Maintaining a secret can be extremely difficult at times.
While it may feel liberating to reveal a secret that you have kept hidden for a long time, doing so could have serious consequences for your loved ones, acquaintances, and future prospects. These individuals discovered this firsthand after deciding to reveal the secrets they had carefully kept hidden for years.
My wife's grandmother, who raised her, believed that when you are close to passing on, your deceased relatives appear to guide you to heaven. I don’t know where she got that from, but it was what she believed.
She was reportedly a horrible person. As the old woman lay on her deathbed, her final words were spoken in a quiet, terrified voice: "They're not coming."
At a previous job at a restaurant, there was a server who was involved in an affair with the general manager. This server was difficult to work with and had an awful attitude. She was also paid more than other servers despite not meeting the minimum wage requirement for servers.
Her paycheck listed her as a cook, and she received an additional $2 per hour and tips. She was also frequently given the best section of the restaurant to work in. It was widely known that she was able to receive these perks because she was engaging in a sexual relationship with the boss during work hours.
My great-grandmother had a strong dislike for me. I was born out of wedlock, and my parents separated when I was young. When my father's girlfriend became pregnant, my great-grandmother threatened to disown him unless he married her.
My father ended up marrying my stepmother, who was a single mother at the time. My great-grandmother was very kind to my half-brother and sister, but not to me. I only learned about my great-grandmother's feelings towards me a few months ago, when I turned 36 and my mother finally revealed the truth to me during our last Christmas together.
On the day of a mid-term economics exam, the professor had to give instructions to 300 students in a large lecture hall using a microphone. After finishing, the professor left the lecture hall to go to his office next door. However, he forgot to turn off the microphone, and the entire class was able to listen in on the conversation and subsequent events that took place in his office. We heard a brief exchange between the professor and a female teaching assistant from our class, and then the conversation stopped. It became clear to everyone that the professor and TA were engaging in a sexual encounter.
The TA's quiet moans were amplified through the speakers in the lecture hall, and the entire class remained silent. Suddenly, the professor swore loudly and turned off the microphone. Later, as if nothing had happened, the professor returned to the lecture hall. He was fired a week later.
During high school, I didn't have many friends, and my mother has always wondered why. The real truth was a secret that I never wanted her to know about. My family struggled with financial issues when I was growing up, and I didn't want anyone from school to see how we lived.
Because of this, I always refused invitations to do things with other kids or have get-togethers at my house. To make matters worse, I decided during my senior year that I didn't want to burden my mother by asking her for money when I needed to buy things. So, I started working as much as I could outside of school, which left me even less time to make friends. I never wanted my mother to find out about this and feel guilty or blame herself for my lack of social life as a child.
I was on a flight from London to Las Vegas, sitting next to my girlfriend. She wanted to show me something she had planned for the trip and pulled out her phone.
When she opened the Messages app, it showed a chat with a guy (who I know) saying how much she will miss him and that she doesn't want to go on the trip with me. The doors of the plane were already closed, and this was going to be a very unpleasant 10-11 hours…
In the early 90s, my brother had lost his life in a car crash. I had always idolized him, and my family held him in high regard. He was planning to become a lawyer, and his loss was seen as a terrible tragedy. When I was 16, I found a box hidden in a compartment in his closet.
Inside the box, I discovered journals, sketches, and a detailed plan to kidnap and harm a girl from his school. It is unclear whether my brother would have carried out this plan or if it was just a fantasy, but the discovery was deeply disturbing and affected me for several years.
When I was 11 years old, my extended family and I went to a mutual friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner. The house was very large, and the children played in the basement while the adults prepared the meal upstairs. Later in the evening, it was noticed that my uncle and the hostess, who was a family friend, had disappeared into the master bedroom. My aunt and the hostess's husband were both downstairs at the time. Everyone, one by one, went to knock on the door to see what was going on, but they refused to come out. Strange noises were heard from behind the door, and my aunt was crying and the hostess's husband was extremely angry.
My uncle and the hostess remained in the bedroom for almost two hours before finally emerging. The hostess was wearing different clothes, and everyone else was upset. Recently, I asked my mom what had happened that night, and she told me that some of the adults had been drinking and getting intoxicated upstairs while we children were playing karaoke downstairs. My uncle and the hostess had locked themselves in the bedroom to do drugs and became too paranoid to come out, according to them. It is still uncertain what happened in the bedroom, but all of the couples involved are still happily married.
When I was 20 years old, my brother revealed to me that I was adopted. Everyone in the family – I am the youngest of five – knew about my adoption and kept it a secret. It turns out that my mom and birth mom are distant cousins. My birth father was a member of a biker gang and had addiction problems, and neither he nor my mom were able to care for a baby. After finding out about my adoption, I saw some pictures of my birth father and was surprised to recognize him.
