic.
The John was in the shower when she came to. She managed to wriggle free and ran out of the room. By the time the authorities arrived, the dude had left, but the room was still all Dexter-ed up. The security footage could see the guy leave the hotel, but he'd obscured his face on every camera angle. To my buddy's knowledge, the guy was never caught.
11. Turnaround
My uncle met his wife during the time he was using substances pretty heavily. She was an, ahem, "lady of the evening". They have two kids now and they're great parents, nobody would ever guess that they have a rather dark past. They haven't let it visibly affect them at all.
12. A Twist In The Funeral Plot
The mother of the deceased came to the funeral out of her mind intoxicated. She put on an over-the-top show of crying and screaming about how much she loved her daughter—but soon after, the dark truth came out. It wasn’t long after that terrible day that she was convicted of her daughter’s murder. Her performance didn’t fool anybody, and I hope she rots behind bars for the rest of her life.
13. Some Things Are Worse Than Nothing
When my friend was 18, his dad wrote him out of the will before suddenly passing away. The strange thing was that they always got along. It seemed very suspicious. He was then kicked out of the house by his father’s evil wife without a penny to his name. On Christmas Eve, the client went back to get some photos he left there and saw something he shouldn’t have. It was then that he learned just how evil she really was.
He knew where she kept the spare key, so he let himself in. On the way to his room, he saw the stepmom's phone sitting on a table and as he passed by she got a text message. It read something like, “I’m so happy we got away with it and we can finally be together. He didn’t deserve it anyway”. My friend was convinced that she forced his dad to take him out of the will, then somehow planned his dad's death with a secret lover. He's in law school now and is planning to go into estate law to help people get through problems like the one he had.
14. Role Reversal
When I showed up for an interview the hiring manager was not there. I was told he was "out sick" but I could interview with his backup. Halfway through the interview the office starts buzzing with activity. Whispers of an emergency were circulating and the "sick" manager's name is part of the emergency. We wrapped up the interview early and I went home.
Later that day I googled his name. He wasn't sick. He had turned himself in that morning for taking a shot at his baby's mother. It also grazed the baby but didn't cause serious injury. I got the job.
15. Is Now The Right Time?
The groom's father did a toast when the groom and bride were at the altar (is this normal? Everyone around me seemed confused), and he said, "I'm glad I made it out here today. I just want you guys to know that I have cancer and I'm going to die very soon. Congrats to my son and his beautiful bride. Enjoy your time"! Everyone was in complete silence. It was the most awkward thing I've possibly ever witnessed.
Also, this was in 2008 and the groom's father is still alive.
16. How Dare You
My dad is a physician. He tells a story about being on call overnight and monitoring a patient with a severe cardiac condition. In the middle of the night, the patient went into cardiac arrest and he pronounced him deceased after they were unable to resuscitate him and he'd shown no vital signs for close to an hour.
Later on that night, he got a page indicating that there was a patient who had a bone to pick with him. He returned to the ward to find the "deceased" patient upright in bed, alert and fully lucid. He was joking about the fact that he had been pronounced deceased earlier that night.
His return to health was remarkable, and possible only because his condition had involved the very gradual shunting of his pulmonary artery so that his body had slowly, over the course of months or years, become adapted to a low oxygen environment, allowing it to survive approximately an hour without any cardiac function.
17. Busted
When the pastor got to the part “or forever hold your peace,” the bride said, “Yes, I’d like to say something”. Then she turned around to her guests and said, “I’d like to thank my maid of honor for sleeping with my fiancé last night”. With that, she threw her bouquet down and stormed off. The story even made it onto local radio at the time.
18. All Sliced Up About It
This is going to sound weird, and unbelievable, but I have to recount this tale. The family wanted a private moment with the deceased. We allowed it, and all our staff cleared out, alongside the pastor. Within about five minutes, we hear retching, and dry heaving, and we knock, and ask if everything's okay. But the retching doesn't stop.
So, the staff enters the room, and by God, I'll never forget what I saw. They were eating slices of the body–embalmed slices. God knows how poisonous it was. The adults were detained for desecration of a corpse. The children went into foster care. These were some sick people.
19. The Siblings
I have nine siblings. We all share the same father. I only knew about seven of them until my dad passed. I found out that two of my "cousins" were actually my brother and sister. My father had cheated on his then-wife with her sister. So those kids were born out of wedlock. When my mother passed, I figured out that my sister (whom I thought we shared the same parents with) was fathered way before they met.
My only full-blood sibling is my twin. I'm only close to him and my sister. The other half-siblings get along well with us but we are not close.
20. Obsessive Father
One summer, when I was about 13, a friend of mine had a girl from her school who invited us over to go swimming in her pool. We go to her place and are shown to her room to change. As I'm changing my friend suddenly whispers "What the heck"? I turn around and see a bunch of used sanitary pads lined up on this girl's desk. But then it got even weirder.
She comes to join us in her room and my friend flat out asks her what the pads are all about. She says, very plainly, "They're for my dad so he can check that I'm not pregnant".
GettyImages
21. That’s Insane
At work, there was a guy working on an ejection seat without a properly disarmed drogue gun (the part that deploys the parachute). Since the thing wasn't properly disarmed, when he went through the timer checks the component fired. Unfortunately, his head was hovering above the large heavy piece of steel that fires from the drogue gun to pull the drogue chute out.
Apparently, it went through his chin and out of the top of his head. It cleanly pulled 20 feet of cord through his head, then the drogue chute. The chute went half way into his head then got stuck. It was so firmly planted in the 2" diameter hole going through his grape that it stopped any bleeding. They cut him out of the cables and took him to the hospital for surgery. Other than the 2" hole in his chin and the top of his head he was completely fine and was back to work two weeks later.
22. Somewhere That’s Green
I was about 8 or 9 and my parents were going to be out of town, so they had me and my siblings stay with a family from our church. Once we got to the house (which was really nice BTW), they had one rule: you can play wherever you want, but the basement is off limits. Me being the little jerk that I was, snuck down there the first chance I got and was supremely disappointed to only find rows and rows of plants growing under lights.
Wikimedia Commons, Plantlady223
23. Big Brother House Owners
I'm an inspector, so I'm in and out of thousands of houses every year. Over that time, I've seen a lot, but nothing compared to this one house. I found hidden cameras set up in the attic, all of which pointed into bedrooms and bathrooms. Also in the same attic (it was a big one), was a completely furnished hidden room. Needless to say, the new homeowners were pretty freaked out.
24. The Felon Granny
It's disturbing in a way: My great-grandmother went into the Armed Forces after committing an offense, and while there, she confessed to a judge. He punished her by extending her contract and forcing her to serve in the war. I never knew what happened until way after she passed when I asked my dad about it. My jaw dropped when I learned the truth.
There was a man in her neighborhood who was touching kids and going after boys. My grandma beat the snot out of him when she saw him try to lift two boys. So, yeah, granny was a vigilante.
25. Pregnant Disaster
I was pregnant with my oldest daughter and had extreme pain one day, so I came home early from work. When I get home I see two purses that I knew weren't mine sitting on the stand. I head to my room to see if my then-boyfriend could explain the purses; I'm hearing noises coming from our room. I opened the door to peek in and he is having a threesome. I close the door and just go back into the living room.
I was shocked. I was supposed to be on bed rest, but I was the only one who had a job, so I was going to school and working while he got to stay home all day. I was livid, but what was scary is that I was so furious that I remained calm. I went into the living room, sat on the couch and waited for them to come out; when they finally did I asked them if they had fun?
I told them they needed to get out of my apartment. He tried to talk to me, but I told him he needed to get out. I calmly packed off of his stuff up, had a friend come over because I couldn't do heavy lifting being 7 months pregnant and dropped his stuff off at his parents' house that night. It's still shocking to me that I remained so calm being that angry.
