Everyone keeps secrets from their families.
Most of the time, these are fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things, like accidentally breaking a window with a baseball but blaming it on a fallen branch, or claiming the dog ruined your mother's favorite pair of shoes when you actually wore them for a grand night out.
Some people, however, are better at keeping secrets than others, and often take these secrets with them to the grave.
In doing so, however, they still might leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs, which will leave their surviving family members with a slew of unanswered questions, which will likely remain unanswered.
Even if people will forever continue to do their best to solve what these clues actually mean.
Redditor UltraFab was curious to hear mysterious discoveries made by the Reddit community about their families, leading them to ask:
"What's your family's unsolved mystery?"
Something Is Definitely Fishy...
"The day my father died from a car accident involving a boat trailer In the middle of nowhere out of state in 1991, my mom found a box with a Chinese medicine ball with a bell inside and a letter that said, 'I am sorry'."
"It was in our mailbox."
"She found it before she got the call that my father had died."
"The first autopsy on my father said there was a high blood alcohol content."
"My mom demanded a second autopsy, and there was no alcohol in him."
"She had seen him less than hour before he died and he hadn't been drinking that morning."
"My father was a third party candidate for state governor and published an independent newspaper talking about corrupt politicians and organizations."- neurotica_9000
Save Your Pennies...
"When my great-great-uncles house was to be torn down, they found old money hidden EVERYWHERE, even in the floor and the walls."
"Nobody knows where he had all that money from."- Imaginary_Town3642
Whatever Happened To Alice?
"In England around 1880 my 3x great grandmother received a letter from her daughter."
"She read it, threw it in the fire and said 'she’s made her bed, she’ll have to lie in it'.”
"My 2x ggmother never knew what happened to her sister Alice and later immigrated to the US."
"A couple years ago an unknown DNA relative from that branch reached out on Ancestry."
"She’s mixed race with Jamaican roots but doesn’t have clear written family records."
"I suspect that we’re connected through Alice."- EmmeryAnn
He's Out There Somewhere
"Who is my maternal grandfather?"
"The name on my mom's birth certificate is the guy my grandmother was married to at the time but military records show that he was out of the country when my mom would've been conceived."
"DNA also backs this up."
"Sadly, none of my close DNA matches will respond to me."- agreeingstorm9
Safe To Say, He Was Up To No Good
"What my great uncle got up to after he disappeared to Mexico in the early 80s."
"Great Uncle was a fairly unstable individual."
"Rough childhood, shipped off to Vietnam."
"Came back, got a wife and had a son."
"Got heavily involved with organized crime in the city my family is from."
"Became very abusive to his wife and my cousin."
"Wife takes cousin and leaves him."
"Great Uncle spends next several years chasing them."
" FBI eventually gets involved, and he just ups and disappears."
"We find out he had gone to Mexico when, 16 years later, my Grandmother gets a call from his daughter saying that he had passed away."
"The fact that he had apparently been not only alive the entire time, but had also started another family was a surprise."
"My cousin, despite everything, decided he should attend the funeral in Mexico."
"At the viewing, he tells us that two well dressed guys pull up in a Town Car, approach the casket, snap a quick picture of my deceased great uncle, and leave."
"Without having said a single word to anyone."
"We have a lot of questions."- Ok_Counter_4610
What They Don't Know, Won't Hurt Them...
"An intentionally unsolved one to make you laugh."
"When I was say 10 I hated cutting the grass, we had a brutally steep hill and it was never fun."
"Our lawn mower had gotten old and hard to start, so a brilliant kid idea came to me, sabotage!"
"Now I was no slacker here, I thought it through."
"I carefully pulled the starter cord out about halfway and frayed it so that it was just half cut."
"Then I went inside and told my Stepfather I could not start it."
'He naturally enough went outside to show me that I could and was just being lazy."
"The be fair I was but the cord lasted about three hard pulls before snapping, which led to the air turning blue from the cursing."
"This was apparently such a frustrating thing that we ended up with a brand new self-propelled, mower, a huge success."
"Fast forward 20 years and when this story was finally told by my sister it was not believed."
"He insisted that it broke because it was a pile of garbage, he was there after all! "
"I could only laugh at this."
"I think he believes to this day I could not have pulled that off."- bullwinkle8088
A Likely Story...
"What my grandfather actually did in the military."
"He said he was an accountant, that he wrote paychecks."
"But we also know for a fact he spoke Russian, was a crack shot with a rifle, to the point when I was in JROTC doing the shooting drills he warned me to miss a few times on purpose, because crack shots get made into snipers, and snipers don't live long, and we discovered after his death that 'was an accountant' is an extremely common cover story."- Edymnion
Her Own Fault For Leaving It Unattended
"Someone took a chunk out of aunt Eliza's pumpkin pie when nobody was around at our family thanksgiving back in 1994 and they still do not let the subject go to this day."
"Anyways It was me and I can never tell them."- blackmobius
Always Two Steps Ahead Of Everybody
"My Grandmother used to answer, old-school rotary, phones before they rang and there was always someone on the line."
"She would also tell us to go open the door for family and friends seconds to minutes before they were even in sight of the house."
"She was an extraordinary lady."- Poopybut58
Gone Without A Trace
"My great-grandfather was said to have up and disappeared one day."
"No signs of it beforehand, he was only 70 and still very active, was still involved in the business, and all of the extended family was living in the same area."
"Even more surprising was that in that small town where most people knew him, nobody even noticed him leave."
"My grandma still cries on his birthdays and on the anniversary of the day he disappeared."
"He was very well loved."
"This was way back in 1985, suburban India."- LiveInTheFlow
There is little more frustrating than not having closure.
Then again, there's a reason why "ignorance is bliss", leaving one to wonder if certain mysteries should remain unsolved.
