To find out how this conversation started in the first place, we got in touch with Reddit user TrustyMadman. He was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda and share what inspired him to start this thread.
“We’ve all been told that secrets, etc. are akin to entering a pact. When in reality, most of these need to be spoken aloud to protect the speaker and/or others of mistreatment,” the author shared. “[Some] should be kept as family secrets, as no one needs to air their laundry publicly. But everyone in the family needs to speak to each other bluntly and matter of factly.”
I am a wheelchair user and was stopped by a homeless woman in Vegas who was very distraught about me crossing the street. She claimed she’d seen another wheelchair user get run over and k**led on that particular road and that I should always travel with someone abled for visibility purposes. She got hysterical at that point and I excused myself, promising to be careful. I was unsettled.
I googled the incident later. Her mug shot came up in the search. She was the driver.
Not a direct confession, but a coworker told me about a lawsuit he was involved in that sounded interesting, so I googled it to see if I could find the court case. Instead I found an article where he had gotten caught and arrested for filming minors.
My grandmother was born in 1918 in Germany. She survived heavy bombings in WW2.
Our family never talked much about the bad things. If they talked about the war, it’s was mostly light hearted anecdotes.
I was around 9 when we were watching a documentary with my parents and grandma. It was about the bombings and when the term firestorm came up we kids were curious. My parents startet explaining how a big fire can draw so much air that it creates a strong wind that pushes the flames even further.
My grandma suddenly got that 1000 yard stare and casually said “I have seen people burn like torches”.
We said “What?!” and grandma snapped out if it and said “What?”.
I guess it had to come out, but she didn’t even realise saying it.
We also asked the OP if he had ever heard anyone casually throw out a shocking confession. “I’ve had multiple people disclose a variety of things to me personally over the years,” he noted. “Being in the military for almost 24 years now, I’ve heard everything from minor and highly fragile family situations. Being senior leadership, I’ve become one of those people that anyone can talk to, and I love being able to help out.”
However, TrustyMadman says it’s important to determine whether he’s talking to the victim or the person who made a mistake. “If it’s the victim, there are multiple resources for everyone and I can walk them through it,” he continued. “I’ve done this many times. If they are one of the a**holes that did something stupid, I will ensure all matters illegal or borderline illegal are reported.”
Was at a club one time with a group of work friends. One dude grew up super religious and it was his first time really drinking. He tearfully confessed he was gay and probably forgot the next day. I still follow his socials and he’s still deep in the closet.
Vietnam vet friend of my father’s went on a road trip with us. Great guy. Funny. He told us some funny stories about the war. One of them was a war crime. Ha ha. I was 7 or so, so I didn’t catch it at the time.
Next, we asked the author what he thought of the replies to his post. “I’ve read each of the thousands posts, diving into the unique ones,” he shared. “They were mostly very well written, and I thank everyone who contributed.”
Playing a boardgame with a friend who had become a d**g dealer
Told me that there was a night where someone had ripped him off and he and his friends went after him leading to a car chase. The other car hit a bystander and left the victim paraplegic.
He felt really guilty about it, would obsessively watch news reports of the incident over and over again.
I found out he had died of alcohol poisoning about a year later.
My dad once told me about one of his college buddies who loved doing nitrous oxide so much that he tied a bag of it around his head and asphyxiated. He said this in a joking way and chuckled until I pointed out that it was likely a s*****e then his face dropped like he hadn’t ever thought of it.
I was talking to a guy a year after we got out of high school. His father was an LA Metro cop. He told me casually that he and his buddy would put on suits, take his dad’s Crown Victoria, badge and gun, and “hassle” [escorts] in Hollywood. He said hassle but I think he meant “get free services.”
When I saw him at the 10 year reunion (the only one I attended) he had become an LA Metro cop, but was getting a divorce, was on his 3rd police force, and was being sued by 3 people. He said they were suing the depts but were also suing him personally and he didn’t think he would be a cop for much longer. I didn’t ask for details. He told me all this in 30 seconds. Then he said “So what have you been up to?”
Edit: This guy also held our high school record for bench press (460?). He would snort all kinds of c*****e and do a single rep for the record.