26. Disturbia
A neighbor was a somewhat off guy who nobody really liked, but he was not hated either. He passed well into his 70s of natural causes. A young couple bought his house and every item in it, because his relatives did not want to clean it up. They discovered surveillance cameras everywhere, watching the whole street—which is against the law in Germany. And that was just the beginning.
Finally, they found a room which was hidden behind a concealed door. This room contained lots of surveillance documents and loads of Reichsbürger propaganda, basically a far-right conspiracy. He was one of them; prepared to retake Germany from the usurpers of the German Reich.
27. Not An Easy Mistake To Make
Was a bridesmaid in a wedding. At the reception, we couldn't locate the groom for the first dance. We fanned out to search for him. I found him… in an intimate position… with his 2nd cousin. His excuse: he was intoxicated and thought it was his new wife...even though she was in a bright red dress. The marriage didn't last long.
28. The Ceremony That Will Make Your Jaw Drop
My buddy had a wedding about 15 years ago. We thought he had found the perfect woman, she was so nice all the time, hot as a bonfire, and from what we understood from manly banter as well as her own jokes at the poker table, amazing in bed. Wedding time comes round, "Does anyone have a lawful objection"? From there, everything unraveled.
His dad objects because he hadn’t found a way to tell everyone that he cheated on my buddy’s mom decades ago. But get this: the "other woman" was the bride's mother. And guess what? The bride was my buddy's half-sister. Apparently, only the parents knew the truth. A DNA test later confirmed it. Now my friend is in therapy because "the best love and lay of my life was my sister"!
29. Secret Weapon
My mom is a visiting physical therapist. She used to work in a small city in the area, with some bad areas, and she had to do therapy for a rather overweight guy who was pretty paranoid about the people in his complex (granted most of us would be too) but my mom sat down on the couch and felt something hard underneath the cushion.
She had the guy get what it was, and it was a stick, with a large blade taped to the end. She had almost sat on it too. She asked him if there was anything else like that in or around the area she needed to work in, and he managed to remove multiple knives, makeshift spears, and a syringe-based weapon. He was HIV positive.
My mom discharged him shortly.
30. Tragic Ending To A Wonderful Weekend
During a three-day wedding, the first night had a raging party. Everyone had just really good clean fun. Nobody was heinously intoxicated or dramatic, the food was awesome, the servers were hilarious, and the music was the perfect volume and style. Truly a once in a lifetime kind of party and everyone had an absolute blast from the 90-year-old grandpa to the one-year-old toddler. But we didn't know what was coming.
Next day was the wedding. The bride and groom are coming separately to the church, but the groom is late. He's stuck in traffic because of an accident, but he'll be there. He's all ready and tux-ed up so it's literally just up to him to slide into the church and get to the altar. He was nervous standing there because he’d been so late—45 minutes—because of the accident but whatever, he's there now.
Bride is stunning and doesn't care that things are delayed as nothing can ruin this day. They say their I dos and start to walk back down the aisle. Groom slams to the floor, and passes on before he hits it. Massive aneurysm took him out. But that's not the worst part. The traffic he hit on the way there was a result of the bride's grandparents in a car accident, and they too had passed.
31. The Apple Don’t Fall Too Far from the Sheets
One of my friends went on vacation with his dad over the winter break. While in the hotel lobby, my buddy started chatting with this stunning young blonde. They eventually went upstairs to her room to get some alone time. My buddy was having a great vacation so far, but then everything went so wrong. Later that night, my friend and his dad were in their room when they heard a knock. His dad opened it and immediately got punched in the face...by the man who turned out to be the blonde lady's husband.
My friend felt horrible that his dad got punched because of him, so after the husband left, he sat his dad down and apologized. Confused, his dad asked him why he was sorry. My friend told him he'd slept with the blonde chick. Then there was this horrible awkward silence before his dad asked, "The blonde girl? In room 334"? My buddy turns white as a sheet as his dad reveals that he had slept with her too. Yup. Father and son are now Eskimo brothers.
32. Change Of Heart
Amazingly, I was at a wedding where the groom himself objected. He just stood up there and started crying, then announced in front of everyone that he had fallen out of love with the bride a while before but didn't know how to break it off. It was extremely uncomfortable, and they both stepped out. Ten minutes later, they came back in and got married—because she'd apparently told him she was pregnant.
They're still together, with three kids now. I'm not sure about the husband, but I can confirm that the wife is having an affair. Neither of them are happy, but she has a comfortable life and he doesn't have the spine to leave.
33. Day Care Don’t
I took my two babies to an in-home daycare run by a lovely woman. About nine days in, the woman’s teenage son was home when I picked up my kids. He gave me a super creepy vibe. Pulled the kids from the daycare and placed them elsewhere. I didn't find out until 10 years later just how right I was. That kid offed two people and then went for his own mom.
34. A Double-Decker of Trouble
I was at my good friend’s wedding. She's a sweet girl and she'd fallen hard for a truck driver. Their relationship was long distance forever, so she was thrilled that they were finally getting married. When the priest says, “Does anyone object to this”? a woman stands up and says, “I do”. Turns out the guy wasn’t a truck driver but a married man from Florida who had two kids.
Yep, he just said he was a driver so he could play her long-distance. Oh and obviously the objecting woman was his real wife. Awkward...
35. Hidden Truths
My mom was raised by her mom and her stepfather, who touched her inappropriately. Where was dad? He passed when she was 11, or at least that's what my grandmother said. This would have been around 1961. Flash forward to 2015 and my sister is doing genealogy work on the family. She finds out my biological grandfather not die in 1961, he passed in 2005. But it gets worse.
He had five more daughters, one of which he gave the same name as my mom. So, my mom got cheated out of a potential relationship with her dad by her liar of a mom (who moved and remained hidden from her ex, my mom's real dad). My grandmother moved down to Texas from Virginia to stay in a nursing home and to basically make my mom and dad's life terrible.
We went to visit one weekend and she came over for dinner. I dropped the facts on her that we'd figured out she'd been lying for 50 years. She then had the nerve to act offended. My dad told her to shut up.
36. Having A Hard Nugget Definitely Helps
Paramedic here. I ran a call on a guy that was ejected out of a late-80s Mustang. The guy said the car rolled two times before pitching him out of the driver's side window. He said he landed on his head and the enormous seven-inch scalp avulsion seemed to corroborate his story. The car was completely crushed and flipped over on its top.
Here's the plot twist: The guy, meanwhile, never lost consciousness and wanted to refuse treatment and transport. Somehow, he seemed fine, but I still insisted that he go to the ER. He rode the whole way texting people and calling his girlfriend to tell her what happened. When I told him that he shouldn't be alive, he just said "Yeah, I got a hard nugget".
37. Redrum
My neighbor once asked me to feed his cat for him while he was out of town. Nice guy, mid 30s, lived alone, ran his own landscaping company. He would sometimes cut our grass for us when he was out cutting his on his huge landscaping mower. So I mean, yeah, of course, I'll feed your cat for a few days.
Bible verses were written in red marker on every inch of every mirror in his house, and there were an odd amount of mirrors. Like, multiple full length mirrors in just his living room, absolutely covered in tiny red Bible verses.
I never really looked at him the same after that.
38. Kids Know More Than They Let On
My mom told me this story the other day and it freaked me out. When my oldest sister was little, like 3 years old, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up to hold her. My mom said she was like "She can't pick you up, honey, she has a baby in her tummy". And then my little sister was like "That baby is dead"! My mom freaked out.
Still, my aunt and grandma were fine and were telling my mom it was all good, she was just a toddler and didn't know what she was saying. They were so, so wrong. Well, lo and behold my aunt goes to the doctor the next day for a routine pregnancy checkup, and the baby's heart had stopped beating. Give me the willies just thinking about it.
39. Home Away From Home
Two and a half years ago, I was in dire financial straits. I sold my home to keep my struggling business afloat. But I neglected to tell the owners about one key thing. They have an 800 square foot bunker on the property that I built about seven years ago. The bunker that I've called home since I sold it. The entrance to it is well-hidden, but I still come and go very early/very late in the day.
