It might be healthy to scare the living daylights out of our beloved parents every now and then. It keeps them on the toes besides soon enough we’ll be too old to bug ’em the way we should!
The following Ask Redditors shared the times they traumatized their folks.
Interested in more stories? Find the original thread at the end of the article.
I was 18-years-old. As summer came to a close, I went on a week long hiking trip with my girlfriend. We went off the grid, many miles away from civilization. There were no designated campsites, running water, etc. We were roughing it out.
Being young and randy, we wanted to have our share of sexy time, so I brought a sizeable stash of condoms. Of course, there were no garbage cans in the middle of the woods. When the deed was done, I had to put the used condoms into a ziplock baggie in my backpack. By the end of our week in the sweltering August sun, that baggie was full and funky.
The trip went well. I returned to my parents’ house exactly one day before I had to leave for my sophomore year of college. I was a ridiculous slob. So, using my patented packing style, I hastily dumped my backpack’s contents into my bedroom closet, picked through the mess, took what I needed and left the rest.
Yeah. I forgot about the baggie.
But somebody else found it. No, not my parents. My dog.
Basically, my parents came home one day to find used condoms spread all over the living room. Yeah.
Apparently, my dog had found the baggie, but he didn’t just sniff it, or eat it on the spot or whatever. No, he took it downstairs and spread my week-old rubbers all over the couch and carpet in the living room – the first room you see when you enter the house. Welcome home, Mom and Dad!
They didn’t tell me about it for years, to spare me the embarrassment. When my dad did finally tell me, he was laughing his ass off. But my mother was apparently… not pleased.
bat_guano
So when I was 16 I found out that who I thought was my Dad, was actually just my step dad and not my real Dad. Well, a sister I never knew about contacted me and it turns out my real dad lived in a small town just 8 miles away from mine.
I met my sister and had her come over one day while my mom was at work. My mom came home early and when I introduced my sister, I introduced her as my girlfriend…the look on my mom’s face was priceless.
ohhighone
When I was about 8-years-old, I was going through our medicine cabinet (like the little rascal I was) and found one of my brother’s old EpiPens (the Epinephrine injector for use during a severe allergic reaction).
I was curious about how it worked, and figured it was like any other pen in that you clicked the top with your thumb and the needle came out the other end. Turns out the needle comes out of the end that you click, and it ended up going right into my thumb!
When my parents came upon me screaming my lungs out in the bathroom the walls were painted with blood that I’d sprayed around getting the pen out of my thumb. Apparently it was pretty grisly.
PinkWhiteandGreen
To this day we don’t know why, but toddler me decided one night to get out of bed, grab my toy hammer, walk to my parents room, round the bed, and smack my sleeping dad in the face before dropping the hammer and returning to bed.
He’s still jumpy in his sleep.
neogetz
Context: When I was about 7, I lost my cat. He just disappeared one day. Probably coyotes. But his favorite thing to do was to sleep in my mom’s bathroom sink. Also, my neighborhood is infested with cats because someone down the street never got hers fixed.
So, now for the real story: I was swinging on my porch swing, looked over into the bushes, and saw a cat. It was laying down, eyes closed, mouth open. No wounds as far as I could see. It looked asleep but it also looked sick. So to ‘make it feel better’, I picked the dead cat up, took it inside, and placed it in the bathroom sink. Plus, I was feeling really lonely after my first cat disappeared. I thought my mom would let me keep this one but she wasn’t pleased.
EarlLemongrab
When I was about 9 years old, my family and I lived in a crappy high rise apartment building. I opened the window of my bedroom, removed the screen, stuck my head out the window and screamed as loud as I could like I was falling. I then quickly proceeded to hide under my bed as my parents frantically came running in to my room with me nowhere to be seen and thought I fell out the window. Eventually I started giggling and was busted. They were not impressed to say the least.
its-a-jelly
My mom got my sister and I our first set of makeup when we were 11 and 15.
We ran to the bathroom to try it out and immediately decided that the best course of action was to paint bruises and wounds all over our faces, fake fight sounds and screaming, then run to our mother’s office area appearing like we needed to go to the hospital.
It worked. She turned about as white as a sheet and screamed before we collapsed into laughter. We weren’t allowed to have makeup again until we were adults and bought it for ourselves.
deleted
The first movie I saw with my ex-wife was Knocked Up. At the time there was awkwardness, because we’d accidentally had unprotected sex the week before. It turned into a big joke between us, and I bought the movie for her for Christmas. My mom asked me, “what did you get Jen for Christmas?” And without hesitating, or thinking, I said, “Knocked Up.”