Edit 2: I talked to a friend who said this guy was impersonating cops since the 11th grade. They would also pistol-whip pimps and d**g dealers and steal d***s.
Finally, TrustyMadman left us with some wise words. “If you have something that you’ve been carrying and it’s eating you alive, you need to talk and get resolution,” he says. “Whether you’re the guilty party or not, I’ve been told repeatedly that feeling is permanent until you do. After you realize this fact, the rest is self-inflicted purgatory.”
I (50F) let the condo maintenance man in to replace my thermostat. I’ve met him before & he was always nice & quick with repairs. It was the start of summer & he asked if my kids & I had any vacation plans. I reciprocated the question & we were just making small talk. Out of nowhere he casually says he m******d his brother. WTF?? I completely froze, then mumbled oh just as he was putting the faceplate on. He didn’t follow up that statement & I didn’t ask for details. He quickly said bye & walked out. I moved shortly after.
Friend told me at school that they had new puppies at the farm but the dad drowned all but two of them. It was normal for him growing up to do that.
Asked my best friend what he had done for the day and he casually tells me about how he robbed a McDonald’s……..😭 Mind you we were in high school and the way he casually breezed past it and explained his entire day?!?! Like sir PLEASE let’s back up a bit, you did WHAT??????😭😭😭😭😭😭.
One of my best friends from college was a few years older than the rest of us. When we pressed him as to why, he would tell us that he partied way too hard with his frat brothers and basically was tossed out on academic probation.
I’m hanging out with him a decade later and I’m not sure how the topic came up but he went into a little more detail. He partied so much that he knocked up a girl when he was a freshman. Ultimately, the mom wanted nothing to do with him and his parents pulled him from college to straighten out. When we met him was when he had cleaned up his act and was doing his best to avoid his frat brothers.
He has a daughter out there somewhere that he’s never met. He was so casual about it and it snapped me out of my drunk stupor in an instant.
So I used to work nights at a hotel. One week, I was scheduled for the latter half and missed that we had been housing a family friend of the GM. This family friend is an elderly lady, at least early 80s. She comes down to the front desk at midnight looking for a bottle of water and sticks around until about 3 AM just talking general old person stuff, stories, etc., and I’m listening and replying nicely since it was an otherwise dead night.
Then she drops why she’s there. She was deemed not mentally fit to be unsupervised and tried to go out of state with her friends against her husband’s (the designated supervisor) permission, so she ran off anyway leading to cops having to find her so her kids decided to house her at the hotel for a bit. She then goes on to tell me she hates her husband because of all the trauma he caused their son up to and including making him work a dangerous logging job that he was severely injured at during his early 20s and all the associated stories with that. To cap it off, she tells me she’s supposed to have medications brought to her, but her kids had not brought them to her yet, and it had been 3 days.
She tells me one of he medications is LITHIUM, among an assortment of antipsychotics and old person meds. Lady tells me she is on it because she hated him so much she tried to run him over and got institutionalized for a few weeks over it. I feign having to go do some work activities in the back to get out of the conversation, but she asks if she can be swapped rooms due to wanting a better view but I pass that buck to the manager in the next shift because we don’t usually do that for that reason.
Flash forward to the next morning while I’m training a new breakfast worker… This lady has a psychotic breakdown and is hanging out in the dining area in only a bath towel. This is an entire other story, but I felt necessary to include.
I used to work for a store that puts the stuffing in teddy bears. One day I was outside wheeling around a cute one to try and bring customers in and get reactions from kids and I smiled and said hi to an older lady. She stopped, we had a conversation and she said “this is the only conversation I’ve had with a human being in over a week.” And went on her way. I was devastated for her and I still think about it a lot.
Me and a 2 friends of mine were on vacation in Amsterdam. We sat in a lounge in a coffee shop and were smoking when a dude came in. He was a very chill guy, he was from the UK has moved to the Netherlands a while ago. It was just us 4 in that lounge, smoking, and having casual conversation. We were talking about motorcycles and stuff like that.