I'm a single man who keeps to himself. I'm now in a situation where I could move somewhere else, but I love this hidden paradise so much.
40. There’s A Story There
I found a father's day card from another child at my dad's house when I was 11.
41. Too Close A Call
When I was 15, my parents were going through a divorce. My mom worked night shifts and my dad was living with a friend of his. One night my sister, who was 19, at the time came home pretty intoxicated from a party. She was acting goofy and fell on the couch next to me. She started grabbing my leg and laughing and we started fondling. That's when I made the biggest mistake of my life.
We ended up hooking up right there. When we woke up the next day, she had no recollection of the night before, so I just kept my mouth shut. Fast forward to when I’m 18. Sister is home from college and dad is over for a visit. They get into an argument and in a fit of rage my dad announces how he has never forgiven her for "taking away his grandchild" when she got an abortion at 19.
The baby she aborted was in fact mine...and as far as I know, I am the only one who knows since she has never mentioned that night.
42. Ask for A Doctor’s Note Next Time
I was with this girl for just shy of two years. Holidays, festivals, discussions of marriage the lot. Claimed she lived at home with her mum, who had terminal cancer, and as a result, her mum didn't want to bring anyone new into her life, as the pain of knowing she would soon leave them was too much. Therefore, we spent all our time at mine, and I never met her family or mom.
I received a message from a guy one night asking how I knew her. I explained the whole story. What he told me made my blood run cold. Turns out her mom was fine, and she had been engaged to this guy and living with him the entire time...they were due to get married in two weeks. It still blows my mind that she managed to play us both so well the entire time.
43. Eerie Phone Call
My uncle works for dispatch in my town and he recently told my family of the weirdest call he's ever gotten. He says that he had received a call from a landline one night and when he answered it there was only static on the other end. This happened two more times. Finally, he calls a squad to go check out the address from the caller ID.
When the authorities got there and walked into the house they immediately saw that there was a body. The person had been gone for five months. The craziest part about it was that there was no electricity or any other utility working. So there is no way they should have been able to get those calls into dispatch. But if they hadn't, who knows how long that person’s body would have stayed there.
44. The Lazy Step-Dad
My stepfather was getting more and more tired, falling asleep during the middle of the day, sneaking off for a nap... really ticked off my mother and I. We were helping him renovate a house at the time and we didn't appreciate him always dozing off. A while later, he got diagnosed with bladder and kidney cancer, which had already spread too far to be treatable. We only really realized after his passing last spring that he was tired all the time because his cancer was already slowly taking over.
I didn't always get along with him, and I regret a lot of things I said to him. I just thought he was being lazy, I never thought he'd be gone within three years.
45. The Second Eldest Aunt
After my grandad passed, my great aunt told me that he was responsible for the passing of their baby sister. She said that when he was young, he picked the baby up, but because he was so small, he dropped her and she hit her head. When we went to clear out the house, we found a ton of family documentation, including birth and death certificates for the family.
It turns out the little girl passed as a result of whooping cough. I was like, what? It turns out that my aunt let my grandad go to his grave believing he was responsible for the passing of his baby sister. I can just never get my head around why.
46. Asleep On The Tracks
Nurse here. I had a patient once with throat cancer and his tumor ate through his carotid artery. Due to the cancer and a previous surgery he had a fistula (a hole) in his neck. He and his wife were at home... he was dozing in the sunroom. Wife goes to the kitchen and comes back to see him covered in blood and bloody handprints on the glass door where he tried to open it and get help. He had perforated his carotid artery and the blood was pouring (spurting?) out of his fistula.
This tiny little old lady pulled the drapes from the window, jumped on his neck, and pushed her life alert button. Somehow she held pressure enough to keep him from bleeding out, and we actually saved the man with very little neuro deficit. People perforate carotids in the ICU and don't survive the run to surgery... and he survived until EMS got to him and got him to the hospital, all because his wife thought quick and was remarkably strong.
47. Keeping Your Mouth Shut
My boyfriend's parents just lost their house. I told my mom what he had told me and she didn't think the story lined up, so she went all Sherlock Holmes and started looking up his parent's names in our county's public records. She got more than she bargained for because she found a locked file labeled "ADOPTION" with my boyfriend and one of his brother's names listed on it.
None of his other three siblings were on there—they are all way younger. He's never mentioned being adopted though, and is well past the age where you would tell a kid something like that—he's in his mid-20s. His family has already had a really bad few months and I don't want to cause any more drama by asking about it.
He has the same last name as his "dad”. He was in the forces and claims his "dad" is on his original birth certificate so, I'm really confused. I don't think his parents were married yet when he and his brother were born because his dad was still in the forces and away from home a lot. The papers weren't even filed until he was almost 10 years old.
But a biological father wouldn't have to adopt his own kids, even if they weren't married yet, right? I regret knowing because now I'm insanely curious and I can't say anything because this has that feel of “your darkest family secret” to it and I don't want to start anything.
48. Didn't See That One Coming
When I was in college studying photography, I got friendly with a fellow student who had a wedding photography business but was studying to get his qualifications, etc. After seeing my work, he asks me if I want to assist him on his next wedding, I agree. The big day comes and I’m all prepared to go in to see the groom, but the groom refuses to be in any pics, stating he was feeling under the weather.
I kinda thought he should suck it up, as it's his wedding day, but he was insistent. The ceremony comes and goes, time for the bridal party photos at the church. Again, the groom refuses pics, much to everyone’s annoyance. Get to reception, speeches begin, and midway through the father of the bride speech, the groom just straight up leaves, saying once again he was feeling a bit ill.
This is where the bride drew the line and went into a rage and started pulling the small groom and bride figures off the top of the cake and stomping on it, yelling "I shouldn’t have married him"! Lots of hullabaloo and guests trying to console her. Everyone agreed he was being dramatic and basically a jerk. We got paid in full even though at that point we were done. But so much more was about to happen.
I go home, feet up few beers...phone goes off, it’s my friend Craig the photographer. The groom passed on shortly after leaving the reception hall. We do 2-for-1 wedding and funeral service now.
49. More Than He Bargained for
Private investigator here. One woman I was hired to investigate was married to a guy who made a decent living. He wasn't mega-rich, but he likely made around $250K a year. He started to suspect his wife was cheating on him, so we tailed her for the weekend. It was only one weekend, but we quickly discovered that she was selling herself on Craigslist and Backpage.
We caught over 13 men coming in and out of her motel room that weekend and found her ads online.
50. The Cheater
My sister’s fiancé passed very suddenly and very tragically from a heart attack. She was 20, and he was 23. It turned out that he had an underlying condition. In the months following his passing, she found out he had been cheating on her basically since the start of their three-year relationship. Some women were long term and knew about her, others were just casual one-night stands that probably didn't know.
She kind of went off the deep end a little, because now she was not only mourning a man she loved; she also had to deal with this fact without being able to ask him for answers. Silver lining though; she ended up dating and marrying one of his good friends. They sort of bonded in the aftermath. He is the best thing that ever happened to her and vice versa.
They will be married for three years this summer.
51. A Mother’s Greed
My friend's mom got rid of her husband. She had taken a $200k life insurance policy out on him six months before he passed, and he passed from not taking his medication that he'd taken no problem all of his life. My buddy was away for the weekend so he wasn't home when it happened. After his mom passed, we found out even more: She'd taken a life insurance policy out on my buddy at some point too, and she'd also forged his signature to sign over $100k my buddy's dad had left to him.
She robbed my buddy blind and he had no clue. She took his inheritance from his grandma too that he'd had no clue about and gave a big chunk of it to her friends/his godparents who used it to buy a beach house... She also faked illnesses to get prescription pills and had little books filled with info on what she'd sold and how much she'd made from selling them.
