1 month ago
22
1. "When I was about 11, I found my mom's diaries and read them. I found one from when she was pregnant with me and was seriously contemplating adoption. Then one from several years later, where she wondered if she made the right choice."
"When I read the entry, it didn't come as much of a surprise. We always had a strained relationship, even from the time I was a young child. She just never wanted the responsibility of having a child, I think. Our relationship now is superficial."
2. "I walked in on a black market plastic surgery. I was a freshman in college and hanging out with an old buddy from middle school. He was shady about only staying in his room, entering through his back door, and being quiet. We were leaving when I turned down the wrong hall to his kitchen, and there was a doctor and assistants in scrubs — tubes, machines, and plastic wrap everywhere. I was ushered out, screamed at, and told not to talk about it."
"It was either lipo or a tummy tuck; I don't remember. He told me the doc only did those and Botox, if I remember correctly. This was done in a lower- to middle-class neighborhood. To me, it was not done in a clean environment, but who am I to judge, lol.
Update: I just texted my friend, and he said the doctor got caught a few years ago for transporting drugs (Botox, antibiotics, and painkillers), and his parents haven't heard from him in a while. He apparently only did weight-loss stuff and did discount diagnoses for poor people. He told people if stuff was serious enough to go get appointments/tests done."
3. "Leaving work late one evening, I saw the HR director and CFO in a dark office shredding papers (no, that's not a euphemism). I didn't say anything but quietly walked on down the hall. Two weeks later, we were raided by the SEC, and several people were charged with cooking the books."
4. "It was a sweltering summer day in a sketchy downtown parking lot. I was sitting in my car having a smoke. I saw a guy pushing over a portable washroom with another guy inside. The poor dude was covered head to toe in the contents of a hot, city toilet. I could smell it from my car. This guy obviously flipped out, and he started beating the living hell out of the dude who pushed over the toilet. He got the guy on the ground, picked up a huge cement brick, and repeatedly smashed it on the guy's head. It was a horrific scene. Nobody knew I was there, and I had to testify in a court case years later."
5. "When I was around 10 years old, my mom and I went to visit an aunt and uncle, as my uncle, my mom's brother, had just had a major surgery. During the visit, my aunt and my mom cooked a big dinner, and my aunt told me to call my cousin to invite them to dinner. I went to his room and opened the door to be greeted by the sight of guns lining the bed. I vividly remember seeing bricks of what I later learned were cocaine and big burlap sacks of weed. I blurted out, 'YOURMOMSAIDCOMEEAT!' and immediately slammed the door shut. It was no secret to anyone in our family the type of business that our cousins were in. He came out of his room a few minutes later and scolded me for not knocking. I was scared shitless, but the young kid brain in me was also extremely fascinated to see that they were real-life 'drug lords.'"
6. "I have two best friends who I've known for 15 years. One best friend (we'll call him Adam) got married to a woman (let's call her Beth). I later walked in on the other best friend fucking Beth. They saw me, too, and said I couldn't tell Adam. I've held the secret inside for about three years. I just don't think it is my place to tell Adam. And to be honest, I don't want to get muddled in the middle of all of them."
7. "My husband (and the father of my newborn) texting his affair partner that he loved her and would be on one knee before she knew it...as well as a recounting of their sexcapades. That one hurt."
8. "My dad gave me a piece of furniture one time. When I got it home, a Post-It note that had been stuck to the bottom floated down to the floor. I picked it up, and in my dad's unmistakable handwriting were various notes about gay personal ads he'd been responding to with details about the other guys. Their names, ages, sexual interests, the status of their conversations, etc. My dad was, at least I thought, very straight. I put two and two together and realized this piece of furniture was from an apartment he'd kept briefly while he and my stepmom were on the outs for about a year. None of this bothered me one bit, but I got the distinct impression that my stepmom (an older, very conservative lady) would have NOT been cool with any of this...I let him go to his grave without ever telling him."
9. "When I was a kid, maybe 8 years old, I went over to visit my friend who lived across the street. I'd often come over unannounced and just knock on their door to ask if my friend wanted to hang out. As usual, I knocked on the door and waited; no one came, but I could hear noises indicating that someone was home. My friend would often play video games with headphones on and would be slow to answer the door, so I just kept waiting and knocking. Through the glass, I saw my friend's dad walk into the hallway to see who it was. He stood there fully naked, dick swinging, and we made eye contact through the glass. I turned to walk away, but he saw me leaving, approached the door, and opened it. At this point, I saw a woman appear behind him who was very naked and very much not his wife."
