"The whole speech of a dying man delivering justice is something that haunts the whole family to this day, 10 years later. It was heavy."
It goes without saying that last words are extremely important. They serve as a person's final chance to convey what's truly on their hearts and minds. Often, a dying individual will use their last words to bestow a message of love, gratitude, or even a sense of peace to their family members. However, there are also instances when a person feels the need to get lifelong secrets or regrets off their chest in their final moments...
So, when MPLoriya recently asked, "Which is the most haunting deathbed confession you know of?" their fellow Redditors did not hold back. From glimpses of the other side to family reckonings — here are 15 unnerving deathbed confessions that range from terrifying to heartbreaking:
1. "One of my uncles confessed to having two other children with another woman. He thought he was going to die from COVID, and I guess he felt he needed to come clean."
"However...he didn't die. That was back in 2020, and there's still a ridiculous amount of drama happening over potential inheritances and whatnot."
And my uncle is not a bad person, as far as I know, but we've never interacted much because his English is bad, and my Mandarin is atrocious."
2. "I knew of a couple where the wife developed a mental illness that caused her to stay inside the house. This went on for years. Eventually, after counseling, she made a little progress and agreed to go to the drugstore one night."
"She went in while her husband stayed in the car. While she was in the drugstore, someone walked in, shot her in the back of the head, and walked out. She died immediately, and the shooter was never caught.
Many decades later, the husband admitted on his deathbed that he had hired someone to kill her because he could not cope with her mental illness anymore."
3. "My grandfather revealed that my mother was not his only child. In the 1950s, when his longtime best friend was unable to impregnate his wife, my grandfather spent a week (A WEEK) in a remote cabin in the Ozarks having sex with this guy’s wife to give them a child."
"He said they had sex over 20 times that week. His friend even walked in on them once — having sex on the kitchen counter after he drove down for the day to check on them because there was no phone at the cabin. Well, the week of sex worked, and she got pregnant.
The couple then moved out of state to start a new life as a family. The only communication my grandfather received from them afterward was a letter confirming the child was born a healthy little girl. She is their only child, and she’s not aware of her biological dad. He never saw his friend again but stated he often thought about that cabin in the woods."
4. "My wife is a CNA at a nursing home. She once had a resident who used to be a delivery (OB) nurse in the 1970s and '80s..."
"When she was on her last few breaths, my wife was leaning into her face to clean it, and she whispered in my wife's ear, 'When I was a nurse, I switched babies around.'"
5. "I worked in a nursing home for over a year. We had one guy who was dying from complications of Parkinson's disease. He was placed in hospice and would often scream both in his sleep and while awake. He would beg, 'Please forgive me,' and, 'Tell your children I'm sorry.'"
"One day, one of my coworkers said, 'That's the bomb [referencing the atomic bomb]' in front of the patient, and my patient's face lost all color, and he then asked if we had ever heard of the Manhattan Project.
He began talking about bombs and other things he helped engineer and how he had been haunted his whole life. He never told his family about his involvement in the project because he was too overwhelmed with shame. He asked me if the melted children he saw (death visions) would ever forgive him. It was super rough."
6. "As he was dying, a family friend confessed that he had used an assumed identity of a dead friend for his entire adult life. He was a Jewish child in Germany in the 1940s, and there was a program in the UK that accepted 10,000 Jewish refugee children from Europe."
"He was slightly over the age to qualify, but the Nazis had murdered a younger friend of his, and he took the opportunity to steal the identity of this other boy. He escaped to the UK, eventually moved to North America, started a family, and lived out his life.
He never told anyone, including his wife (who passed away many years prior), because he was afraid he would be deported back to Germany."
7. "My ex's uncle (I’ll call him John for this story) was in hospice, and about a week before he passed, we visited him along with a couple more family members. A volunteer violinist knocked on the door and asked if John wanted to request a song. John smiled and said, 'Please play ‘Danny Boy’ if you know it.'"
"The violinist obliged and played the song. Once he left, John started crying and blurted out, 'I knew where my mom went all this time, and I never said a word!'
When he was seven years old, he woke up around 2 a.m. to the floorboards creaking. He peeked outside and saw his mom walking out the front door. Curious, he followed her, making sure not to make any noise. This was in Ireland, and their house was about a five-minute walk to the beach. John said his mom didn’t mutter a word and walked very slowly. When they reached the beach, he watched his mom walk into the ocean until he couldn’t see her anymore.
