15 Stories About Family Members Who Are Your Worst Nightmare

Sometimes, the darkest things don’t live in horror movies, but at the same table where we share our Sundays. They say that family is not chosen, and on the internet, hundreds of users were encouraged to tell what many keep quiet: sick secrets, unthinkable betrayals, and attitudes so twisted that they seem to be taken out of a detective novel. These 15 anecdotes reveal the shadiest— and sometimes implausible —side of the family bond. Get ready to read things that, if they weren’t so well detailed, no one would believe to be real.

• [Edited] My mother tried to take my newborn son from the hospital, which caused a lockdown of that part of the hospital. She was banned from the property. Five days later, when I came home with my baby, she started causing trouble again, so I told her to leave my house. She not only refused but smiled, so I called the police. That was also the last time I ever spoke to her. Even my grandparents didn’t speak to her for years because of this, and they were two of the most forgiving people in the world. © BobbleheadDwight / Reddit
• I went to high school with a guy whose parents had installed a camera in his room that fed into a TV screen in their bedroom. When he told me about it, I assumed it was one of those cameras they used when he was a baby, which they then disabled when he got older. But according to him, they still kept it on 24/7, even though he was 17. I’d never been so creeped out. © Unknown author / Reddit
• For me, it was my dad getting a $125,000 loan to “renovate” our house, but he actually pocketed some of the money. He bought my stepmom a new car and booked multiple cruises. He also lied to my Abuela about the money when she asked about it. I was furious when he said he used some of the money to book my high school graduation cruise, which I didn’t even want. © B******-soda / Reddit

• My aunt is my dad’s twin. He went to college and got his master’s degree, paying for it all himself by working three jobs. My aunt went to beauty school when her mom got tired of her moping around the house. She literally never moved out of the home she grew up in. When she had a daughter, she took out her misery on her. My aunt was vulgar around us kids growing up. She made fun of us to our faces, threw things at us, and bragged about throwing away her daughter’s school art in front of us. She never missed a chance to be a miserable human being.
  
  My cousin ran away from home a couple of times and always came to live with us for a week or so until she felt she could go back. When their mom (my grandma) died, the inheritance was divided between the two kids. My dad was the executor and made sure my aunt got the larger share whenever equality was difficult to achieve. She got the car and the silverware. Then my dad got cancer. How did my aunt respond? She sued him on the first day of his treatment, claiming that he had lied and hadn’t paid her the correct amount. She lost in court, but her lawsuit cost her her entire inheritance and cost my dad half of his, plus a significant amount of time and stress, all while he was undergoing chemotherapy. As part of the discovery process, it came out that my aunt had intentionally timed the lawsuit, thinking that my dad would settle because of his chemotherapy. Today, we pretend she doesn’t exist. I haven’t seen her in 20 years, and I don’t miss her. © Kahzgul / Reddit
• My aunt was upset that my dad wasn’t cheating on my mom like her husband cheated on her, so she started spreading vicious rumors about him at my great-grandfather’s funeral. She’s the same woman who, when she found a cancerous mole on her skin, decided not to have it removed so she could play the “How could my husband cheat on poor, sick me?” card. She could have easily not had cancer and been fine. But she’s a bad person. © sezrawr / Reddit
• My aunt won’t let her kids open their own soda cans because she’s afraid they’ll cut their fingers. That was fine when they were young, but now they’re 15 and 18. © SteelyDanny / Reddit

• My ex’s mom screamed in my face—literally inches from my face—that I was “stealing her son away” when he bought his house. He made the decision to buy the house, and he wanted me to live with him. You ask about the location of the house? Directly across the street from his parent’s house. © figsteav2 / Reddit
• I watched a relative take a ring off her father’s finger after he died of cancer and put it on her own finger in front of her mother, who was horrified. I imagine that, in her father’s final moments, she was thinking about taking the ring. Her mother later told me that she didn’t know how to react or what to say. It was a telling moment. © zinneavicious / Reddit
• My parents both deserve this title because they did it together. They bullied my autistic child to the point of tears many times because they wanted to toughen her up (i.e., they tried to bully the autism out). Then, while we were struggling to figure out why my celiac daughter wasn’t gaining weight and why she was having stomach issues, they started feeding her gluten. They even gaslit me, telling me that she was fine and that I was stupid for taking her to the doctor to find out why she was still having issues. One day, my dad let it slip. He said that I was trying to make my kids like me because they have the same genetic disease that I have. It’s almost like the genetic disease they have is something they inherited from me, LOL. (Hint: I got it from my mom, but they wouldn’t admit it.) I did give them one last chance. But they blew it. My dad had a major heart attack, and they came to pick up the kids the same week he was discharged from the hospital. They hid it from us. Then they blamed me, saying that I would hold it against them and not let them see the kids, so they had no choice.
  