"My friend's dad panicked and just stared at me. I panicked, too, and asked if his son, my friend, was home. He awkwardly said, 'No, he's not here,' and decided that now might be a good time to finally cover his nakedness. I didn't say anything else and just turned to leave, at which point my friend's dad just blurted out, 'Don't leave!' I looked back, confused. He hurriedly left the room for a few seconds, while I was forced to say a very awkward hello to the naked lady standing in my friend's house. The dad came back, handed me a fistful of cash, and said, 'Don't tell anyone,' or something to that effect. At the time, I didn't comprehend why he was giving me money, so I refused it and just walked back home.
It wasn't until years later that I fully comprehended what I had witnessed and why my friend's mother kicked their dad out of the house soon after that."
10. "I was a junior associate, attending the company holiday party. It was well known that I don't drink, so my boss's wife secretly asked me to hang around my boss and make sure he didn't try to drive himself home. Sometime during the evening, he disappeared, and I kinda panicked. His car was still in the parking garage, so I started wandering through the e-suite looking for him. There were lights on in an office, so I walked up and tried the door. A woman was there, standing with her nose in the corner, her skirt lowered, and her butt as red as Rudolph's nose. Another woman was laid out over my boss's knees, her skirt also lowered, my boss spanking her like she stole something. Everyone froze, staring at each other in horror. I didn't know what to do, so I just backed out and closed the door behind me. Not another word was said, but three weeks later, I was made a senior associate — the youngest one in company history."
—Anonymous
11. "My friend wrote in his scholarship essay about how 'he needed assistance more than ever, since he was diagnosed with HIV.' I never told a soul. It’s been my best-kept secret since."
12. "My mom's suicide plan. She had a small notepad that she kept in her dresser drawer. It had her planning on trying to make it look like an accident so my dad could collect the insurance money. She almost even went through with it one day, but from my understanding, my brother unexpectedly came home early from either school or a friend's, and she didn't go through with it."
13. "Way back in the day, before Wi-Fi and cellphones (for ordinary people, at least), back when getting online meant sitting at a desktop and waiting to connect, I wanted to connect to the internet and couldn't. My dad had been on the phone for hours. I assumed he had forgotten to sign out, so I picked up the phone to be sure. Instead of hearing the grating internet sounds, I heard a woman talking. I distinctly heard my father say, 'And would you kiss me?'"
"So I hung up, calmly walked to his door, and yelled at him. He cornered me and kept yelling that I had made it all up. This went on for hours until I agreed.
Not long after, he left our family and pretty much cut off contact with us. I saw on Facebook recently that he took his wife (not my mom), her 40- and 45-year-old daughters, one of the daughters' husbands, and their two children on a cruise. Meanwhile, he can't be bothered to even pick up his phone and talk to my children.
He's a piece of shit. I feel nothing but scorn for him and his vile wife."
14. "My computer broke, and my ex was letting me use his MacBook for a school project. I was sitting in the same room as him. He had his text window open on his computer, and all of a sudden, I saw a convo between him and another woman in which she said she was planning to come over as soon as I left for work. They were trying to time it so she got there right when I left. The worst part of it all was that she kept going on and on about how she couldn't wait to play with MY CAT! My fucking cat! Those are fighting words. Fuck them both, I'm happily married to someone else, and my cat is still my bestie."
15. "The thing I wasn't supposed to see was my dad's face as he was listing off all the friends who died during Vietnam. He never talks about it because of PTSD (though he's talked to my mom about it a few times when they are alone). That night, I was a teenager coming in to borrow the car keys. I just walked right in because the door was open. Then I realized my dad was reciting names. I looked over and saw the pure anguish on his face. Tears streaming. I realized I had overstepped, and my mom threw me the keys."
"My mom told me that later he started reciting names again and went for over 20 minutes, and this is on top of what he's said before.
My dad's an asshole. But I know he loves me. I still love him despite his giant personality flaws. I wouldn't wish the pain I saw on his face upon anyone in the world.