He was a regular at the restaurant where I worked the year before I found out about my adoption. He was always very kind to me and mentioned that he knew some of my distant family, but didn't say more than that. It turns out that he wasn't there for the food – he just wanted to see his daughter and make sure I was doing well.
My grandad was a farmer his whole life. Every animal loved him—and I do seriously mean every animal. Every time we would go to a new place, dogs would be mysteriously coming straight to him, or horses would cuddle up with him. He just had a charm with them—or so we thought. This illusion was about to be shattered for us.
One day, while cleaning out his closet and digging in his pockets to make sure nothing of value was thrown in the wash, we found grains, bits of dried meats, dog treats, bits of old carrot. Turned out he didn’t have a natural charm with animals at all! The man had simply been secretly bribing animals with food all this time.
I used to work for Wells Fargo bank. It was all-around shady. We had to straight-up lie to people to get them over to a banker to open up checking accounts by telling them our policies were changing, and they had to do this. We had to make sure they had every single product we offered, whether it actually benefited them or not.
We weren’t supposed to give up until the customer had them all. This is the most chilling example: One time a blind lady came up to my window with THREE separate checking accounts under her name, and she didn’t even know why she had them. A banker had opened them all up for her to meet their quota. Once I quit, I moved all of my accounts elsewhere.
My parents saw me as an investment and kept a secret journal of how much they spent on me my entire life. This included what I got for Christmas, birthday gifts, movie tickets, even when they gave me quarters for the arcade. Even after I got married, they would track anything they gave us: gifts for the kids, things they bought for our house renovations, etc. Eventually, I found my Mom’s diaries and a handwritten ledger with my name on it, detailing everything when we cleaned out her house. She also really didn’t like my wife—she repeatedly wrote that I married someone that she felt was from a lower class. She had multiple notebooks detailing what to do when she passed that we found throughout the house. What I found left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. The notebooks stated that my wife, her family, and her friends were not to enter the house after her passing, nor would they have any of her possessions.
Jokes on her, though. It took us six months to clean out their three properties, and guess who showed up to help? My wife and her family helped me to clean out the three properties, which was completely packed with stuff. They helped me to sell anything that we didn’t want. My family—the ones from my parent’s side—never showed up until the day of the final property auction. It completely changed my entire view of my parents and their love for me.
I worked as a receptionist for a chiropractor. One day, our first appointment came in, so I went in the back to look for him. I walked in on him doing the deed with a co-worker on the table. It was the same table the patients sometimes would lay on face down on.
I went back to the front and said, “He’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.” I was disgusted. He was married with two young kids. I didn’t work there long after that.
I used to work at Victorias Secret—and oh my god, did they have a secret. We were required to refund and take back any used underwear as well as anything else that came back in the store. It would then immediately go back onto the sales racks, even if it had obviously been worn.
I showed my manager a used pair of panties that had a disgusting smell, and she advised me to “just spray perfume on it.”I would often grab a pair of scissors from the back and accidentally cut the ones that I knew had been worn so they had to “damage” them out and not be sold.
About eight years ago I discovered my wife’s sister’s reddit account accidentally. It was a variation of a username she’d used for AIM before, but with different numbers and no underscore (the numbers were a significant date to her though). There were too many coincidences in her posts for it not to be her. She was posting on the relationship advice subreddit. When I saw her posts, it broke my heart. Her (now ex-) husband was abusive. We’d known something was off about him but couldn’t really put our finger on it.
I created another account that I only accessed from incognito mode to send her encouragement to leave, and to ask her family or friends (but kinda steered her towards us) for help. She didn’t want to impose or be a burden on any of them (we’d just had a kid, and I make a bunch of money but we live well within our means so you wouldn’t think this based on appearances, so it was an understandable concern). I slowly, over several weeks and several different posts she made, convinced her that it’s possible her family realizes something isn’t quite right and would not consider it a burden to help her out. After their divorce, I deleted that account. Nobody will ever know that the random internet stranger who was weirdly persistent in encouraging my sister-in-law to reach out to her family for help and leave her abusive marriage was actually me.
I worked at a Joyce Leslie clothing store. Once a year, I was given the most jaw-dropping task. I had to take a rack of out-of-season and unsold clothes and destroy every garment with scissors. I was supposed to cut the clothes so they couldn’t be worn. When I asked why they couldn’t just donate them, I was given some nonsensical corporate answer. The stock boy and I decided to donate them anyway.