52. Not Good With Rejection, Or Humanity
I worked as a shot girl at a pub. One night, I rejected someone who attempted to get my number. Not unusual and he didn't seem that bothered. The whole exchange wasn't strange to me. In the early hours after the bar closed, I went to leave through the back door into the car park like usual, when I saw the sensor light outside was on. Someone was standing just outside the door.
I felt uneasy so went out the front and asked one of the bouncers to walk me around the back to my car. As we rounded the corner, we spotted this guy lurking outside the door holding his belt like a makeshift garotte. When he saw us, he started screaming that I was a hideous prude and I should die. He scampered off into the road and never came back.
53. The Matriarch
We always thought something was up with my nan. She always kind of shunned any females in the family. Her sons and grandsons were like gold to her. Wives and granddaughters were treated like rubbish. Wasn't until she passed a few years back that it came out that she had been hurting her sons and possibly some of her grandsons.
One of my uncles ended up going behind bars for hurting all three of his children, two sons and a daughter. Tore his family apart. When my nan was dying, our uncle never left her side; he organized the funeral and seemed more cut up over it than anyone else. He was the favorite son. Totally gives me the creeps.
54. Lifesaver
I work as an ER nurse and had a patient with a little dizziness, a little nausea and a swollen abdomen. She was fairly bright, able to talk, and nothing seemed too horrific. But she was turning a grim gray color and breathing quickly. Our average wait time today was two hours. I could have put her back in the queue and moved on.
But I had a little dark feeling that there was something sinister happening here. So I called our most senior doctor out of a consultation and asked him to see her. Right now. Ever heard of your abdominal aorta? Enormous blood vessel that can pouch out, suddenly rupture, and make you bleed out internally in minutes?
It’s called a burst AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm). You’ve heard of it now. That’s what she had. I’ve never seen one before. But now I have. Within five minutes, she was barely responding. Within ten, her blood pressure had dropped to a barely sustainable level. Within twenty minutes, I was pouring blood into her and eight people were around the bed.
Within an hour, she was on an operating table clinging to life. But because I raised the alarm, and because my team worked their butts off, that woman is still, somehow, alive. Feels good, man.
55. Burning It Up
My cousin got married last April and I only went because my parents were going, and I had nothing better to do that weekend (also, free bar). I got to watch her set her bouquet, the white carpet, and the groom's pants on fire mid-ceremony because he had spiked his hair wrong. The best part was that the minister just kept reading the vows as it all went down.
Eventually, they got it all under control and the two said their I Dos. The divorce finalized a couple of days ago.
56. Roundabout Help
I was going to my old Taekwondo studio, taking classes, and visiting and working out with old friends when I met a new girl at the gym named Rita. Rita was very energetic, squeaky-voiced, and kind of flirty. I had hung out with her a couple times, but I knew nothing was going to happen between us. I'd heard too many stories about her on and off boyfriend, and she just reeked of drama.
It turned out to be a good decision because she made an insane request to me. Rita and her boyfriend were apparently together again and having a bit of a pregnancy scare. They were considering their options. So, she asked me that day, if we find out that I am actually pregnant for real, do you think you could round-kick me in the stomach"? She even said it with a straight face. After my initial "wait...what"? I shut her down hard. NO! FREAKIN! WAY! From then on, she was one big pile of NOPE! in my eyes. I haven't seen her since that day.
57. I Could Destroy You With A Whisper
My parents are divorced. My father was a pastor who cheated on my mother with a member of his congregation. She took me and left. The families have no contact. Originally, I was used as a pawn by him, and treated horribly until he had his son and left. I was five. Fast forward to today. Through internet sleuthing skills, I’ve managed to find him.
He has four kids and has inherited a couple of million dollars from his father. His family doesn’t know I’ve found them and that I could bring up his past if I chose and ruin his life. The kids don’t know I exist. But here's the worst part: My mother and I lived in poverty. I’m disabled, and he abandoned us, and never paid alimony or child support.
I’ve even found his radio programs where he talks about being a good Christian and giving all of yourself to the poor. I could ruin everything and take him to court. It’s my secret.
58. Getting A Tapeworm Out
Nurse here. My biggest "wait, what"? moment involved a gentleman who had a garden variety stomach ache. In his mind, the mild discomfort meant there was a tapeworm in his belly eating him alive, so he drank bleach AND ammonia in an effort to "smoke it out".
59. Sup, Bro?
While visiting family in Michigan for a reunion, there was a controversial rally in the small town where we were staying. As a young black teenager, it was really scary since the people rallying were into pointy white hoods, if you know what I mean. As they were chanting, I decided to hide out in the grocery store where six other black people were laying low too. Little did I know, that day would change my life.
I made eye contact with a guy who looked almost exactly like me but just slightly older. We got to talking and he said he was on a road trip with friends from Florida, just driving through the town. I told him that I was born there, adopted, and then moved to California, and I was just back for a family reunion. The guy was immediately curious about my adoption, so I told him my biological mother’s name and explained that she was a teen mom who just couldn't take care of me at that age.
After he heard this, the guy pulled out a picture of his mother at her high school prom. I reached for my wallet, numb with incredulity, as my fingers pulled out the exact same photo. We have the same mom. We're long lost brothers.
60. Sister Swap
I found out that one of my aunts had an arranged marriage. She wasn't actually the aunt who was supposed to be in the arranged marriage, but her sister was adamantly against marrying the guy. I guess my grandma somehow persuaded my aunt into replacing her sister's part of the marriage. My aunt and the guy got married, moved away, and had kids.
They lived far away so I barely ever saw them. Only as I got older did I learn that the dude was abusive to my aunt, to the point where she still had some intense mental breakdowns long after he was gone. I guess her sister was right to stay far away from that guy.
61. Paranoid Delusions
I had a brother who had some paranoid delusions (FBI, CIA following him, spying on his apartment, etc.). My brothers and I tried to get him help and he would just have no part of it. After a few years, it seemed like it had gotten better. He stopped bringing it up and we felt like it must have just passed. After he passed, we found his journal and it was just horrifying.
Right up until the night he passed, he detailed all of the stuff that they were inflicting on him. I can't go into much detail—it's hard for me to write about. Briefly, he believed that they were using some type of focused energy beam. They focused on different parts of his body at different times. Every noise that an appliance made was proof of electronic surveillance. Every bump on the wall or person walking in an adjacent apartment was a message from either the "bad" FBI agents or the "good" FBI agents.
It was just incredibly disturbing to read what an awful life he was living inside his mind while acting relatively normal outside.
62. Brothers Never Known
I always knew that my parents had some kind of "family secret". Various mutterings amended streams of conscious, etc. in my childhood. From the sound of it, I was under the impression that I had an older sibling. I am the oldest sibling of four, so I was fixated on the few little details, but as I grew older, I assumed it was a very morbid kind of imaginary friend delusion I had.
When I was in high school, I was talking to my mother when she slipped, saying something about her early relationship with my dad. I pushed her on it and found out that she had stayed with my dad after they had a child at age 15. She went on to tell me that I’d had not one, but three older siblings, and that were lost in some kind of accident.
My mom broke down. I didn't push for details and never have. That day, I went from being the oldest of four to the middle of seven. Probably my frame of reference for the concept of "trauma". Every obsession, every worry, and character flaw of my teenage self at that time burned into my character like scars.
63. The Only Limit Is Your GPA And Imagination
The teacher I was the TA for once told me that instead of a social essay, a person sent in their triple-x-rated fan fiction. It was....way more than she ever wanted to know about that student.
64. Double Plot Twist
I was head of HR for an answering service company at one point in my life. Staff turnover was atrocious and most of the resumes that came through were from people that had zero job history or were chronic job hoppers. Imagine my surprise when Renee's resume crossed my desk. With the exception of a ten-year gap on her resume, she appeared to be an ideal candidate.
