At some point in life, usually between dessert and the third glass of wine at a holiday gathering, it happens: a relative—often an elder, often unprompted—lets something slip that quietly detonates your entire understanding of the family tree.
Like how grandma was once engaged to a man who later founded a cult in Oregon. “But he was very sweet,” she says, as if that’s the relevant part.
One TikToker asked people to share their own unhinged family stories like that—and sure enough, the internet had plenty. Scroll down to read the most chaotic ones, and if you’ve got one too, the comment section’s waiting.
#1
Someone I know was SAd by her dad, her uncle took him hunting in the woods and they had an ‘accident’ and her dad never came back and no one ever got arrested, justice was served
Image credits: Musleh
#2
after my stepdad moved us across the country, he sa’d me for years and uses the military as a crutch to stay out of jail. my mom saw it as competition and tried to get pregnant to “make me jealous” and i saved enough bday money to buy a tent at 14 and never looked back. theyre still married, shes still popping out kids. when i tell anyone in the family about the truth, she claims its my “diagnosis”(autism). ive been on my own for a while. i love venting in comment sections, thank you for this.
Image credits: slimbackup
#3
My Nona didn’t work for over 40 years and was unmarried but was taken care of by several men who would come over to fix her house up and give her an allowance in exchange for her baked goods (she was an amazing cook/ baker) well one of the guys fell obsessed with her and when he found out about the other men he tried to break in and k**l my Nona but she shot him dead while smoking a cigarette and never leaving her recliner. Nona was a player
Image credits: TheTattedBarbieChef
#4
My great great great grandmother was a picture bride. Her picture tho was taken when she was 15, but when she was “ordered” she was already 25… guy didn’t like her so he hung her on a nearby mango tree to die. A guy passing by found her right before she died, nursed her back to health and they got married
Image credits: Hotuuu <3
#5
My dad was murdered in 1999 from a carkjacking. My sister and I were in the car and witnessed it. Almost 2 decades later, a false documentary came out about the k**ler saying he was innocent (he claims he didn’t do it but there is overwhelming evidence against him). It got popular and many celebrities got involved to try to get him released. Luckily, he’s in jail for life. But it was traumatizing watching the public get manipulated about the case and have to relive that trauma.
Image credits: rhowell023
#6
I grew up in a small town and there was a woman whose husband was an awful drunk and would beat her horrifically. She had these dogs that were always kenneled, and horribly mean and she would spend a majority of her time with them. One day she came to my grandmothers house and was really badly beaten. The next day her husband went missing. After a while no one missed him and it was just considered he left her and she was better off. Town people could care less where he went. Eventually she confessed that she k**led him and fed him to her dogs.
Image credits: AbsolutelyNot_kayla
#7
My grandmother fell pregnant to her boyfriend when she was 19. He left her because of it being a scandal and married her bestfriend. She had the baby and was forced to give him over to the nuns running the orphanage. She tried to find him but they didn’t keep records back then. When she was 74, he found her (another long story) and they had a beautiful relationship catching up on their lives in between. Until he died 18 months later, in a train accident. He was the driver. She grieved her son’s life twice.
Image credits: iamemelizabeth
#8
my gma was committed to a psych ward & given electro shock because she didn't want more than 4 kids. She became a famous burlesque dancer when they got divorced. My mom was in Playboy in the 70s
#9
My mom went to school with hulk hogan, she said everyone hated him then too
#10
My grandma was thrown in a well to die. She clawed her way out and went to the police station to press charges on her boyfriend. He was filing a missing person report.
#11
My grandmother watched her father and brother drown in a river when she was 12. Later she admitted that if they didn’t unalive, she probably would have been pregnant by one of them by 15.
Image credits: Emmi
#12
My mother used abortion as a form of birth control. She told me I was a missed abortion and that she didn’t know she was pregnant for seven months. I am now 40 and have no contact with her, nor do I know if she’s alive or not. and that’s OK because I treat my children like the mother I never had. She chose d***s and alcohol over her entire family.
Image credits: Christina
#13
my great grandma went to jail for murder of a guy. came out years later the guy was actually not dead n very much alive so she proceeded to actually k**ling the man and when she got arrested she told the cops she can’t go to jail again for the same crime
Image credits: lari
#14
My dad passed when I was 7. I’m 26 now. Did ancestory to find out more about my dad’s side. Got my results and turns out, my dad isn’t my biological dad. Found my bio dad in less than 24 hours (we didn’t know about eachother) and now I have a dad
#15
My aunt asked her mom (my grandma) to fly from Ohio to Palm Springs to get her car from her boyfriend’s house and drive it back to Ohio for her. My grandma went and never came back and married my aunt’s boyfriend.