Then my friend asked him why he moved to the Netherlands. He started talking and settled into that two thousand yard stare the more he told us. He had a house in the UK, and some night, a dude broke in. While he was at home. He got up, got into a fight with the burglar, and managed to knock him out. He tied him up and called the police.
But the police didn’t show up. He thought they just didn’t believe him. He called multiple times. At some point it had been over 1 hour, and the burglar was still tied up in his house. So he throw him out into the garden and poured gasoline over him. He lit a lighter. Then he called the police again, held the phone to the burglars face, and started screaming “HELP ME HE’S GOING TO K**L ME! HE’S GOING TO BURN ME ALIVE!”.
Then police arrived. They arrested them both, and both were sent to prison. After he was released, he started a new life in the Netherlands. And you could tell that story was real by the look on his face and how silent everthing became when he started talking. We were just sitting in silence for a minute after he told us that story, and he just started at the wall, saying nothing.
Afterwards he snapped back and we had a somewhat normal conversation again. But bot gonna lie, we were nervous as s**t when he told us that story.
I once sold weed to a coworker I didn’t know all that well after our night shift. He stopped by my house and we smoked a little and he says his ex wife doesn’t seem to want to get back together. Then says really casually he’s not sure if it has to do with the fact he tried to drown her in their bathtub when they were married. He said he didn’t think he held under water all that long! So why won’t she take me back?
My wife’s grandmother was a very eccentric woman who lived in a massive house. With no furniture, except for a bed on the floor, all her time went to her art. Which was everywhere. She lived in Alabama after ww2. After the war she was employed in the WASP a woman’s Air Force service pilot. While she didn’t fly, she did monitor radars and told us casually over dinner one evening that she had been sworn not to divulge information, but their main job was to track UFO’s activity over the Gulf of Mexico. She said she tracked 12 personally. But knows the team tracked way more than that.
Wife’s mom casually dropped privately to me during dinner she and her friends use to smoke pot behind the bleachers at football games.
Now I know this doesn’t seem that odd to most people, but both her parents are very straight edge and conservatives. They acted like the world was falling apart when my state decriminalized pot.
And it was so out of the blue as well and only I heard it. I think we were just talking about football in general or something.
Someone told me once that they ran over a deer and then threw it through some guys window. I asked, laughing, “why’d you do that?” to which he replied, “he owed me money.”
We were very close face to face, and there was like an intense energy exchange and eye contact with us in that moment.
Then we went right back to what we were doing, which was a party with other people in my backyard.
One time my mom was pouring her heart out bc ig she was feeling particularly emotional that day, and she just causually said “and yknow what? I AM racist. I just keep it discreet, but really, why shouldnt I be racist?” And like…. ma’am, moments ago you were talking about how you feel like you failed as a mother. Whats going on.
I was talking to a state Senator and he was casually telling me, in front of a few other guys about how he would cheat on his wife behind the school we were close to.
A really good friend of mine had been out of contact traveling the country, hitchhiking, sleeping on random people’s couches, camping out in the desert, etc. for around a year, and so when he came back we all got together to hang out, and it basically turned into a small party. At some point he just casually drops that he has a court date coming up, and explains it was because his ex is suing him over the fact that he beat his infant daughter nearly to death sometime before he left. He then just tried to continue on with the party like nothing happened.
I don’t think I ever heard of anyone who was there hanging out with him again after that.
I was talking to a very good friend of my now deceased father.
He said that many years ago he talked my father out of murdering my mom. He believed she was cheating on him, even stalked her on the way to college with a gun in the car. She wasn’t cheating, also they already had kids at the time. I’m 100% sure what he told me is true.
Got chills thinking what my life would have been, had this occured. My mom is the greatest person I know by a mile, I’m glad she’s still here.
When the first Harry Potter movie was released in 2001, my ex boyfriend at the time told me while we were sitting in the theatre that he had a crush on Hermione (Emma Watson) in the movie. She was 10. He was 25 at the time. I was pretty stunned at his casual comment about being attracted to a child. Anyways a few years later it came out that he had sexually a****d a young girl from the family who took him in when his mum kicked him out. He was 16, she was under 10 I think. So yeah, glaring red flags.
