I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be on the receiving end of a huge, earth-shattering confession. I don’t want to know people’s darkest secrets. I don’t need that kind of responsibility.

If these 14 people didn’t already feel this way before they heard these confessions, they surely do now.

14. Oh my goodness how could you have ever known?

My mother always hated driving over a particular bridge, one that had a metal mesh as the road bed. The sound the tires make is very particular. We used to tease her about it for years. One day she had enough, and told us why.

When she was a wave in WWII, she went out to party with some sailors. One of them had a car with running boards, and one more sailor wanted to come along, one the other guys didn’t like. They told him to ride on the running board and hang on. When they went over a bridge with a similar road bed, they hit the gas, and the extra sailor fell off and was run over. She was still carrying the guilt 40 years later.

13. When you realize someone has a good reason for drinking.

Shared an off-campus apartment with a very cool older guy in college. He was a nurse. Got up super early every morning to do his shifts. Every night you could find him at his regular Irish pub. They let me drink there without ID because they knew I was with him. Basically a super high-functioning alcoholic.

One day I came home after finishing my exams. He brings out a bottle of Jameson to celebrate. It was about 2/3 full. After a few shots he starts telling me about his time in Vietnam. I’d known him for two years and he had never brought it up, and I had never asked. I knew he was a vet, but assumed he had been a nurse. Nope. Special forces (I’m not military and I’m sure I got some of the actual military stuff wrong, as you shall come to understand). His demeanor totally changed after a few drinks. He started telling me about having to go on covert operations to carry out assassinations of civilians. Said he dreams of the faces of all the people he killed. We ended up polishing off the entire bottle. He got up the next morning at 5am and went off to work. I spent the entire day moaning in bed and praying to the porcelain god.

We never spoke about it again.

12. What an actual nightmare (I’m glad she shared this one, though).

When I was 14 my mom took me and my sisters and a couple of our friends to the beach. My sister (15) and I got our own room with our 2 friends and wound up meeting some boys and getting drunk. My sisters friend (15f) was really drunk and got super upset and confessed that her step father had been sexually molesting her, raping her, for years. Really really really horrible stuff. It sobered everyone up fast. We rallied around her, told her we were there for her, yada yada, but when we got home from the beach trip a few days later I knew I needed to tell my mom. After I told my mom she got the state police involved, there was a trial, and the man wound up sentenced to 8 years in prison. It turned out he was doing it to the younger sister as well.

11. I hope that uncle is in prison now.

My cousin and I found out we were molested by the same uncle

10. And now we know she wasn’t alone.

After a work party the wife of a colleague and me ended up being the last two people standing. We were both fairly drunk when she started telling me about how she was raped by a priest when she was a kid. The church covered it all up and the bastard never faced any charges.

9. That’s something to hear at a bar.

A guy in a pub told me through tears that two guys took him at knifepoint and bound to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, raped, harmed and kept him captive for days. He got free whilst they were sleeping, stabbed them both to death and left them there.

Whether he was actually telling the truth or not I will never know. He seemed very deeply traumatised by the experience and seemed to if nothing else believe what he was telling me. It was in the days when I didn’t have internet access so I wasn’t able to look for clues about it.

8. My heart, you guys. I would not be okay.

A funny old drunk in my town used to come in and chat with me at the ice cream parlour I worked at. He was a very kind old man who liked to joke around and he was always very appropriate to me and the other teens who worked there, just lonely I guess.

One day I was asking him if he was ever married and he got tears in his eyes and said i lost her, she died with the baby, and that’s when everything went bad. And then left. Me and the other girl working just sobbed, it was so sad.

7. What on earth is wrong with people.

I had someone tell me that he molested his daughter when she was an infant because he was angry and thought that his girlfriend had cheated on him and that she wasn’t his biological daughter. He went on to say DNA testing was done and it was determined that she was actually his daughter and that he felt very guilty about the whole thing. His daughter was 7-8 at the time he told me this.

I literally spent a night tossing and turning thinking about it and finally decided I had to report him.

6. This is the premise of a movie or something.

My best friend disappeared for a while, presumably left town. We were both in our mid twenties. He came back after a month or so and he’d take me out every night drinking and partying. I wondered how he was able to blow so much money on drugs and alcohol but he wouldn’t tell me. I saw him pay our tab one night and he must have had twelve or fifteen grand on him.