Image credits: Honey
#16
We believe our great grandmother is a serial k**ler.... Three people that have been in her care have died, two husbands and a neighbor.. she almost got our great Uncle Joe, her son. He went to go stay with her and he started getting sicker and sicker until he finally moved out and got better... She's always given some weird vibes.
#17
My aunt was dating someone in jail. Moved in with his mom to help take care of her cause she was sick. Turns out she moved in with his WIFE not his mother
#18
My grandma grew up in Honolulu and saw Pearl Harbor happen as a child, watched her best friends house explode, all the horrible things you can imagine.
Image credits: Crystal Ransons
#19
My grandma’s dad was an a****ve alcoholic. They lived up in the Tennessee Appalachian Mountains. The house burned down one day, everyone made it out except him.
Image credits: Mary Elizabeth
#20
My ex MIL told the story about being born in the mountains in the 30s I believe. She was a preemie and nobody thought she would live so they literally gave her to her eight year-old sister like a doll. The sister put her in a box under the wood-burning stove and a couple hours later she started to cry, so they fed her and she lived. That story always blew my mind and was confirmed by other family members.
#21
When my grandma was 9 she was sold to a 30 year old man in Mexico and had two kids by 12. She later escaped and fled to matamoros where she met my grandpa she eventually reconnected with the two girls but they wanted nothing to do with her.
#22
while I was in college, my paternal grandmother started using pictures of me when I was 14 to catfish men on Facebook and Instagram and BRAGGED about it to my mom and said she was crazy for making her stop
#23
My great grandma had tickets for the titanic (3rd class) but her dad died a few days before it was to set sail so she stayed for the funeral instead. None of my family would be here if she went.
#24
Atleast ten of my family members have been on Jerry springer
Image credits: Dalton Smith
#25
Took an Ancestry DNA test hoping to find my birth parents (I was adopted as a baby). Didn’t find them, but I did find a “2nd cousin” on my dad’s side. She didn’t know who her dad was either, so we were just two mystery babies trying to make a family tree from scratch. Fast forward…I get my original birth record from the state, find my birth mom on Facebook, and literally messaged her like “Hey lady… this you?!” She said “Sure is!” And that’s how we started to get to know each other after almost 40 years. Found my bio dad too! Turns out I’ve got a whole squad of sisters I never knew about (hello sisterhood). That “2nd cousin”? Yeah, she was actually my half-aunt. Her half-brother = my father. Apparently my grandpa was out here planting seeds from Maine to Florida. Still finding cousins like it’s a Netflix docuseries. But wait—it gets better. On my mom’s side, I kept getting DNA matches with the D’Arcangelo family. Asked my birth mom, she’s like, “Oh no, they’re just old family friends.” Riiight. Got her to do her own Ancestry DNA test and BAM! She shares D’Arcangelo DNA. Her siblings? Don’t. So turns out her mom had a secret affair with Mr. D’Arcangelo himself. And the woman my mom grew up calling “just a close friend of the family”? Yeah. That was her half-sister. I basically cracked open a multigenerational secret with one little spit test.
#26
My 100% Black and married grandma owned a bar, her best customer was a White Man. She had 5 kids. Why did my Black Grandma and her Black Husband have 2 biracial kids with blue eyes one of which is my father? It took me and my sister years to figure out why our father hated his mother. We later inherited our real Grandfather’s house. Apparently, she was the love of his life.
#27
I'm adopted and found my birth mother when i was 19 and when i was 20 I asked her about my bio dad and so she gave me his name and i found him on Facebook sent him a message, hoping for the best ,(my mom didn't think i would contact him), so this man never knew about me , they never told him cuz they broke up when mom got pregnant with me ,(he never got married and literally has no kids besides me)so fast forward couple months of us being in contact, i made a post for fathers day for him and she asked if we are talking, and im like yeah we have kind of started to build a relationship... so then she got quiet and was like " listen I don know how to tell you this, but your dad might not be your dad " ( turns out she cheated on him when she got pregnant ) it was a whole story that day , we did end up doing a dna test and also when we went to got do the dna test , that was the first time me and my dad actually met in person , dna test came back positive that he was my dad so that worked out great tho but still damn
#28
A Great Grandfather of mine k**led his daughter’s husband and buried him in a field. No one knew til he was on his death bed and told them. Everyone thought her husband had ran off again since it was something he did frequently and just didn’t come back this time. Whole time he had been dead in field for decades.
#29
My brother suffered from mental illness for almost five years combined with bouts of severe depression. One morning, as he laid in bed with a pew pew held to his temple, he told my mother he didn't want to live this way anymore. She told him to either pull the trigger or stop saying that. She brags that he finally listened to her and pulled it. He's been gone three years now. My brother and I were 7 & 9 when our father did the same thing. I often wonder if she did the same to our father. I will never know because I went no contact with her after my brother's passing.