If I feel comfortable enough, I share this with people when they ask me why I don't support the US's wars. I'm tired of our young men going out, getting killed or mutilated, or developing mental health problems because they think they are defending their country and loved ones. Then they come back broken, pleading, and in need of the care that was promised to them. And that is a real crapshoot."
16. "I found a court-ordered DNA paternity test for myself. Apparently, there was one to determine if my dad was my dad. It was beside my dad's divorce papers. My dad claims he never took a test or asked for one, but he lies, so he may have known. I never asked my mom about it. She is wild, so for all I know, she took his hair or toothbrush for the test."
17. "I went to knock on my older neighbor's door to ask him if I could help him shovel the snow in his yard. Nobody answered. That's when I noticed a strange smell and a lot of heat coming from under the door. For some reason, I opened the door. A cloud of white gas immediately enveloped me, and I ran away. It smelled awful, like antifreeze mixed with nail polish remover. I saw out my window that he'd closed the door. At this point, I was throwing up and felt really shitty (feverish, shaking). I managed to put two and two together and called the police. He had been running a meth lab."
"This wasn't Breaking Bad-type stuff; the 'setup' was really small from what I saw. It looked like it could all fit in a dorm room kitchen. It made a lot of smoke, though, and I guess he didn't have any windows open because it was a WALL of smoke. I honestly thought there was a fire and I was about to die in a backdraft, until I noticed the smell."
18. "I borrowed my (now ex) husband's laptop one evening while I was at home, and he was out with his friends. The browser was open to his Gmail account, including an ongoing GChat with his affair partner. He must have been chatting with her from his phone, because their conversation continued on the screen as I looked on in horror. I scrolled back through the previous several weeks of their chat. He mentioned having a wife. He sent her dick pics...SO MANY dick pics. He gushed over his feelings for her, but she mostly seemed to want to hit him up for money. It was horrifying, of course. But also a terribly sad look into that douchebag's inner life. Divorced now, thankfully. Good riddance to bad rubbish!"
19. "I saw a video of my girlfriend being fucked by her ex from a year prior. At the time, I thought we had lost our virginity to each other."
20. "While looking for my birth certificate, I found a death certificate for a brother I never knew I had. This made me curious. I looked a little further and found family photos from my mom's previous marriage that I had never been told about, as well as her divorce records. She had a whole other family before ours and never told us."
"I'll never bring it up to her because it's really none of my business."
21. "A text from my wife to someone else, 'I can't wait to feel every inch of you deep inside me.' Divorce is going okay."
22. "I worked for a downtown metropolitan hotel for a long time, and I've seen a lot I wasn't supposed to see. Probably the worst was a kid with an older man. I checked this guy in around one in the morning (not uncommon, since people travel at different times), but he was alone. Like, an hour later, he asked for something, like a towel or blanket. Anyways, we dispatched our runner to deliver it. After the runner came to me and said he thought something was wrong because he caught a glimpse of someone, and the old guy was trying hard to block the entrance. Being that we were supposed to take stuff like human trafficking seriously, I asked our maintenance to cut his power, so we would get a call to come up to try and fix the problem. He did, and I went up with him to apologize for the inconvenience because the guy was also a top-tier member. Sure enough, we heard a kid hiding in the bathroom."
"I tried to ask who the kid was, and the old guy tried everything to shut us down, from throwing his status around to bribing. I called the cops and let them deal with it.
I had the next two nights off. I was called in on my last day to meet with a detective from HR and a lawyer from the hotel chain's legal team to take my statement.
I talked to the cop a bit afterward, and she told me to just kinda keep quiet about it all because I could be called to testify if there was a trial.
I never ended up getting called, but for a few months, I would run the older man's name through our in-house system to see if there were any company notes on his account. It took, like, two months, but his status was revoked, and his name popped up on our DNR (do not rent) list.
So I didn't learn specifics, but I learned it was bad enough for me to talk to cops and be prepared to testify if needed."
23. "When I was about 5 years old, I woke up to the snow finally starting to melt. I notice a girl 'asleep' in the garden. I went and told my dad; he took one look and told me to go play in my room. Turns out the girl had been 'asleep' in our front garden for about two weeks, buried and frozen under the snow."
