Small town dark secrets are so fascinating. Nothing binds a small town like a shared event that causes people to gasp—and nothing makes a better podcast topic, either. Every small town has that one incident that sent collective shockwaves through the community, whether it was a gruesome murder or a school scandal.
On Reddit, people are sharing their home town’s secret, dark stories — and now I want to go look up and see if my home town has any dark secrets.
1.
The mayor of the town I live just outside of was murdered by his girlfriend a little while back. And there was a realtor that was using his company as a front for smuggling drugs. Other than that it’s the usual small southern town crap. — drone42
2.
“The new police chief’s bachelor party was held at the local strip club. It was videoed when video was new. The cops broke in looking for the tape which was also recorded. New chief lost the job within a month.” — Dendad1218
3.
“This is more comical than dark. A house burned down in this small town of 600 population. One block from the fire station. It being a volunteer fire department, nobody was at the station. They tried to get the pumper truck out, but one of the volunteers had run it into a brick building the week before and it was still at the shop. We’re still undecided whether the house owner burned it down for the insurance. Strange that there was nothing valuable inside.” — third-try
4.
“15 years ago, the local District Attorney called his longtime girlfriend and told her he was taking the day off from work and that he loved her. He parked his car in town and went for a stroll past the local shops. He hasn’t been seen since. His car was found where he had parked it the next day — he had left his cellphone in the car, but his keys and wallet were missing. Later that year, his laptop, sans hard drive, was found under a bridge at a nearby river. The hard drive was eventually discovered by a local woman walking along the bank of the river, but it was too damaged to recover any data from. Interestingly, investigators discovered that someone had done a search on his home computer for ‘how to wreck a hard drive.’ Did he jump from a local bridge, did he encounter someone whom he had prosecuted who did him harm, or did he escape his life to start a new one?” — ReduxAssassin
5.
“Oh I have a doozy. Short version: popular kids in high school run a secret towel fight club and accidentally kill one of their friends in the house of a local politician, who proceeds to bury the story. Towel fight club: tape towels over your hands and beat each other up. It’s supposed to be just boxing but it sounds like they got out of control and hardly could call it that.” — LordranMelonFarmer
6.
“This is a sad one to me. There was an older couple here who ran a halfway house for troubled kids who’d recently gotten out of juvie, they fostered a few as well. They were loved in the community, wonderful people. One of them had an older brother who was a gangbanger in the nearest big city. During a visit, he snuck his 15 year old younger bro a handgun. Younger bro ended up holding up a local gas station and killed three people. One of them was my friend’s cousin. The foster parents lost whatever credentials they needed to do what they did, the kids went back into the system, and the giant house has been abandoned since around 2009.” — Hardcore_EHS
7.
“About 10 years ago a lot of homeless people disappeared and when the police did the investigation they found out a guy was kidnapping and eating those people. Police found his hideout and found a half eaten body and bones from another person. People don’t like to talk about it but everyone knows what happened.” — fakethought
8.
“The town I was raised in wasn’t exactly small, but here’s the one “dark secret” I know: my hometown was where lots and lots of sports players had their mansions. And so of course, their wives and children were out and about in the community a lot. Every single sports-player-wife in that town was (is?) heavily addicted to opioids. Every. Single. One.
Opioid addiction is obviously an epidemic all over the country, but among the rich wives in the town, it had a 100% ‘infection’ rate, so to speak. I know because one of my friend’s mom was the hairdresser for basically every single one of those wives. I was homeless my senior year of HS, and one of the sports player wives heard about me from her, and she gifted me an iPhone. That phone was pennies to her, but I still wish I’d expressed my thanks more, because that wife died of an overdose not long after.” — SIFremi
9.
“There’s a half submerged submarine from the war in the bay where I live, you can walk out to it when the tide is out. In the late 80s somebody cut open the hatch (one of the only visible parts left sticking out the sand), climbed in at was having a look around. The tide came in and he drowned. If I remember rightly the whole hatch was filled with cement, then welded shut to stop it happening again.” — 0lliebro
10.
“Our local pizza place was a known KKK hub. Everyone knew it, and still to this day, if you Google ‘[town] kkk’ the first thing that pops up is this pizza shop. They had some nasty-ass pizza too.” — Brian_M_Hill