#30
My great grandfather lived under an assumed name.. even on his deathbed, he wouldn’t tell my great grandmother who he really was.
#31
My great grandma had a best friend that was murdered by her obsessive stalker after being rejected. He kidnapped her and knocked her unconscious, then tied one leg to a tree and one leg to the back of his truck as he drove off.
#32
I was working in pathology. My father asked me what was the most common and successful ’painless’ way people unalive themselves. So I told him. 2 days later he does exactly what I said. He failed. I gave him the wrong dosage/ amounts. I have never spoken to him since. How could he think it was OK to print that guilt on me?
Image credits: Stephen
#33
My parents met and conceived me while both were patients in a mental health hospital, that’s just the start
#34
Sisters force me to take a DNA test, knowing that my dad wasn't my biological dad. No big deal really. Mom denied it. Mom takes a DNA test. Turns out her dad isn't her biological dad, either. She was flabbergasted.
#35
My mom cheated on my dad. My dad took a chainsaw to everything in the house. Cut the couch in half, loaded it up in the truck, took it with him to his new apartment. Kitchen table, chairs, funniest thing I ever saw.
Image credits: ChicagoDeptOfDibsManagement
#36
My grandma had a baby by random man, six months later got preg by another random man, moved to New Orleans and gave baby to a voodoo witch doctor, came back home and six months later got pregnant with my mom by random man, my grandfather courted her and she made him think my mom was his….. we found ALL of this out in 2018 when the kid she gave away found us on ancestry dna
#37
i’ve picked my moms near lifeless body off the ground more times than i can count, have had to use narcan nose spray on her. can’t even count the amount of ambulances i’ve had to call. addiction is sick
#38
My sister thought it would be fun to take a dna test, found out her dad is not dead and our mom is friends with him on Facebook
#39
my dad was on hospice the day before he died he told me I have at least 17 brothers and sisters that he knows of I never told my mom that dad was a player I never looked for them either because I'm not sharing my inheritance
Image credits: Big Buddy
#40
My ex husband lived a secret life for over 10 years and I had no clue. (He was a pastor) lead worship in church every Sunday. Found out he had been cheating on me the entire time when we had a one and a two year old. Got divorced and he was on this last season of The Voice making up sob stories about how hard his life has been.
#41
My great grandma gave me her blood pressure medication, telling me it was candy. My grandma caught her, gave me ipicac syrup and sent me outside. Everyone thought she was trying to unalienable me so she was sent to a nursing home. We visited and took her out for family events. Years later, my mother and I were discussing it while she was caring for my great aunt who had dementia and after my great uncle had died from alztimers. Turns out she had altzimers bad enough she actually though her medication was candy.
#42
My grandpa was good friends with Jim jones. Yes THAT Jim jones.
Image credits: DaniDontYouKnow
#43
My Uncle Sam (yes his real name) is in the triple k, has been for a long time. His first and second born grandsons are both African American.
#44
my grandpa was movie producer late 70s/early 80s...he had an affair on my grandma with Liza Minnelli
Image credits: HDewaal
#45
my grandfather visited Japan for a couple months out of the year every year for a long time when he passed away in his 90s a random young Japanese lady attended crying no one knew who she was
#46
Grandpa Olen was Married to Pauline… divorced after 2 children. Olen married Irene, Pauline’s sister. Went on to have 7 more kids (one being my mother). Pauline married Jasper, Olen’s brother. When Jasper passed, my grandpa in the other side of the family moved in with Pauline.
#47
Both sets of grandparents lived double lives. My paternal grandfather who was married had a side dude and got AIDS and died in 92. My maternal great grandfather had 4 families (none of them knew) , kidnapped one of the families… still a cold case.
#48
My dad has 2 older brothers, at the time of this story the oldest was in his 20s and moved out of the house. My dad was around 10 and his older brother was 13. My dad’s parents thought that they needed a babysitter so they hired a 16 year old girl. My grandpa thought the 16 year old was such a baddie that he decided to divorce his wife of over 20 years, and get married to the 16 year old babysitter. HE MARRIED THE MINOR BABYSITTER WHILE HE WAS IN HIS 40s
#49
my grandpa died the day before he was suppose to give evidence in the Tate and LaBianca murders against Charles Manson.
#50
I took a ancestry dna test and after I got the results back it said I was related to a lot of people that I had no idea who they was. Well come to find out my grandmother on my dads side had an affair with a man named verlan and he’s my real bio grandfather. They’ve all passed before I found out all the results and was able to ask about it but apparently my grandmothers sisters knew and a few other family members but never told me. it was definitely very unexpected. Lol