"I didn't know she was dead until I was about 16, when I mentioned it to my dad. 'Remember that girl asleep in the garden?' Dad: 'She was dead, you idiot.' As far as I know, she was in her late teens to early 20s. We lived in a pretty rough area, lots of drugs, etc. She had probably been out partying, sat on our garden wall, and passed out. I do not know the exact cause of death or the toxicology report."
24. "My childhood best friend found her stepmom's diary a few years back. Her mother died almost 15 years ago. She read through it out of curiosity and found pages and pages of her stepmother wishing she and her brother would have died with their mother, saying they were the worst kids ever, and that she was glad their mother died because she deserved it, etc. She even showed me one day when I was at their place. It made me sick. I never looked at her stepmother the same after that."
"To clear things up, this woman is pure evil to their faces, too. Anytime her stepmom starts an argument with my friend's dad over the most ridiculous things, as if she's just trying to start something, she always goes straight to trash-talking the kids loud enough for everybody in the house to hear. If I recall correctly, she actually put her hands on both my friend AND her brother. This is my friend's house legally; her mom gave it to her in her will. She could very easily kick her out, but she's scared of what will happen to her dad. She knows it will cause even more trouble. He doesn't know about what's in the diary because we've always been scared to bring it up."
25. "I saw my neighbor having an affair. I stayed home from school sick one day and thought it was odd that the woman next door was home. Then her child's soccer coach showed up. All the houses on our street had giant picture windows in the front. I sat in my living room, plainly seeing them walk around her living room naked. A few days later, I told my best friend. By the end of the day, everyone in school was talking about it. I watched her daughter be told by her friends. I watched her fall apart as we waited for the bus home."
"Later that night, the woman showed up at my house and cornered me in my bedroom alone. For literally 45 minutes, she crouched next to me as I lay in bed, her face inches from mine, demanding that I tell her I lied. I'm still not sure why. She knew I knew. I knew I knew. Nobody was there to hear me lie to cover her ass. All I could remember thinking was, 'Wow. This woman is not only sleeping with her kids' coach, but she's also forcing a child to lie about it.' It was the first time I realized not every adult deserves respect.
A few months later, the soccer coach's wife found a receipt for an expensive necklace. She saw the cheating neighbor wearing it at a child's basketball game. A fistfight ensued. Divorces came shortly after. The neighbor ended up marrying the soccer coach.
I felt bad, but I was in fifth grade. I had no idea how to process the information I had. To me, it was a story about how I saw the hot mom next door naked, not something that would destroy marriages."
26. "I am a med student, and had the privilege of taking practices in the rural area outside the city. The university offered a bus to take you to different hospitals in case transportation was an issue. I used to sit in the first row behind the bus driver, so I could look at the road, to avoid the motion sickness that I get on road trips. One morning, when we were about to depart, the bus driver climbed inside the vehicle, and when he was about to take a seat, someone came inside the bus and shot him six times with what I believe was a big revolver. He died on the spot; blood loss was out of control because, as I later learned, one of the bullets pierced through his aorta."
"On a selfish note, I am glad the killer was wearing a motorcycle helmet, and I couldn't see his face, because I swear that after he was done with the shooting, he looked right at me and, for a second, contemplated the idea of getting rid of the witness. I was afraid of coming to my uni for the rest of the year and someday being killed.
RIP Mr. Bayron. You were the quickest and coolest bus driver I met, even though the route really made me dizzy.
(Here are two news articles about the incident.)"
27. "I went to a concert at a dive venue that was tucked away in some back alleys. I was having a cigarette with a buddy out front during the show, and amid the surrounding abandoned housing, I saw two dudes exchange what looked very much like a bag of guns and a bag of money. The dude who was instigating the handoff immediately noticed me and made eye contact. He slowly started reaching toward his waist. I held my cool and casually looked back toward my buddy, who was drunkenly ruining a joke, and followed him back inside. I knew what I saw. The man knew I saw him. I didn't look back."
28. "I found my ex's Reddit with a bunch of naked pictures of me I didn't know existed. He's since deleted the entire account, but I bet they're still posted somewhere."
29. "An email from my dad's affair partner on his computer. I mentioned it to my mom, and that's when she told me my dad had been having an affair for the past seven years, and I have a half-sister because of it."
30. "My team lead at my last job uploaded a year-in-review on Snapchat on NYE; in the middle of all the memories was her masturbating with a giant purple dildo. It was up for about 30 seconds, and then it was gone. I had a hard time looking her in the eye at work the next day."