My mom picked me up so we could get food on my birthday a few years ago and randomly brought up an instance when me and her went to disney for a cheering competition I was in where the only thing I asked for on the whole trip aside from food was this round minnie mouse plushie filled with those soft styrofoam like beads. It was so squishy and soft so I took it to my mom and asked if I could have it. She had said no so I just assumed parent saying no because they don’t want me to have it.
She casually drops *why* I wound up getting it on the last day of the trip. My bio dad and her were still married at the time and he *drained their join bank account on strippers at a local strip club*. Her friend who was with us who’s daughter was also on the team had to cover dinner for us that night and I didn’t know. She had to call the next morning and ask her job to give her a 3 day advance on her paycheck as we weren’t leaving until saturday morning so that was gonna be like 3 1/2 days without food for the day as our stay package only included breakfast at the resort.
I already hated my bio dad by this point and I just couldn’t believe he would be so f*****g reckless. I believed he would do it but not that he would put me and my mom without food for 3+ days. The j*****s… I still have that plushie by the way its in my closet my bio dad tho? No contact.
An old fandom friend told me about her stepmom who she absolutely hated. Apparently her dad had problems with her as well. One morning the woman just abruptly disappeared out of their lives forever and the only thing she took with her was the mattress.
My kindergarten age daughter was invited to a pool party with her classmates. I was chatting with a few moms when one of the moms mentioned that she was sad because she’s had to get rid of her great dane because he was too aggressive. In the most casual story telling way possible, she told us that the woman from the Great Dane rescue hadn’t really seemed to believe her (the mom) about how aggressive the dog was until he tore her (the dog rescue woman’s) ARM OFF. .
I was talking to a close freind when out of the blue he mentioned that a few months back (at the time) he nearly committed s*****e. I enjoy talking and being social. That hit me to my core, and I became non-verbal. I love that man and it hurt that I didn’t know how badly he was feeling.
I talked to him more on this, at first he was hesitant, but he is okay now. I got him the help he needs.
One of my mom’s friends, a tiny and friendly old man, once gave me a job at the cleaning service company where he worked. I was 18 and it was easy money, he was chatty and helpful, and over lunch he started talking about how he didn’t hear so well out of one ear.
He then just throws out there that he was tortured by electricity and ear drum slaps in his home country (a Latin American country under a military regime in those days) until he passed out, and he then came to his senses in a mass grave.
He reckoned they thought him dead and dumped him, and he woke up, crawled among the bodies and found his way home.
A tiny, friendly old man survived the kind of s**t the word “hell” barely can describe with accuracy, the kind of thing that would reduce me to a drunken, s******l wreck, and decided to tell Death to f**k off while he lived the best life he could.
It redefined the word “tough” for me. It’s not the hard muscular alpha-male type dudes, it’s the people who’ve seen the Devil and still continue on enjoying life, BECAUSE they’ve seen him and know what an alternative might be.
There was this dude I hung out with once in a while for maybe six months before we just fell off eachothers radar. My wife and I got along with him and his family fine, we just didn’t mesh into friendship very well.
A few years later he shows up just looking to talk to a friendly face. I’ve had bad times before, so I invite him in, and ask how he’s been.
Turns out he’s stressed out because his wife had an injury and told him to find romance elsewhere to unwind. (The injury was unusual but they were swingers) He thought it was a good idea to text his 12 year old stepdaughter and her 13 year old friend about it.
He lays it all out like he did it from his point of view, and at the end drops the one sentence “I told her she couldn’t buy a new movie so she stole my phone and sent all these texts to her and her friends phones to get back at me!”
Then he says he’s taking the plea deal and going to jail for 5 years, we don’t say anything remotely supportive, and he just leaves. So now he’s on a registry for life, because even he didn’t beleive it when he said his stepdaughter set him up.
We moved before he got out 5 years later. It wasn’t the only reason, but started the “maybe we shouldn’t live here in 5 years” talk.
I was doing a Europe tour in my early 20s with a bunch of Kiwis, Aussies, South Africans and a few others.
We were sitting in a hotel room in Rome playing never have I ever. People were throwing out pretty innocuous things until one guy said “Never have I ever stabbed a guy” and had a drink.
