Family stories you don't share with ANYONE

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Has your family ever done something so horrendous that you don’t tell anyone, for fear of being disbelieved?

There are a lot of these in my family.
[ol]
[li]My uncle built an ark. Yes, THAT kind of ark.[/li][li]My cousin joined a cult and renamed herself Iris. Then she took her dead mother’s body hostage.[/li][li]My grandmother beat a snake to death with a hammer under the light of the full moon. [/li][li]Supposedly a different cousin initiated the cover-up of the murder of a small town bully. My cousin was the town reverend.[/li][/ol]

I can’t be the only one! Anyone else with a story too bizarre for belief?

2

I have nothing to add that is anywhere close to being that Batshit crazy.

But I am fascinated by #3 above. There has to be something symbolic about the full moon and a hammer.

3

Apparently one of my grandfathers is illegitimate.

4

Symbolic of being a strong-minded woman? My grandmother is well known for her “I’ll do it MYSELF” attitude. (A week after her hip replacement she quit therapy because she didn’t have time for it. She gets around with a cane now.)

But anyhow:

Apparently she was in her kitchen just before bedtime when she found the snake on the floor. Being
(a) in curlers
(b) covered in green face goo (ok, not really, but this is the only way my brain makes sense of this situation)
© unwilling to go upstairs to get her husband for back-up

…she decided to take care of Mr. Snake herself.

Somehow she got it into a gunny sack (ok, who keeps gunny sacks readily available?), carried it outside (possibly also remarking upon the lovely full moon), and at a loss for killing methods, ran back inside for a hammer. She then proceeded to beat the ever-loving s**t out of it.

She was 85 at the time.

5

My great grandmother “G.G.” was a lovely, genteel woman. She made the best lemon merigue pie in the world.
She owned a beauty shop as long as I could remember. When she passed away in 1999 (when I was 35 years old), I found out at the funeral that she was the biggest madame in the area until I was two years old and she was busted. When she got out of jail, she opened a beauty shop in the same location and ran that until her death at 97 years old.
I had always wondered what my other great grandparents had against her. They wouldn’t have anything to do with her and I had heard rumors all my life about my grandmother being in big trouble for marrying “the boy from ‘that’ family”.
Well now I know…and I thinks it is pretty cool.
G.G.'s first husband died young and she was left to fend for herself and her son. She took up prostitution to pay for beauty school and found she had a knack for it. She decided it would be better to be the madame than the worker and decided to start her own house. She prospered and didn’t remarry until the age of 63.

6

I want to know about the Ark, Iris & her dead Mom, & Rev. Cover-up (who I may find to be heroic, depending on the circumstances).

7

I got the scoop of all times…But I don’t share it. :wink:

With anyone.

8

What’s wrong with building an ark? I mean…I don’t see why, but what’s the big deal? (We’re either talking about an ark of the covenant or a Noah’s ark, but what’s so horrendous about it?)

9

My grandfather’s older brother built an ark. The floaty kind.

The story begins at the end of World War II. Glen had been a Merchant Marine in the Pacific Theater and was well-loved by all the ship’s company. One night during a storm, Glen fell and hit his head against the capstan. He woke up a different person. The genial and easy-going person everyone knew was now curiously flat. He had no expression whatsoever. He spoke little, cared less, and was deemed so alarmingly perturbed that the ship’s surgeon arranged a private meeting with his fiance upon his return to port. The surgeon told Dorothy not to marry him.

She should have listened.

Their life together was hell. Three children, three moves, dozens of jobs, thousands of dollars frittered away on his hobbies rather than food: boats, motorcycles, a small plane. One night, after Dorothy came home tired from her 4th job and found her small stash of rent money had been raided, she forbid him from buying any other thing that endangered their children’s stomachs.

Glen had always been a tinkerer and amateur mechanic. He could pull apart any broken piece of machinery, examine its parts, and shove it back together in a way that would work. So this time, rather than use his stolen money for a Mustang, he used it to build… something.

It started as a wooden platform in their backyard. His two sons spent their afternoons beside him rather than doing their homework. After a month or two, a neighbor climbed his fence and told his friends that Crazy Glen was building an Ark.

Where this Ark could be launched in southeast Nebraska, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, is apparently not something he considered. The nearest river was the good ol’ Great Platte - a mile wide and a foot deep.

Glen worked on his Ark for a year. I don’t know much about the construction of the boat; I do understand that most of the outer hull was finished. As with all his other hobbies, this one was eventually abandoned for another project. Personally I don’t think he ever meant to complete it. It was just another one-fingered salute to his wife.

He cannibalized the Ark’s parts to build himself a plane.

Despite not finishing, he always loved the water. He drowned last summer.

And Iris? She was his daughter.

10

Freudian Slit, I don’t see the Ark itself as being so horrible. It’s what it stood for: a horrible father who preferred to see his children nearly starve than get a job.