31. "A buddy and I were in BC and got directed to a local corner store (in the middle of nowhere) to buy some weed. We showed up, and it was closed. I saw someone inside, but the lights were off, and I thought maybe they could help us out, considering we had come all that way, and knocked on the front window. The guy was like, 'Um, ya, s-s-s-sure,' when I asked if he could hook it up and invited us in. I could tell something was funky about this entire thing, but we had been driving all day and were groggy. The dude stood around for a second and then left, saying he would be right back. We stood in the middle of this closed store like fucking idiots when the actual owner (who did end up slanging us weed the next day) came in with a goddamn shotgun, wondering wtf we were doing there."
"We explained the situation, which just confused him even more, but he let us go on our way. I felt so fucking dumb.
Turns out that dude was just robbing the fucking store, and we saw him. In my defense, we were, like 16, lol."
32. "When I was in my late teens, I was sitting with a friend in his car at a set of traffic lights about 3 a.m. on a quiet street in the city. At the next set of lights ahead (about 30m away), I saw a guy walk up to the car waiting for the lights to change. He extended his arm and fired a shot almost point-blank range at the passenger window, before quickly walking off. We sat there in shock for a minute thinking, 'Did we just fucking see what we thought we saw!?' while the car sat there through two more light changes, before slowly rolling away. No other cars were on the street at the time."
"The next day, I saw on the news that some dude from a gang called 'the Assyrian Kings' was shot in the head in a car and died right around where we were the night before.
We never said shit about it to anyone as we decided we didn't want to get involved, being paranoid teenagers."
33. "My marriage was on the rocks, and I was working on getting myself and my 2-year-old out of the situation as safely as I could. So, I still played the dutiful wife: cooking, cleaning, shopping (while working full-time), and, of course, laundry. I was putting away the clothes and found an open box of condoms with several missing in the dresser. I knew I'd be okay then. I noped outta there within a couple of days. I never found out who he used them with. He's been married twice since then."
34. "I am a criminal defense attorney. One of my clients was picked up for drug trafficking and was guilty as hell, but to help himself out, he'd successfully set up a drug bust on a much bigger dealer. The district attorney's office had been slow to act on the case, and we could not figure out why. I couldn't go and, point-blank, ask around among other defense attorneys, including the one for the guy my client busted, because my client was a 'confidential informant' (CI) on the case. If the other guy's case went to trial, my client would have to testify for the State. I learned what the hell was going on while I was interviewing a different client in jail."
"I was sitting on the 'public' side, talking to my client over the phone. It just so happened that a few feet away from me, in the private attorney's room, were the defense attorney AND the guy my client had busted. And they were both super pissed at each other. Those attorney interview rooms ARE NOT soundproofed. And guess what: If you're going to be shouting at your client, your attorney-client privilege won't stop others from hearing what's going on. Some things I learned:
– The defense attorney had no idea who my client was, and for whatever reason, his client was not giving up the name of my client to him.
– They had wildly different opinions on the possible success of the case. The defense attorney's words: 'If you take this to trial and the CI says what is in this report, you're fucked.'
– They had until the end of that week to decide the case.
I finished up my interview with my client (while taking notes on both cases) as they were still in the middle of their argument.
So, in one broad stroke, I learned pretty much all of the information the district attorney's office had refused to tell me. My client was facing at least eight years in jail for drug trafficking. I was able to use the information to get his sentence reduced to a little over a year."
35. "My wife and I vacationed in London a couple of years ago. It was about 11 p.m.; we had followed some locals to a pub. I really had to pee, but I couldn't find a restroom anywhere. I asked the guy working the front door where the restroom was. He looked at me kinda funny and said, 'Upstairs. First door on your left.' I found the staircase in a back corner, blocked by a table, which was odd. You could tell that these stairs weren't meant to be used, but I had been drinking, and my bladder was about to bust. On the second floor, there was a long hallway with about five doors. I tried the first one on the left, but it was a dark room with empty kegs. The first door on the right just had supplies. Then I noticed that I could see light under the door at the end of the hallway. That must be the bathroom, I thought. I opened the door to find a group of people in very sharp business attire seated around an oval table."