And then I found the articles from a newspaper about two hours away. That ten-year gap? Serving time for kidnapping and murder...with an axe. A freaking axe murderer. Anyway, I hired her and as far as I know, she's still there. Model employee. Strong work ethic. Positive attitude. 10/10. Would hire an axe murderer again.
65. Something Doesn’t Match In This Match…
My brother dumped his fiancée a month before the wedding because when she gave birth. The baby that was born was black, and neither he nor his fiancée is. Unsurprisingly, a paternity test proved it wasn't his, and thus child support was denied.
66. Be Careful Blowing Your Nose
I've been asked this repeatedly when I was in the hospital for my open heart surgery "How are you still alive"?
Back story: I was basically born with a congenital birth defect which has an extremely high mortality rate. Like 1 in 120,000,000 chance of it happening and about 95% to 99% chance of dying. Not only did I survive it for 20 years, I played lacrosse for four years. Now, the issue was that I was missing a major blood vessel on my heart that is required to pump blood. My body compensated in such an extreme way that the blood vessel on the right side of the heart went down and around the heart and attached itself to aorta. My heart was basically circulating blood around itself alone and the rest of my body didn't get enough blood.
So how it was found out? Not when I was a baby or kid, no. As an adult, I blew my nose and had a full-on heart attack. Surgeons repeatedly stated and asked "How was I alive" and "You played lacrosse for four years"? Also, the main surgeon stated that anyone with this condition usually dies at birth. They only know of the condition from autopsies.
67. Facebook Help
One night I was at my friend's house and my neck started feeling all crazy. We were drinking and I powered through it. At about 6 am, I woke up cold and just took the liberty of taking a bath to warm up. Go home, still feel bad... But I write that off to too much to drink. A day more goes by, I think I might have pneumonia. This was before I had insurance, so I figure that I can tough pneumonia out.
Then my neck and back start hurting. My symptoms are pretty close to bacterial meningitis, but not exactly right. In a fever haze, I go on Facebook—not call a friend or do something reasonable—I put it on Facebook that I might need someone to take me to the hospital. I tell them that I think I have pneumonia. They x-ray my lungs, I don't. She runs me through the meningitis mobility tests. I don't have meningitis.
She asks me about my medical history, I tell her I've only been to the hospital twice in my life. Once when I fell in a bonfire, the second when I broke my ankle. She decides that I'm obviously messed up and runs an MRI on me—they cost a lot. The results gave me full body chills. It turns out that I had a 7-inch abscess in between my lungs. It had ruptured and was pouring pollutants into my body.
She came back and turned to the other nurse and said, "He has a 13cm abscess on his mediastinum". The other nurse responded with, "I didn't know that that could happen". She says, "I didn't either". If I had waited a day or two more, I'd most likely be a goner. I had five different medical specialist groups come in and run me through their diagnostics. Even had a class come through just to check me out. They never figured out what caused it or even what the infection was because it was so close to my heart. I just did daily infusions for three months and I believe that I'm okay now.
68. Stone Child
I was working in Africa when the usually very stoic Congolese surgeons called me into theater, gagging. The patient was an elderly woman with a protruding abdominal mass. When they opened it, they nearly fainted. They found that it was a long, long gone mummified fetus which, as a result of an ectopic pregnancy, had somehow managed to both wall off after its heart stopped beating and somehow avoid harming the mother too badly.
Her body had encapsulated the alien tissue and over the years, it had slowly eroded her anterior abdominal wall to the point where it finally caused her to have enough symptoms to get something done about it. It was horrific and the smell was even worse. Happily, though, the patient survived the procedure and just left the surgical team with a...memory.
69. When The Cat’s Away…
Last year, when I was 17, I pretended to be a private investigator just for fun. My neighbor gave me ten dollars to go look for his missing cat. I guess he just wanted me to have some fun and I was just fooling around. I was pretty sure I wouldn't find anything. But darn did I ever find something. A very big something.
At the bottom of my street, there was an old abandoned retirement home that had closed a couple of years after I moved in. I went there first and found a blood trail leading into the place. There wasn't a lot of blood, but just enough that it could have been the cat's blood. Case in point: It turns out the building was being used for a drug operation.
After seeing that, I almost pooped myself because I was only going into the whole P.I. thing as a joke. I anonymously tipped off the authorities, who raided the place. Apparently, one of the guys accidentally hurt the cat, who started to wail loudly, and he was scared people would come to investigate. He couldn't bring himself to end the cat’s life, so he dragged it inside and forgot to clean the blood away.
It was one of the most thrilling yet terrifying things that I had ever gotten myself into. But hey, at least the cat lived and my neighbor got her back!
70. Memory Delivery
I was taken by CPS when I was two, adopted by the same foster family that originally took me in when I was five. Came with one baby picture and maybe a toy. No contact allowed with bio family, as per court ruling. Cue 20 some odd years later, I'm working as a pizza delivery driver. Quit, come back a year later when another job doesn't work out.
I'm friendly with one of the drivers there, an older guy who's driving for something to do after retiring from the social work field. I notice on Facebook he's friends with my half-brother. Ask him about it (thinking maybe it was due to his old job or something). Turns out he used to be married to my bio aunt, sister of my bio mom.
He babysat me a bunch when I was a baby, and his ex-wife left a ton of junk in the divorce. Including my baby pictures. He let me have them. Mom just about cried when I showed them to her.
71. Big Pharma
I was promoted to VP of my company. The company was in trouble, and the CEO had asked me to figure out why and fix it. I arranged for a random drug test. All employees, the CEO, me, everyone. All on the same day, and everyone went down at the same time. Even said I would ignore weed, but anyone with anything stronger would be gone. We get the results back and I fired everyone who had tested positive for any drug other than weed. The CEO and myself were the only two people left working for the company.
Shutterstock
72. Saved By A Lace
While walking down a street in a Nicaragua, I noticed my shoelaces were getting loose. At which point, I had a 'gut feeling' that I should stop and retie them, to avoid untied shoelace related accidents and injuries. In the 10 seconds I took to tie my sneakers, a bus stop with five people at it, about 10 seconds walk from where I was standing, got laid flat by an out of control bus.
The people that had been waiting for the bus were now under it.
73. That’s Just Freaky
I'm paramedic/volunteer fireman. We covered a town in the middle of nowhere. Get a call from "Woodchuck City" as we call it, which is a trailer park with all of the chaos you'd associate with a bad scene. Call was FNRP (Found Non-Responsive, with/weak Pulse), so we rushed out there. These are usually overdoses or strokes, so time was important.
I get there and when I come in there were four or five adults, all wearing their church clothes (black pants, white shirt, women in blue or grey gowns) which threw me off because it was about two in the morning on a weekday (their Sabbath is Saturday, I think). I kneel down next to her and feel her wrist. Cold as ice. This is where things start to get weird.
My guess is they're wearing their clothes because they knew she was deceased, and the minister was on the way for last rites or something. Paramedic with me asks if we should defib, I shake my head and try to verify there aren't any vitals. Nothing. Their dog starts growling at me, and I'm thinking he doesn't like me touching her.
I ask them to get rid of the dog and he starts howling. Then the dog just stops. At the very moment the dog stops, a light blows out, and the "deceased" person sits up, says "Make sure [victim's sister] gets the heck out of her place" and slowly lays down. My partner and I are freaked out, as I was CERTAIN that woman was deceased, but nobody else is.
Partner starts going through, checking, to see if I screwed up. Nope, still gone, skin is getting a little change. We call in the coroner, who has to come out from the other part of the county, nearly 40 minutes away. Sheriff radios in and says they'll be a few minutes, as a tree has fallen on a cabin a few miles away.
Later find out they had called the sister and she hadn't taken two steps out of her place when a tree had fallen on her cabin, totally destroying the bedroom in which she slept. I don't know if it fell directly on the bed, but, at that point, I didn't want to know any more about anything that happened that night. It certainly wasn't normal what I saw.