After coming back to town he basically stayed inebriated at all times and wanted to hang out with me whenever he could. He’d come over to my place after closing the bars down and we’d often keep partying until morning. He would usually end up breaking down and crying to me about how he can’t live with himself over what he did. He wouldn’t give details.

Night after night this would happen until he broke down again one night and told me he was paid a lot of money to do some bad things to bad people. He confessed that he was paid by someone in his dad’s gang to burn someone’s business down over a money dispute. Then he told me he killed a couple of guys who were thought to be molesting children. He said he was given a handgun and a shotgun and was paid ten thousand dollars after each man was executed.

More than ten years later I still don’t know if I believe him or not. After he came back he was so f*cked up and depressed. If he was telling the truth it would make sense. He kept doing drugs and drinking until about five years ago when he had a heart attack at age 27. He quit using drugs and alcohol but the damage was done. He suffered another heart attack six months later and died a few days after his 28th birthday.

He was the funniest and kindest person that I’ve known and I miss him.

5. Those are some demons.

I had a boyfriend who never talked about his past ever. He talked so fondly of his old state but just about the actual state never about people. If you trie to prod further he would just say oh well it doesn’t matter anymore.

We were young (I was about 19 and he was probably like 23 or so). He drank a sh^t ton all the time and whatever we were young so I just thought that it was normal and all in good fun.

One night while sh^tfaced he started talking about how much he loved going into the woods and how he and his friends enjoyed playing on the rivers and streams in his old state. Then he got very sad and started to babble a bit incoherently. I heard him say something along the lines of his friend came to his house on meth and they were all also on drugs. Then more incoherently babble then something about his friend getting shot in the face. Then more incoherent babbling then something about that is why he can never go home again.

He was so desperately sad and missed his home very much. You could tell everytime the topic came up. So yeah I am pretty sure he accidentally (or on purpose) killed a guy and was on the run. I have.my money on accident because he seemed so distraught buuuuuut you never know. Also, you barely know anyone or anything at 19 years old.

I often wonder if he ever had to face those demons.

4. You really never know what’s happening in people’s lives.

One of my best friends since middle school opened up to me the day we had our last day of high school. We had been partying all day (got off at 10 am) but most people left at around 3 pm to go get ready for the senior’s dinner and after party and what not. My friend stayed behind with our class president. I told him I’d pick him up for the dinner and left. When I got back, both were falling down drunk and in tears.

A few years earlier, our class pres had lost his father. I take my buddy back to his house so he can get changed for the dinner and on the way he tells me what happened. They had kept drinking when everyone left and eventually got to the topic of their dads. I had never met my friend’s dad, he died and that was all I knew. I never knew HOW he died.

It turns out my buddy’s dad was a lawyer or something in the country he’s from and was being extorted by a gang. When money started to run out, my buddy’s dad sent the family to another country and told them he’d meet them there, that he had to finish some things up. A few weeks after moving they learned that he had been murdered by the gang. It completely f*cked my friend up.

We always used to drink heavily and whatever since we were in high school. For me it was just drinking, for my buddy it was numbing the pain. It was f*cking shocking when he told me this, and really made me understand him a lot more, why he acted how he acted.

3. One weird little lie.

My friends husband told me he was hiding liquor from his wife (my friend). Which was weird, because they both drink and it’s not a big deal. I told my friend what he said, she confronted him and all of his lies started pouring out. Cheating on her with multiple women, lying about his income, taking cc’s out in her name, racking up tens of thousands of dollars on them, stealing from their kids college funds. They are now divorced. That weird little lie he told me while drunk is what started it all.

2. This is epic.

When he was 11, my dad was abducted and raped by three men. He was so terrified that he never told his parents.

After my grandpa passed away, my dad finally told my grandma what happened. She told him that they already knew. One of my dad’s siblings knew and had told grandpa. She just said that he had taken care of it.

A few years later, a developer bought my grandparents farm and turned it into a development. During excavation they found three male skeletons buried in a single grave. I guess grandpa really did take care of it. Rangers really do lead the way.

1. This is mostly really sad.

My old pastor told me he was gay and found women repulsive he had a wife and a baby on the way this was in a small very religious town where fear about the homosexuals were rampant

I would…I don’t know what I would do if I had heard these. No idea.

What would you have done? Have you ever had something like this happen? If so, tell us about it in the comments!