John walked back home, went to bed, and never said anything to anyone until that day. Everyone assumed she left her family for another man, so there was never an investigation."
8. "My grandpa disowned my aunt just 24 hours short of kicking the bucket. He was crying, and you could see how bad it felt, but he called it his last act of justice."
"The aunt he disowned had outed another one of my aunts as a lesbian in the 1980s. My lesbian aunt lost her job and her friends and was banned from many places. She had to move to another town to rebuild her life.
If that was not enough, the disowned aunt had done many other evil deeds over the years. I've never seen my grandpa cry, but he wanted to do it himself, not through a will, as his last deed as a parent. The speech of a dying man delivering justice is something that haunts the whole family to this day. It was a heavy moment."
9. "A woman once told me a story where her older friend had a clinical death for a few minutes, then was brought back to life by EMTs."
"When the friend returned to life, she grabbed the woman and urgently insisted, 'Change my will. Whatever you do, do NOT have me cremated. You won't believe what I saw. NO CREMATION.'
She then lost consciousness and wasn't able to be brought back by EMTs again."
10. "My wife's grandma handed her a book in her last days. It was just a small little black book with gold edging. She said, 'If you're lucky, it'll never happen to you.'"
"Her grandma was never lucid and had no idea what was going on 99% of the time. This was one of the only moments of clarity I had ever seen.
My wife opened the book thinking it was some sort of insight into her life or something like that. Nope. It was an address book with hundreds of names written in it. Each one crossed out had 'dead' written next to it.
She had outlived everyone except two family members, who she barely remembered, and a neighbor who would check in on her occasionally. She didn't know who the neighbor was, but she was so lonely that she let her come inside and hang out."
11. "I am from Argentina, and when I was a preteen, my grandfather was dying from kidney failure. It was a very traumatic and drawn-out death."
"He kept going in and out of these fever-pitch nightmares despite the morphine and medications he was being given. He began screaming things in German — well, not so much screaming but hoarse gasping — even though no one in our family ever spoke any other language besides English.
After he passed, my cousin told me that my grandfather sometimes spoke German without realizing it."
12. "When I worked in a nursing home, one of my patients was an older lady who had a mentally challenged son who would visit her. She had no other family, as her husband had died years before."
"After his last visit before her death, she began crying and told me the story of her second child.
When she went into labor with her second baby, her husband locked her in the outhouse and forced her to give birth there. He told her he didn't want the second child, seeing that the first one was born with a disability. After she delivered the baby, he forced her to drop it down the outhouse toilet."
13. "My dad, who was a straight-laced military man (or so I thought), confessed to my brother and me two days before he died that he had once been a paid arsonist."
"When someone owed too much on their home or wanted to get insurance money out of them, they would hire him to burn them to the ground. The very last home he burned almost got him caught, so he stopped doing it.
This all happened in the early 1970s. Nearly 25 years after he told us, I'm still shocked as shit that my dad was a criminal!"
14. "My grandparents fought for as long as I could remember. I actually learned to swear from my grandmother because she would cuss my grandpa out during dinner."
"In her later years, she became ill. Grandpa fell ill at the same time she was dying in her hospital bed. A nurse approached her and said, 'Look, your husband is here, too. Would you like us to move him to your room?'
She quickly replied, 'Hell no, I only married him because I thought he was going to die in the war, and I wanted the widow payment...Please let me die in peace without that idiot around me!'
They were married for over 75 years and had 6 kids and 22 grandchildren."
15. And finally, not exactly a confession — but the eerie lack thereof:
"My mom was raised in Kentucky, where miners and coal operators were involved in conflicts from the 1930s onwards.
One time, she told me about an older man who had worked for the coal company back in the day and had presumably done bad things on their behalf — car bombs, shootings, and things of that nature.
Years later, as he lay dying in his hospital bed, the coal company had someone sit in his room for 24 hours to be sure he did not make any deathbed confessions. Creepy as hell, I always thought."
Which one of these last words did you find most unnerving? Have you ever heard any shocking deathbed confessions? Let us know in the comments!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.