74. Hard To Bring A Bad Ex Up In Conversation
Ex-girl. She had a fairly large scar on her back and was incredibly self-conscious about it. She wouldn't even take her shirt off the first time we hooked up. When I asked her about it, she said she had fallen from her horse when she was young. Fast forward a little and I'm out finding her a birthday present and have enlisted the help of her friend.
I pick out a sultry singlet and her friend just looks at me like I'm stupid. Apparently, the scar on her back, which the singlet clearly revealed, wasn't from a fall, but an abusive ex-boyfriend who had pushed her onto his motorbike’s exhaust pipe and burnt her.
We ended on good terms, and I never told her I knew. I hope she is doing well.
75. The Second Life
My grandfather was Polish. He fought in WWII in the Allied forces after escaping to occupied Italy. Later, he came to the UK and met my grandmother, with whom he had an unbelievably troubled relationship, and five kids. He passed when my dad was 14. My dad and his brothers found some old projector films in the attic. One of them changed everything.
It was a slideshow that appeared to depict my grandfather in a suit, next to a woman in a wedding dress, standing at an altar. The guy had been married already, in Poland. We don't know what happened to his first wife, but now we know why he was estranged from his Polish family.
76. Let It Go, Dude
My ex-husband went off the deep end when I left him three years ago, despite the fact that he was cheating on ME every step of the way. Anyway, I moved 1,000 miles away and began to restart my life. One day, about a month after leaving him, I checked my mail and saw that I had a huge, heavy envelope in the box. When I opened it, I was horrified.
It was photos of me doing allllll the activities of my daily life, but the photos were clearly taken from afar, and without my knowledge. Immediately, I contacted my attorney. It turns out, my ex was hoping to catch me with someone else, because he wanted to try to sue me for abandonment. It was awful, and it took me a long time to feel safe and secure in my new home.
77. Smile, You’re On Candid Camera
Someone kept trying to break into my brother’s place so he installed cameras. It turned out to be a neighbor who drank too much and got lost. The late-night visits stopped soon after. But then, a couple weeks later he came home and saw a bunch of officers outside of his apartment. Turns out someone had found the intoxicated guy's lifeless body.
My bro decided to check the footage one last time—and he was utterly horrified by what he found. It showed his other neighbor, who had also gotten harassed by this guy in the middle of the night, ending the life of the guy who kept knocking on my brother’s door. He turned it over to the authorities, and the neighbor got detained and ended up behind bars.
78. Consider It A Bonus
Baggage handler here. Back in 2000, I was sorting luggage when I found a weird bag. It was tied with rope, loosely closed and just didn't seem normal. Something felt wrong, but I grab it anyway. As the bag hit the cart, the rope came undone, spilling the contents. At first they stunned me—then they changed my entire life. Lo and behold, there is a ton of illicit substances in there.
So I picked up the few bricks and popped them back in the makeshift bag. As I was placing them in there I found a stash of hundred dollar bills. Not one or two, I'm talking wrapped in bands Breaking Bad money. So being the dumb teenager I was, I pocketed it and had my own bag filled with nearly $25K. The next day I bought a used car, paid my school off, and invested in an IRA for retirement.
Thanks, stupid dealers!
79. Raised As Their Own
I was looking for some old clothes in the storage part of our house when I found a file folder full of old papers. I casually look them over and discover that I'm adopted. My parents got me when I was just a baby and never told me that biologically, I'm not theirs. Coincidentally, a couple months later my biological sister got into contact with me.
Getty Images
80. Famous Last Words
When my father passed after a long and painful battle with cancer, a pastor at my mom's church spoke at the funeral. The entire time that she was talking, I wanted to walk up there and punch her in the face. She had the audacity to stand in front of us and speak about how devastating cancer is. If she realized that I knew the chilling secret of her past life, she would never have had the guts to show her face.
That pastor used to attend a different church, but had to leave after she was caught for having faked cancer for two years. Her husband left her and her daughter disowned her after they found out. My mom was the secretary at that church. So she knew, and had already told me. My dad’s funeral was only like two years after that whole thing went down. I would have walked up to the podium and punched her right in the face were it not disrespectful to my parents.
81. Psycho Granny, Qu'Est-Ce-Que C'est?
When I was about 31 years old, I found out my maternal grandmother, who practically raised me, offed my grandfather. I was doing research trying to build out a family tree and wanted to find out about my grandfather who passed about four years before I was born. We never really talked about him. I found an article about his passing in 1978 and had found a corresponding report number for an arrest of my grandmother in the same year.
I didn’t immediately put the two together, but once I did, I put in a FOIA request for the case file. Apparently, my grandfather was in ill health, had a few strokes and needed A LOT of assistance; assistance my grandmother grew tired of. One day, he was sitting in his chair and she just snapped and came at him, ultimately taking his life.
She was apprehended, tried, and eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent some time in an institution, only to be let out in 1981, the year before I was born, to move in with my family. As she lived in our home, she basically raised me from a child. She was the sweetest lady in the world and this SHOOK me.
When I asked my dad if it was true and how he could let her alone in our home with me as a child, his response was, “Oh, you didn’t know that? Well, you turned out alright”.
82. Caught Red-Handed
My boyfriend let me use his iPad so I could watch a Netflix movie. He had his messenger account linked to it, and messages kept popping up on it while I was watching. That’s when I made a disturbing discovery. I watched in real time as he got his best friend's wife to agree to sleep with him over the coming holiday weekend, with the promise that he'd get rid of me for that weekend so they could get intimate in our bed.
GettyImages
83. I’m Sorry, What?
I'm a former paramedic. One day, my team responded to a report of a man down on the side of the railroad tracks near an old embankment. When we arrive, we saw that the man had no signs of life. When we tried to revive him, he flat lined on the EKG, with fixed and dilated pupils. He had no visible signs of trauma and the body wasn't cold yet so he hasn't been gone too long. We search the area and find a makeshift tent/campsite where the guy apparently was living and find no medications or anything out the ordinary.
We are not too far from an area that everyone believes is haunted and is a site for satanic worship. Even though all of us on the scene knew about the rumors none of us had actually seen it or had proof. It's dark and we were all waiting around for the funeral home to show up and bring the body to the morgue for an autopsy. Then the freaky stuff started.
A few of us heard what sounded like people whispering but it wasn't from any specific direction. Then the whispering stopped and the people on scene that hadn't heard the whispering started hearing what they all described as children laughing wickedly, but it was all over, not from any specific direction. Those of us that had heard the whispering never heard the new noise. This went on for about 10-15 minutes while we're standing next to the body. Officers on the scene told their dispatcher to tell the funeral home to step it up and get out there ASAP.
The next afternoon, we went to the morgue to speak with the coroner and find out the cause. The coroner's first question was utterly disturbing. He calmly asked us was why did we clean the body? Me and my partner looked at him kinda strange and asked what he was talking about. He said it must have been a very bloody scene, so we told him there was no blood anywhere around the scene.
He turned pale and said that just added to the confusion, because the body had absolutely no blood in it whatsoever. And there were no marks anywhere on him where blood could have been drained out. He also said he had a weird experience while doing the autopsy but refused to tell us what happened. To this day we have still never learned the actual cause, or been able to explain the whispering and evil laughing.
84. My Hero
My great-grandpa was awful to his wife, but this was in the 1910s and she couldn't leave him—so she planned an ingenious trap. First, she moved out and lived with another man. Then she flaunted the new guy around town until her no-good husband got embarrassed enough to sue her for divorce for infidelity, one of the only ways to divorce someone at the time. Although she couldn't read or write, she signed those papers the minute he served her.
85. A Post-Mortem Addition to the Family
I'm a lawyer who works in last wills and testaments. I was working with a nice old lady, when she drops the mic. She confessed that she had a secret daughter, and she wanted to leave the daughter some money and photographs without the rest of her family finding out. Even her husband does not know about the secret baby. That will be a fun conversation when she passes away.