Many years ago, I was a young police officer in London. Posted to station officer one night, an old lady walks in to report a theft from her garden. I took basic details from her, including her family name and commented that it sounded very French. She had a faint accent, so it made sense, and she said that she was originally from a village in northern France.
The lady went silent and then said how much I looked like the father of a childhood friend. In a casual tone she then recounted how after the N***s invaded her town in WW2, the townspeople joined in the arrests and k**lings of the Jewish residents. She hid in a drain for a day and a half, listening to screams and gunfire crept out after 2 nights and escaped to Switzerland, where she lived on the streets for 5 years before coming to live in the UK.
She then looked up at me and said, ” I don’t suppose you’ll find my hanging baskets, will you ?”.
South African here, and recent events reminded me of this story.
In a mixed group setting, chatting with a fairly new friend in the group, who’s grandfather owned a LOT of land in the interior (think roughly between Bloemfontein and Colesberg area, for my fellow Saffas). Some of it was active farmland, a small amount was game, but most was unused. We were chatting about the hunting trips they took, farm life, etc, and he casually drops a “humorous” story about how they found out that some of the farm workers families were considering making a case for a small ancestral land claim on an unused part of the land.
When the grandfather found out, he rustled up some of the family and immediately went out and bulldozed all the old graves they could find, to remove any evidence of prior residence.
We all stood there in shocked silence for what felt like an eternity, and I can still vividly recall the moment even now more than 10 years later.
Worst part: he was genuinely confused as to why people started lecturing him about why that was so wrong. 😔.
Not so much a confession as an offer. I had been single for a long time, and wasn’t really fussed about it, I wasn’t in the right headspace for dating. Anyway, I went to see an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, and during a discussion about dating, he just up and offers to let me sleep with his girlfriend for money. I thought he was joking initially. He was not joking, and his girlfriend was not present, nor did she have any say in this proposed arrangement. She wasn’t a s*x worker or anything, just a regular woman.
We did not remain friends. A lot more came out about his a*****e and manipulative behaviour towards her over time. No idea what happened to either of them in the end, but I do know she eventually left him with support from her friends and family.
An old friend of mine confessed once that he hates women having a say in whom their partner is, and that it would have been much better if we can just take whoever we want. It goes without saying that he was an incel, but a pretty chill one up to that point. He said it so casually that it took me a while to register it.
The next day we had a fight and he blocked me for telling him he is deranged for saying he would r*pe women if not for the law. It’s been a year since then, and thank God, he is still single.
Recently met a guy. He tells me “you feel like home like I can tell you anything”. Proceeds to tell me how he smokes M**H to take the edge off in the morning “I’m no a****t”. Tells me how recently he’s been getting duped and only getting BATH SALTS. Uh WTF.
I think I caused a freezing moment, I brought up as a joke on a night out how s******l I can get and how thinking about it is so normal in my head (thinking this was just normal) my friend was so shocked and took time to talk to me for a good solid hour.
Ever since the boys always ask me how I am and have even surprised me with a visit to come see me (they live far from me).
I used to sell cable.
You would not believe some of the s**t 70+ year old-old people will f*****g confess to you.
I asked an older woman once what streaming services she used cause I was trying to recommend her an internet speed.
She takes a deep sighing breath and casually goes ‘my father used to sneak into mine and my sisters room at night. Mother told us to be proper girls and not air our dirty laundry to the neighborhood.’
I was just staring and all I could think to say was ‘so. . . .Netflix? Hulu?’.
My ex laughed about putting his grandma’s dog in the microwave and turning it on. He thought that the way the dog leaned to the left forever afterwards was hilarious.
I started planning a safe and secret escape immediately after that “funny” story.
A good friend of mine told me how when he was 7 he went to pee and apparently got a little on the floor….His dad made him lay in front of the toilet and he pissed on him to teach him not to miss the toilet. He said this very casually.
It’s sad to know that definitely wasn’t the only lesson his dad taught him. And that he said it like it was normal for that to happen.
A friend of a friend was talking about their childhood and they, for whatever reason, divulged that they used to t*****e their animals when no one was looking. Said it with a grin on their face and a giggle like it was no big deal.