I spent an hour pretending to cut them. He bagged them and threw them behind the trash bins. I scooped them up on my way home and dropped them at a local women’s shelter.
I used to work at David’s Bridal. The company wouldn’t donate discontinued or lightly damaged gowns to charities. They would instead make workers shred the dresses to bits and throw them away. They would also purposely play “Butterfly Kisses” when they thought you were close to buying a dress and make you imagine being walked down the aisle.
If they could make you cry, you were more likely to buy the gown. The veil stories were mostly baloney to get add-on sales, and the undergarments were ridiculously overpriced. Lastly, the interest on the credit card was nearly 24%. They would say you could make payments before the no-interest period was over, but they wouldn’t send a bill before then, and good luck finding the address of the company to send your payment to.
In my freshman year of high school, I ditched class so much that I flunked the year. I moved to a different town over the summer and somehow they lost my “permanent record” in the mail.
It was the early 90s, so they had computers, but they weren’t integrated between school districts, so it was just a fat folder of paperwork. When the new school realized this, they called me in and asked what classes and grades I had, so I straight up lied my way out of having to retake freshman year.
I worked at a Red Lobster, and every night, the leftover food would be stored in the walk-in freezer. About once a week, a couple of women would come in to pick it up for the local food bank to help feed needy families or the homeless. All I would EVER hear them say was, “OOOH yeah, we havin’ lobster for dinner tonight.” Then the other would reply, “Well, I have lobster almost every night.
I wish they would start giving us something else.” You could just see their mouths watering over the free, fairly expensive food they were getting. I knew for a fact that, unfortunately, none of the food we gave ever made it to the food bank with those two in charge of pickups.
I used to work at a mall kiosk selling straighteners, curlers, hair extensions, and other hair products. I was basically one of those annoying sales ladies who had to approach people walking by and try to get them to sit down and try the products. However, we weren’t actually allowed to approach people. I was once threatened with a $250 fine by the mall manager. I was caught off guard and completely unaware of that rule. My manager just told me to be more careful. I was also told by my manager to tell customers that all of our products were from Italy. That was a total lie. Whenever we restocked the shelves with a new shipment, it was my job to take all the “Made in China” stickers off the boxes. We were also told to tell customers that they could exchange the products at any time, but when they came back with any returns, we would nail them with a $30 exchange fee for no real reason. We would sell VIP passes that would allow the customer to come in and get their hair done for free at the kiosk.
When customers would come for their VIP treatment, most of my coworkers and the manager would make up some reason as to why they couldn’t do their hair at that time. Not only that, but everything had a maximum and a minimum price. For example, we tried to push our straighteners for $200. The minimum price we could sell them for was $100, which gave us all sorts of negotiating room to make up sales tactics that “end today” in order to throw on “free” products if the customer was dumb enough to buy the straightener for $200. So, throwing in a “free” straightener was really just selling them both for $100. On Amazon, you can get these straighteners and curlers for $30. The hair serum I had to sell for $75 was only $10 online. They weren’t bad products, just overpriced. Once I had done the research and found out you could buy the products way cheaper online, I put in my two weeks' notice and quit.
When I ended up in a spelling bee, I quickly realized the girl I was against had put a lot of time and effort into it, whereas I basically just showed up. Plus, she was more on the nerdy side, not a lot going outside of school, and I felt she needed a victory. So I came up with a plan. She missed a word, so I purposefully missed mine to keep her in the competition. This happened a few times.
Later, I missed one on purpose to give her the victory. She went on to the state competition. The teacher giving the words threw me a look of disgust, as she knew what I did, but no one else ever found out.
A co-worker retired and I inherited one of his reports, which is one of my employer’s Key Performance Metrics. Every two weeks, it would take him an entire eight-hour day to complete. The first week I was able to automate most of it down to one hour.
Over the next nearly 10 years, I’ve improved it to the point that it runs in less than a minute. I then spend the next eight hours surfing Reddit, watching movies, and just doing whatever I want in my office from home. All this time, I’ve told my boss it takes me eight hours to perform, and sometimes I’ll tack on extra hours because of “technical issues.” No questions asked as long as it’s in his inbox by the end of the day Friday.
There was an accident that killed a guy I knew. His parents were left in absolute devastation over the loss of their healthy son, and it nearly ruined them. The mother went on a brutal downward spiral of drinking and substances, and of course, their other son, who has cerebral palsy and an addiction to pain medication, also went off the rails. A young girl got knocked up by the guy before he died and she had gone to live across the province with her dad while she had the baby. Ultimately, she gave it up for adoption.