11

Ah, okay. In that case, I see what you mean by horrendous. The idea of someone building an ark on their own (especially miles from any water source–so evocative of the original Noah!) for no real reason, but still being able to, is awesome. Not so much when you’re not supporting your kids.

12

Yes.

13

My great-grandfather was in the KKK. I don’t know if he was in the “lynch black people” sort of KKK, but apparently he was at least in the “tar and feather a guy because he was living with an unmarried woman” sort of KKK.

14

My grandfather may have fathered a child in his later years with a married woman. I think she’s about seven years old now. My grandfather passed away in 2007 and his married long-time girlfriend (she’d been with him for probably about 10-15 years at that point) basically vanished afterwards, since her meal ticket was gone and she wasn’t in the will, thank God. We knew she had a toddler that my grandfather had essentially been financially supporting as if she was his own. Some of my aunts have seen the kid and do not think she looks like him. Before he died, they were trying to figure out a way that they could surreptitiously get DNA tests done. Now we’ll never know.

15

I don’t exactly hate telling people this, but their initial reaction is usually to assume that I am inbred (I’m not) so it’s not something I’d ordinarily bring up: my mam and dad both share a half-brother.

My dad’s father, Cameron, was by all accounts quite the lothario as a young man. Apparently he has fathered 17 children in my home town, all to different women. After a one night stand with him, my grandmother got pregnant with my dad (quite the scandal at the time) and 9 months later he was born. Cameron took nothing to do with his son or, indeed, any of his other children.

Meanwhile, my grandfather and gran on my mam’s side, Peter & Ann, were busy pumping out my auntie, uncle and my mam but Peter was killed in a car accident when my mam was a baby. A few years later Cameron and Ann began seeing each other. She became pregnant and had a child with Cameron. This is my youngest uncle and is both my mam and my dad’s half-brother.

Some years later… my dad was a teenager and had begun dating. He came home and told my gran he had met a girl he really liked called Audrey R. My gran, horrified, asked what he’d been up to with the lassie. He insisted they had only kissed but that he was interested in dating her. My gran then had to explain that he could not date Audrey as she was his half-sister, born within a month of him to Cameron and another of his many conquests. My dad was mightily ashamed of this debacle and, to put it mildly, did not react well if we tried to take the piss out of him for it.

Another few years later and he gets together with my mam, also called Audrey(!), they get married & have us kids. In a class in school we had to draw our family tree… now THAT was a nightmare!

It’s strange how often back home I see people who bear a strong resemblance to my family and I wonder whether they are one of Cameron’s many offspring, or his grandchildren. My mam will sometimes point someone out in the street and tell me how I’m related to him/her. Sometimes in the pub people come up to me and introduce themselves as a relative of some variety.

A few years ago a friend of my dad’s, who is prostitute, had two children who look uncannily like my dad (and a lot like my brother and I when we were kids)… bad man! And so it begins again?

16

I love it! If she’s still around, tell her she has a devoted fan in the DC 'burbs.
My Grandfather came to the US from Ireland with a price on his head. Apparently an English Bobby had “disrepected” his wife (this probably means “raped”, as no one would have repeated that part of the story). He found the guy and beat him badly - left him for dead. The Bobby survived and gave evidence against my Grandfather who escaped and came here.

It was apparently well known that he was in the right, because within a decade or so he was visiting home without concern.

17

I don’t have any way of verifying this, but family legend has it that one of my great-great whatever grandfathers killed all his slaves rather than free them at the end of the civil war. This was told by my paternal grandmother, and if I was to take her as an example of that ancestor, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true. She was a vicious old harpy of a southern belle wannabe.

18

My mom is the oldest of 4 children. One day when her brothers were 12 and 8 the 12 year old decided he had enough (enough of what I don’t know since by all accounts my grandparents were wonderful parents) and stole my grandmother’s checkbook, put on a wig, and drove the car across the state line. During this whole debacle he had his 8 year old brother in the car with him. That 12 year old grew up to be my uncle who, while very nice, is still obviously a bit messed up.

19

My mom’s brother (Uncle Clyde) was an alcoholic.

One day before I was born, he and his best friend were sitting in the garage drinking. They were both wasted, and started discussing a gun the buddy wanted to buy from my Uncle. Well, they decided to take a look at it right then, and my Uncle accidentally shot his best friend in the face, killing him.

He never went to jail, and I know he was able to cross the US border, so I’m not sure what, legally, happened to him.

He is dead now, gone for about 12 years. He died because he was diabetic yet refused to stop drinking.

20

In a drunken late-night conversation, my great uncle (kind of complicated - wife’s mom’s mom’s brother) copped to raping a murdering a woman in his youth with several friends. They buried the body in some swamp in the South.

I never investigated and the case would have been about 50-60 years old by the time he told me, but I won’t ever forget that night. I have never told anyone about this.

He’s dead now.