My dad literally just told my sister (triangulating her to tell me) that he has an illegitimate son born after me that he wants to reconnect with. It’s messed up cause he wasn’t in this son’s or the mother’s life any more than being a s***m donor but since my mother died, we found out he’s been transferring our inheritance to himself, giving him a new lease in life where he gets to be the father of a son.
One day out of nowhere my dad explained about the last time he saw his father.
His father was apparently an alcoholic piece of s**t who would beat my dad, uncle, and grandmother after a hard night’s drinking. One night my dad and uncle had had enough and waited up for their father to get home. As soon as my grandad walked through the door my uncle threw a heavy raincoat over his head and then beat the ever loving s**t out of him with my father until he wasn’t moving anymore. Dad had said he was beating on him for about 10 minutes after my uncle had said he’d gone limp and then just snapped out of it.
The two of them then dragged him in to the street in the middle of the night and never saw him again.
My dad had blurted this out to me while we were out driving on an “errand” before explaining “you’re about to meet your great uncle, my uncle, who I’ve not seen or spoken to for decades. He knows where your grandfather is.”
We get to this house and meet my great uncle, have a ‘catching up’ chat before he told my dad that my grandfather had recently died alone of cancer in a local hospital. Even though my great uncle had had a way to contact my dad (the reverse of how my dad found my uncle), he never reached out to my dad and offered no explanation as to why and would not explain what my grandfather’s life had been like all these years apart from telling my dad he remained an alcoholic.
That was the most I’ve ever found out about my own family before or since which was a lot to take on for an 11 year old.
Years later it would occur to me that my dad lost both his father and his brother under the same circumstances: He’d beaten the s**t out of both of them before they’d stopped speaking and both of them had died of cancer as alcoholics.
Can’t pick em, eh?
Someone once said, ‘I didn’t k**l him, but I didn’t stop it either.’ Still haunts me.
A guy at my church who was as nice as can be, lovely well-dressed elderly gentleman from Chicago, I think? Anyway, we found out around the time he passed away that he was once a mafia enforcer, and did a lot of very very bad things. I’m glad he found religion and became a better man, because the world was much better off after that change.
Cab driver casually telling me how he found his minor neighbor attractive and how one day, when her parents left for a while, he invited her over to his house and proceeded to touch her in sexual ways.
I was 13 and alone in the cab, so on top of confessing a crime it also scared the s**t out of me.
My mom telling me she drank while pregnant with me. I was stuttering and sputtering so much in the seconds that followed that she said she was joking. But like, I don’t want to go into the details, she wasn’t joking. She also told my older brother in front of me, that she hasn’t gone longer than a week without smoking since she was pregnant with him.
My uncle when visiting our family when i was around 12 (also we live in ex soviet country for the context).
“Oh yeah kid, did you knew i was in vietnam? I was send there as a field doctor, patching up vietcong guys, i remember there was one who got his leg torn off by a chopper gun…”.
At a party a few years ago, a straight (male) friend was pretty drunk and just randomly mentioned that he sucked a d**k when he was a teenager but didn’t like it. Then continued on with the previous conversation as if nothing strange was said.
A guy sucking a d**k isn’t really crazy, but the context and abruptness of it was really bizarre.
So I took care of these two women that lived together in the evenings and the night shift woman told me she had a miscarriage at work. What was shocking was she put it in a walmart sack and it just happened to be trash day the next morning and she put the baby in the trash barrel in front of the house. At first I didn’t believe her but I asked the woman that worked days and she confirmed it was actually in the sink when she got there and had told her she needed to go to the doctor immediately but she didn’t and then got sick from not going. It happened about 5 months before I started working there and I just didn’t even know what to do or say. I still think about this over 20 years later.
Met a cute guy on a dating app in person for the first time. Dude nonchalantly admitted he has served time for domestic violence but it was totally his ex’s fault according to him 🙄 I blocked him as soon as I got home. I actually am a DV survivor and my a****r is serving a sentence for attempted murder of his girlfriend. 🙄 I don’t joke when it comes to DV and it feels like society in a way still kind of does….
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