86. The Mistress
I received a phone call from my late husband’s girlfriend the day of his funeral. She was phoning his cell phone which I had turned off while he was in the hospital. She told me that my husband had been paying her rent for the last year. The bank had recently foreclosed on our house. I had no idea he was unfaithful to me, but she knew all about me.
87. This Town Ain’t Big Enough, Period
I graduated law and got engaged to the girl I had been with through university. We both applied for the same graduate program and ended up working in the same office in Canberra. Three months before our wedding, I found out she was cheating on me with our mutual boss, and I broke it off with her. It really broke my heart, and took a long time to get over.
Long story short, it got really, really ugly, and the two of us ended up in a very bitter court case over the property we had. Canberra is a pretty small city and the law world is pretty bloody small there, too, and everywhere I went I bumped into my ex. It was beginning to seriously get me down, and her too. I had to do something about it.
I applied for an Australian government overseas development job in Tuvalu, a Pacific island with about an 11,000 population. It's quite a prestigious job to get, with only two positions offered for a two-year contract on a rotating basis. I was successful in the application and moved on-island to start my posting. And then it all went to heck.
I got there, only to discover that my ex was the other successful applicant. I spent the next two years sharing a tiny office on a tiny island with the person that I quite honestly loathe more than any other person in the world.
88. Hunting For Candy
I'm an estate lawyer. I had a client who was a son who did not really talk to his father. Still, he wanted to make sure the father’s estate was wrapped up properly. They did not know if a will existed but knew that his dad had a safety deposit box. So, we get a court order to open the box, and sure enough, a will was there. However, the will left a lion’s share of his estate...to a woman no one knew.
In with the will were also pictures of a woman and a stage name; something like “cinnamon” or “candy,” written on the back. Soon, the bizarre truth became obvious. The father had left part of his estate to a dancer whom he enjoyed visiting in his older age. She had no idea and they had to track her down, which was a nightmare. They finally found her and she came to the office for a check accompanied by a “male friend".
89. Seen It All
My significant other locked his keys in his car a while ago. Well, only the hidden key that lives inside the fob. But you see, the "unlock" key on the fob is broken, so the key is required to enter the car and the fob fits into the ignition. He had no other choice than to open the trunk with the fob, punch out the small trunk access door that's behind the backseat armrest, find the lever to lower the rear seats by shoving his body through the tiny door, crawl through the car, and retrieve his key in the front seat.
I also forgot to mention that the alarm was blaring this whole time. He finally gets through to the front seat, starts the car, and kills the alarm. Exhausted, with bloody knuckles and scrapes all over, he gets out of the car and shuts the door behind him. Then his heart drops. He's left the keys on the seat. Again. And the door's just locked behind him. Little did he know, it was about to get so much worse.
He turns and gives a swift punt to his tire out of frustration, immediately snapping his third metatarsal, breaking his foot. He then had to repeat this scenario to get his keys out, but this time with a broken foot. He just got his boot off last week.
90. A Spy In The Family
I never liked my grandmother. She was really mean and said all sorts of hurtful things about my parents. At one point, I started to dislike her so much that I stopped hanging out with her entirely. I refused to talk to her on the phone and left all of her texts unanswered. What she did had me that mad at her. After 10 years, she left the state and went to live in the UK with her daughter.
One day, my aunt called up my father and said that she wanted her mother to live there with her permanently. She asked my dad if he could pack up her things in the house and send them over. He said yes. Meanwhile, I'd just graduated and came back home for a break, so I tagged along. The house was on the outskirts of the city, so it was a long drive.
When we arrived, my dad and I headed straight for the basement. In all the years he lived there, my dad was not allowed to enter the basement, so had wanted to see what was there. I helped him break the lock as we couldn't find the key to the door. I should have known then we should have turned back. What we saw when we entered made our jaws drop.
There were large greenish, metal trunks everywhere. The room was surprisingly neat and there was some dust that had settled on them. My dad opened a couple of trunks and found old, brittle books. At some point, I noticed an odd-looking brown trunk and jumped across to it to see what was inside. It contained old photos of my grandmother and my grandfather, both in some sort of a uniform.
They looked like defense uniforms, but not Indian. I fished out more pictures that showed more people wearing the same uniform and standing in some hilly region. Behind every one of the photographs, there were numbers written down, which I assumed were to indicate the year they were taken. I asked my dad about these pictures and he, from the other end of the basement, said that my grandfather was in the Indian army.
I told him that the uniforms looked different, but he said that the uniforms had undergone many changes over the years and I just didn't recognize some of the earlier iterations. I brought over the photos to him and pointed to a symbol on the lower right-hand corner of the photographs. When he saw it, his face went white. He asked me which trunk these photographs were in and I pointed to the brown trunk where I’d found them.
He made his way over and fished out the other pictures, studying each of them carefully. He then opened other nearby trunks. From one of them, he pulled out a small box that contained large envelopes sealed with wax. He tore them open and was immediately shocked by their contents. It was the birth certificates of my father and his three siblings.
The date on my father's "Indian" birth certificate did not match the one listed on the document he had one file, but that wasn't what bothered us the most. The name that was written on the birth certificate was not my grandfather's. It turned out that none of them shared the same father except for the oldest sibling. Oh, the plot thickened even more.
The locations of their births were also not the same—they were all born in different parts of the world and not in India as they had always thought. My father's document said he was born in Russia and I asked him if he remembered anything. He said he didn't. That night, we didn't go home...we opened all the trunks, uncovering different secrets from each one.
My father and I took the photos and visited his friend who worked as an archivist for the government. I will never forget the look on the man's face when he told my father that those uniforms were old Soviet uniforms. But that wasn't even the worst part. In actuality, the uniform my grandmother was wearing was not Russian at all, it was Chinese.
My dad went back to the house to open the other trunks but didn't find anything on his mother's time in the army. He wanted to ask her directly, but I didn't let him because he seemed too agitated to talk calmly. I went back up to the master bedroom and was startled by my phone. It was my aunt—she asked me if everything was okay, as she'd not heard anything from us since she last called.
I told her everything was fine and that we just had some difficult clients to deal with at the office. At that point, I opened my grandma's cupboard and saw the locker. I asked my aunt if there was anything in the locker that had to be sent over to them, but she wasn't sure. I asked dad if we should open the locker and he said that he'd do it.
That evening, we broke it open and found even more mind-boggling documents. A lot of the files were about my grandfather's enlistments and tours. There were also some documents on certain high-ranking army officers, including my grandma. We now think that she was one of the many spies sent out by the KGB to India. Seriously, my head was spinning at this point.
There was a code under her name, too: T.W.o.B. Unfortunately, we could not go through all of the files as my father sent everything to be examined by the archivist. We are still waiting for the news, but we did get an answer to one mystery that had been bothering us for weeks—my grandmother was never a teacher and her name isn't real. She is not even Indian by blood.
My grandmother has since been made aware of all of this. She recently had a massive heart attack and has still not gained consciousness.
91. The Legend of the Legless Man
I work at a correctional facility, and a lady flew all the way from Nigeria to visit her brother, who was supposed to be incarcerated at my unit. She speaks a little English, but we tried to explain to her that the inmate was not in the system anymore. He must have been released. We call a supervisor, and it turns out he was released over five months before.
She walks away confused and comes back in with her husband, who speaks English much better. We tell him the scenario and he asks, “Well, where did he go? He doesn’t have any friends or family in the US". We told him we don’t know where he went, he was released and could be anywhere. The guy, obviously confused, says, “Well... he couldn’t have gone anywhere... because he doesn’t have any legs".
So a legless Nigerian ex-felon with no ties is scooting around the US and no one knows where he is.