Only a small handful of people know, and of course, his parents are not among them. Somewhere out there, his parents have a grandchild they know nothing about, and a kid is out there with the biggest, most loving family you’ve ever met. I wonder if he looks like him. The kid would be 18 now and part of me wants to try and find him, but I’d have to give up her secret to do that. It breaks my heart and I’m torn about keeping that knowledge to myself.
My cousin was my best friend. She was a year older than me. We loved anime, and we would stay up to binge-watch Inuyasha or other girly shows. She and her brother even lived with us for a couple of years after CPS took them from their mom. She said we would always be friends and that our kids would grow up with each other as we did. But I just found out it was all a lie. It turned out that she used to touch my little sister inappropriately when they were alone.
I found that out last year. My sister begged me not to confront her. What did she have to say about it? “I’m sorry I did that to you, but I can’t remember most of it.” All those red flags—my little sister trying to switch rooms, the huge personality change she showed after my cousin moved in—all that time, I thought she was jealous. Now, that cousin is pregnant, and she lies to everyone saying that my family used to take advantage of her and that she had to run away to a better life. The audacity…
I was a former Disneyland employee. It was a standard policy that no one dies in the park. Someone could be decapitated, but the ambulance would have to announce the death after leaving the park grounds.
Also, the Rivers of America ride was kept dirty to hide the tracks for the large boats. So much so that if 60% of a guest’s body is in with the water, Disney has to send you off to get a tetanus shot.
I’ve seen both of my sisters-in-law without their clothes on. The first time, I accidentally walked in on my brother’s wife whilst she was changing. I didn’t realize she was in the room and just walked in. She knows it was me but, we’ve both just pretended that didn’t happen.
The other time, my wife’s sister asked me to fix her laptop as it wasn’t working. It turns out it hadn’t had a system update for nearly four years and the computer was filled with all kinds of bloatware and malware. Unfortunately, she kept her pretty explicit photos in a prime position in her downloads folder, which I needed to access to install the updates. I returned her laptop in working condition with a new folder named “Private.”
When I was 10, I was very lonely. My parents had been working day and night to get their start-up business off the ground. It was the classic latch key child scenario. As they say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. So after several months of spending my afternoons alone with microwave burritos and Transformers cartoons, I decided to diversify my entertainment selection. But I went way too far. I proceeded to ransack the entire house, making it appear that a person had broken in and rummaged for money. I broke a window, two lamps, smashed the legs off a chair and pulled every file from the cabinets in the office, and tossed them around the room like confetti. I then called my mother and told her I’d just gotten home and found the place burglarized. She told me to get out of the house and called the authorities on her way home. They arrived with their sirens blaring at about the same time she rolled up. They stormed the house, screaming come out with your hands up!
When I saw them bashing through my front door, I knew that I had probably gone a little too far this time. Long story short, a detective came to take a report after the patrol had cleared the premises. As I was sitting on my living room sofa, surrounded by the tattered remains of my dirty work, the detective looked me in the eyes and said, “There was no break-in, was there?” I was terrified. The man looked right into my soul and knew the truth. And I knew he knew so lying was pointless. I burst into tears and started blubbering. He walked over, put his hand on my shoulder and said it’ll be alright. Thankfully, I was young enough to escape any charges. My parents weren’t too harsh with their punishment either. I guess they figured it was more a cry for help than the actions of a burgeoning sociopath.
My girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancé, has no idea of my extreme mental health struggle in the past, how I used to be medicated and even checked myself into a hospital when I was extremely suicidal from said medications. I’ve since been fine and haven’t had an issue of anxiety or depression in years BUT it still hurts me knowing my brain could be so dark. When she talks about depression or anxiety she just doesn’t understand because she’s never had to deal with it.
So, I’ve kept it to myself to not put my old burden on her. Maybe one day I’ll bring it up.
I used to be a customer service employee for 13 years. The surveys we would send out after we closed a ticket determined whether or not customer service representatives would keep their job. If they get enough bad surveys, they go to the bottom of the stack, and they’re the first ones to be fired or laid off. Unfortunately, when people fill out these surveys, most of the time, they are grading the experience they had with the product, not the customer service. They don’t realize it is the customer service person who is affected by the survey, not the company itself. The company doesn’t do anything with those surveys other than grade the personnel.
You might think they would take the feedback and use them to make their product or service better or to improve their management processes so that you have a better overall customer service experience, but they do not. It’s all a numbers game. Since a majority of the surveys are going to come back with negative responses, usually because the customers are angry that their product was broken, the managers hold on to them. When it comes time to reduce staff, they use these surveys to justify laying off or firing people. As a result, when someone applies for unemployment, the company can deny the application, stating that they were a bad employee because they got lots of bad reviews.