  When I asked what they would have done if my dad had another heart attack while driving my kids around, they yelled at me and told me I was overreacting and needed to get my act together. I was yelled at, told I was overreacting, and told I needed to get my act together. Then, they hung up on me. The next time I talked to them, they blamed me for the heart attack. I laughed at them. Dude, I didn’t cause your heart attack. Your heart attack was caused by being 400 pounds, sitting around all day doing nothing, and eating two McDonald’s meals for lunch. But I digress. The final straw came when they got the family involved, lied about what happened, and had them start calling me, saying that I was tearing the family apart. I ended up blocking the rest of the family after they insisted that my parents poisoning my child was okay and that I shouldn’t be upset about it. © Wandering_aimlessly9 / Reddit

• I unknowingly moved to the same city as my half-sister. I always knew she was the favorite—she got a surprise grad party while my mom “forgot” to set one up for me; she got a $200 budget for back-to-school clothes while mine were “perfectly fine”; she got a bigger Christmas present budget; she got more affection; etc.—But I never expected her to visit my half sister and not make any effort to see me. I found out through her Facebook posts, which tagged my half sister and showed where they went to lunch. It happened to be right up the street from me. I tried to see her a couple of times before she left, but she was always about to leave at that time. We grew up in the same household, and she’s married to my dad. It’s not like she never saw me or that I was the offspring of the man she hates. My half-sister has caused a lot of trouble in my family, but my mom has always treated me like a delinquent child. Now, I speak to her as little as possible. © amaezingjew / Reddit
• I had a boyfriend in high school whose parents were very strict about dating. We always had group dates because we weren’t allowed to be alone. One time, we went to his house for a movie night, but everyone suddenly left. It was really late, and my dad lived across town. I called my ex-boyfriend to pick me up, but it would take him 45 minutes to get there. His parents made me wait outside on the porch alone in November in Canada. It was cold. He wasn’t allowed to wait outside with me. They didn’t even let me wait in the foyer under their supervision. © Unknown author / Reddit
• After my bilateral mastectomy, my dad couldn’t be bothered to call and ask how I was doing. A year and many complications later, he didn’t reach out on my birthday, the only time of year I ever heard from him. Ironically, that was the day I was finally getting my reconstruction. Even under anesthesia, I texted him and unleashed everything I’d felt about how he and his family had treated me since my parents divorced 18 years earlier. A few years prior, he told me what a terrible kid I was because I never went to the hospital to see him after he got into an accident while driving. I was 14 when it happened, and no one told me until well after the incident. Cutting him out was one of the best and most freeing days of my life. © misforamazing / Reddit

• My first college roommate was extremely coddled by his mother—or at least, that’s how it seemed to me. His home was about an hour away from campus, yet his mother came every day to do his laundry, make his bed, and clean his side of the room. They were both neat freaks. I wasn’t a slob, but I wasn’t quite as neat as they would have liked. I would come back from class to find her making my bed, organizing my desk, and picking up my dirty clothes. I didn’t really appreciate it, but I didn’t want to make waves, so I kept my mouth shut. It finally got really weird when I came back to the room after a class had been canceled, and they were both in the same twin bed. He was sleeping, and she was stroking his hair and face and singing him a lullaby. © notalife / Reddit
• I lost my phone around the middle of my first semester of college. I realized it was missing when I got back to my dorm. Thinking I had left it in one of my classrooms, I called it from a friend’s phone. A classmate who lived off campus had found it. He took it home because he knew it was mine and planned to give it back the following Monday during class. I figured that was that—I would get my phone back on Monday, so problem solved. Boy, was I wrong! He turned off the phone after that call, so my mom couldn’t reach me. She took a plane from Panama to D.C. just to make sure I was okay. She traveled halfway across the continent just to ask one question, even though my best friend and four other high school friends were attending the same college and living in the same dorm building as me, and she had all their phone numbers. To make matters worse, that wasn’t the last time she took an eight-hour flight just to make sure I was okay. © dr***_intern / Reddit
• My cousin, Becky, labeled her snacks in our shared fridge during a family reunion and made a spreadsheet to track who ate what at breakfast. She called it “Food Accountability.” We laughed it off. But, on the final night, we found out she had been secretly keeping score on us the whole week — not just about food, but everything. Who washed dishes, who “overused” hot water, who made a mess and didn’t clean it. She printed out the spreadsheet and held a family meeting to read our “infractions.” I had nine violations, including “toothpaste splash on mirror.” She sent everyone an “invoice” to pay, based on how many infractions they had! And where was the money going? Straight to her account — as “compensation” for putting up with all of us and our infractions during the family reunion.

After reading these stories, chances are you’ll want to call your family... just to make sure they’re not up to something. Were you left wanting more chilling revelations? Then don’t miss this other article about a family confession that literally chills the blood.