"They all froze in place, and we all looked at each other for a good 15–30 seconds. Finally, one of the guys said, 'What the hell are you doing, mate?' I replied, 'I'm just looking for the bathroom; the door guy told me it was up here.' The guy responded, 'We don't have a restroom in this building, now please leave.'
I apologized and headed back down the staircase, confused as hell (but good news: my urge to pee was gone). I returned to my wife and told her what had happened. We both agreed it was strange, but ordered another round.
Five minutes later, one of the men from the room came downstairs. He went to the security guy at the front, said something to him, and pointed at me. I almost shit myself. The bouncer walked up to me and said, 'You guys have to leave.' I told him that I had not paid my tab yet, and he said not to worry about it, just to go ahead and leave. We obliged.
To this day, it's one of the weirdest events of my life. We have no idea what happened, but we love to tell this story and hear everyone's theories."
36. "After downloading a game on my uncle's computer, I was looking for the files to complete the setup, and I clicked on a file called 'games.' A few videos popped up, so, being the curious girl that I am, I clicked on one, and there it was: a girl literally fucking her couch. That was my first porn experience. I was 7, and I showed my sister, who was 5. We decided to show our mom, and I'll never forget the trauma on her face."
37. "When I was a young teen, I was leaving my house to go do something in the neighborhood. As soon as I got out of the door, I heard my parents in the garage. My mother seemed to be in her car, and my father was sitting behind her car, pleading with her not to leave. My parents were divorcing, and I saw a few scenes that I wish I had never seen. Not really horrific, but seeing your parents in emotional pain can be rough."
38. "In high school, I found a document on my dad's computer that was basically a diary of his massive crush on another woman. I don't know why I opened it, and I felt really bad, but he probably shouldn't have kept it on a computer he let me use. It was weird, but I never told anyone and tried not to think about it. My parents are still together, and they seem (mostly?) happy."
39. "When I was 13-ish, I went into our computer room just in time to finish seeing my dad send an email that said 'I love you' and some other stuff to a woman who wasn't my mom. He tried to cover my eyes and act like he was joking around. I promptly left and went back a while later. I tried to get into his email, but he had changed the password. (We all knew it because his email was used to log in to a lot of stuff.) I never told my mom. A few years later, he divorced my mom, and she asked me for help getting proof of his cheating from the laptop he had also used. I found GRAPHIC Craigslist messages that he had sent and received."
"PSA to parents: Don't fucking ask your child to do this. Take it to a goddamn PC shop and save your child the emotional and mental scars."
40. "I saw one really weird message, and then got sucked into reading a whole huge text chat of my dad's really disgusting text messages with his girlfriend, wherein he refers to her by the same very specific (and highly personalized) nickname that he has referred to me as since I was a child. It was like a train wreck; I couldn't look away. The messages had a really strong dd/lg (Daddy Dom/Little Girl) fetish vibe as well, and I have never recovered. It seems he refers to her by nickname whenever they are being sexual or romantic."
"For more horrific context: Said nickname isn't some common thing like 'baby girl.' It's a reference to a misprint on my middle school soccer jersey. It's incredibly specific, sounds a lot like my actual first name, and to make matters weirder, this girlfriend of his had heard him refer to me by that nickname probably hundreds of times, so it can't be lost on her (it also sounds NOTHING EVEN CLOSE to her own name).
I have racked my brain a million times about it to try and make myself feel even slightly less grossed out, but I only ever feel more upset. It seems most likely that they do some kind of sexual role play wherein she role plays as *me*. I have no idea what using that nickname for their sex life would ever be a thing. So, I'm traumatized and haven't looked at my dad the same way since. I sure as shit don't want to ask him about it."
41. "As I was coming out of a dollar store, I noticed two guys in the parking lot who were doing an obvious drug deal. Sirens started wailing, and three or four cop cars pulled into the strip mall. One guy threw something into a large dumpster, and the other guy took off running as I was reaching my car. I went back inside the dollar store and watched as they were both arrested. I waited for about 15 minutes until they were all gone, then I walked over to the dumpster and actually jumped in. I found an envelope with $8,000 wrapped in plastic wrap. I shoved it into my pants and got out with some pieces of wood (acting like I was looking for scrap wood in the dumpster)."
"That was 12 years ago...I used most of that money to put a new roof on my house."
English (US) 