92. I Rest My Case
I'm a lawyer, and I had a case where a man refused to pay rent because his apartment smelled terrible and it was making him sick. So, his landlord tried to evict him. A few days after I took on the case and just before his first hearing, the ceiling in the tenant's bathroom just totally collapsed on him when he came home one day. It revealed a disgusting truth.
Turns out, some plumbing wasn't connected and his ceiling had been filling with poop for months. The landlord settled pretty quickly after that.
93. Say Uncle
Great Uncle H wasn’t a particularly interesting or handsome man, yet he thought very highly of himself, as did his family. He never got into a serious relationship until he met his wife who was very wealthy. She had inherited some old German money and farmland from a previous marriage. Not being able to handle her loneliness, she married Great Uncle H.
That's when things started going downhill for her. When they married, my uncle began to execute his plan. He slowly began to take a great sum of money from her accounts, which he was given access to following the marriage. He robbed the woman blind, left her in serious debt, and then fled the country to Canada, where he met a new woman and created a new life for himself there until the day his first wife passed on.
Uncle H then returned to the US and was welcomed by my grandparents and their children as if nothing ever happened. He now lives with them full-time and I don’t know that he’s ever worked a day in his life.
94. Haiti Datey
My sister's boyfriend decided that he wanted to do more with his architecture skills, so he gave his two-weeks’ notice and moved to Haiti to help rebuild after the earthquake. They stayed together. He had bad phone service, so they mostly kept in touch through emails. He would send her long emails with photos and stories of what they were doing.
This went on for a couple of months. But then, his web of lies unraveled. One off-handed tip from a co-worker and a week of sleuthing later, and it turns out he never went to Haiti. He moved to Seattle to be with his fiancé and partner of nine years. She was totally shell-shocked about the news, but I mean, so were we all.
95. A Textbook Case
We are living in Florida at the time and my Dad goes to the eye doctor because he is seeing double. In all other respects, he’s healthy. He explains his symptoms to the doctor. This was the early 2000s. The doctor picks up a medical book on eye problems. He finds the kind of symptoms my Dad is describing. The doctor shows him the book.
In the book, there is a whole medical page explaining what he is experiencing, and a picture of a kid from the 1960s. My dad sees the photo, and a shock runs through him. He looks at the picture and says, “Doc, that’s me"! The doctor says, “Yes, those are the symptoms you are showing". My Dad says, “No, really, that’s me in the picture"!
It turns out my Dad had this eye problem when he was a kid and it was so rare that they took his picture in 1960s Ohio and slapped him in a book of rare eye problems. He doesn’t remember much about taking the picture but he did manage to get a copy of it to take home. And hey, he figured out his eye problem in the meantime.
96. No Compensation
I’m a worker’s compensation attorney. I now represent injured people, but used to work on the other side. This is the case that made me switch. There was an applicant who fell off a ladder, busted his back, got his shoulder messed up, and needed years of treatment. He had physical and psychological issues. The poor guy was really messed up, so he went to court to get permanent disability payments from my client. We were five years into the lawsuit and finally getting to settlement time.
If we bought out his future medical, the settlement would be pretty far into six figures, which is a lot, but keep in mind that this guy was the sole provider for wife and two young kids. Then we made a jaw-dropping discovery. We found out that the man had aggressive brain cancer. He would only live for a couple more years, at best.
Thus, my client wouldn’t have to pay him for very long. In the end, the man did get disability pay for $60k-ish per year. But because he'd only get that one check, what should have been millions was much, much less. I felt terrible for the guy and his family. I tried to get my client, the insurance company, to agree to a more humane amount given the circumstances, but the bean counters said heck no.
The attorney knew it wasn’t me making the decision. Even though he worked on that guy’s file for 5+ years he decided to take $0 in fees. I have so much respect for that attorney turning down $10k+ in fees to help his client in a very sad situation.
97. A “Shameful” Family Secret
My great-grandmother hated me. I was an "illegitimate" child, and my parents split when I was three. When my dad got his girlfriend pregnant, my great-grandmother said that she would cut him out of her life if "He didn't marry this one". My father married my stepmother, who was a single mother, and my great-grandmother was fantastic to my step-brother and my sister, but not me.
She flat-out refused to have anything to do with me. I spent Christmas with the family, but I came home crying to my mum, asking why Grandma wouldn't talk to me. For the entire four days I was there, she ignored me, while cuddling my brother and sister as much as she could, because they lived in another country by then.
I didn't find out any of this until after she passed. I wasn't included in her will—the only grandchild not included out of about 7 grandchildren, and many more great-grandchildren. My dad took some of his inheritance and passed it on to me, along with a few heirlooms, keeping up the pretense that she didn't hate me up into my 30s.
I was so hated by her that I'm only just starting to meet family members, who had no idea I existed. My dad, siblings, and nana were forbidden to speak about me to other family members, so the few who met me when I was a baby had forgotten I existed. I’m 36 now… It’s a long time to be keeping me a secret from the rest of the family.
My sister only told me all of this a few years ago, though she'd known my great-grandmother hated me from when we were kids because she would speak very hatefully about me behind my back. My nana's partner confirmed it a couple months ago, with my mum finally telling me about it the last Christmas I ever saw her.
98. Sudden Loss
I had my first ever sleepover with my best friend in the first grade. Things at night were awesome. However, when I woke up the next morning, everyone at his house was super distant, and they called my mom to come and pick me up ASAP. I didn’t know what was going on. As it turned out, unfortunately, his father had an aneurysm that night and didn’t survive.
Shutterstock
99. The Old Switcharoo
My wife and I absolutely adore our son. It’s been amazing to watch him grow up—but neither of them know the painful secret that I’ve had to keep from them ever since the day my wife went into labor. She nearly perished while giving birth, and the labor was so difficult that she fell into a coma afterward for days. When she woke up cradling our son in her arms, she had no idea about the sin I’d committed.
Our baby never made it through the birthing process, and I secretly bought our son from a human trafficker. This is quite easy to do in my country, considering that there are a lot of very poor parents willing to give their children away. My wife has no idea and I have no intentional of telling her or our son the truth.
100. Mood Swings
My wife is pregnant with our daughter. Initially, we were really happy and excited about it. But then, it all goes wrong. She starts acting like a nut job. She gets angry and irritated at small things, insults me when she doesn't like the food I make, starts acting insecure, and accuses me of losing my attraction for her. For example, she wanted to eat chicken sandwiches for dinner last week.
Well, I made chicken sandwiches. So she eats all the sandwiches, leaves me nothing, and told me that they tasted like garbage. If she didn't like them, why did she have to eat everything? When I asked her this, she told me that she was hungry. Ok fine. She does this every time. Eats everything I make and calls it garbage. I don't argue with her because I work for more than 80 hours a week and I really want to have some peace when I'm home.
So, yesterday, a random girl starts flirting with me after the gym and asked me if I wanted to meet up with her for some drinks. I rejected her and told her that I was married. And when I got home, my wife started to hug me and apologize. That’s when I learned the dark truth. When I asked her what happened, she told me that her best friend suggested a test for my loyalty.
So they asked a mutual friend to flirt with me and ask me out. And I passed. Yay?!!? I'm really angry. I'm done with her antics.
101. Missed Encounters
At a wedding of a college friend of my husband’s, we learned that the bride (his old friend) had been in love with him for over a decade. We learned this from the women at our table at the reception. We introduced ourselves while we waited for the bride and groom to arrive. They were horrified that we were there—and extremely worried.
My husband had NO idea that she had feelings for him. She bee-lined right for our table after the "introducing Mr & Mrs" thing—ignoring her family and leaving her husband standing alone. She clung to my husband and sobbed—lifting her head to glare at me. She had to be pulled off of him.
She repaired herself, then followed us as we tried to leave quietly—her parting shot was to stare at my chest and say, "Well I guess I know what I was missing all along"! Her new husband was in shock and my husband was horrified and embarrassed—he was completely clueless and would never have gone to the wedding if he'd know she was obsessed with him. It was bizarre.