She was driving, and almost wrecked the car.
h0p3less
When I was in kindergarten, I made a friend while at school. We really hit it off, and she said she had a big bag of Halloween candy at home and offered to share it with me. It was a fairly short walk to her place from school, and from her place a short little walk home. So I head over to her place, and completely forget to tell my parents where I went after school. I completely lose track of time while we were eating candy and playing video games. Her family must have thought my parents knew where I was. We continued to play board games and eat dinner, and I didn’t go home until after nine.
I remember getting home, walking through the front door and being greeted by the sight of my parents, both completely in tears, on the phone with the police. I immediately realized what I did wrong, and I thought for sure I was going to be grounded forever. They weren’t mad, though, they were just overjoyed that I was okay. A bunch of bear hugs and tear filled expressions of parental affection later, I felt terrible. They must have thought I was dead, I was missing for over six hours. Every single one of their friends was out looking for me. I was such a jerk.
deleted
This happened the summer after my senior year of high school.
After a long night of drinking I came home and apparently felt the desire to puke. My parents live on the third floor, I live on the second, and have a bathroom on my floor. For some reason I turned the fan on when I went into the bathroom, which is kinda loud and my parents room is pretty much right above the bathroom. So I puked hard, mostly in the toilet at first. I get hot and really sweaty when I’m puking, so naturally I strip down to my boxers. I then somehow managed to puke all over myself.
Well that’s unacceptable to drunk me so I guess I decided to take a shower to clean up. Never managed to turn the water on. Next thing I know I’m getting woken up by my mother screaming bloody murder, crying profusely. Apparently I passed out in the tub, the fan woke my mom up in the middle of the night so she came to investigate, and found me nearly naked covered in my own puke passed out in the bathtub with as she says my eyes rolling into the back of my head. She thought I was dead. I would say that was a bit traumatizing for her.
pole_whacker
When I was younger, my parents took one of my toys away from me, a brand new mother frigging hulk toy. This made toddler-me angry, so, I did the only logical thing to do. I crapped in their room. I crapped all over their bed and floor.
spadinskiz
You know how your parents told you to never run with scissors. Well I did not listen, I was running through the house and of course I tripped. The scissors went through my front teeth, and jammed in the back of my throat blood sprayed out of my mouth and nose.
It frightened my parents so much that my mom passed out and when she fell her face was smashed on the floor. I had to get three stitches and my mom had $30, 000 worth of face surgery so I figuratively and literally traumatized my parents.
Clownpounder2442
Ugh, this makes me cringe just thinking about it.
When I was 13, I was about as horny as you’d expect a 13-year-old to be. The problem was, I was living in a very religious household at the time (my parents go through phases. This was their religious “phase.” Luckily for me it was while I was going through puberty) and my parents had an ironclad parental filter on the internet so adult films were out of the question.
So, I decided to draw my own. And I’m a pretty damn good artist when it comes to drawing things that are right in front of me to look at. So what I’d do is, I’d take magazine pictures of women who had relatively little clothing on, and just edit out the clothing as I was drawing.
Well, of course, my parents found my stack of drawings eventually. Which isn’t too bad I guess, my dad even said uncomfortably that I had some talent at drawing and should pursue it (just with different subject matter).
Here’s the part that makes me cringe. My mother decided that one of the drawings looked too much like her. It was purely coincidental, it was literally a picture out of an advertisement that I had copied to the best of my ability. And she… asked me… VERY uncomfortably… if I fantasized about her.
Ladies and gentlemen, not much in the world makes you want to crawl into a hole and die more than when your own mother thinks you’ve been fantasizing about her.
coleosis1414
My mom AND dad walked in on me using a plastic bag, with lotion.
Needless to say I didn’t finish and the awkward laughter that came from their room was embarrassing.
nick908
When I was 7 or 8, I did a science project on the antibacterial efficacy of various soaps.
The project basically involved keeping hands dirty for a day, pressing grubby thumbs into petri dishes full of agar, then washing and doing the same again. I’d take tracings of the cultures: bigger colonies were bad, smaller ones good. This ended up winning the county science fair for my grade in a large metropolitan area, so that was nice.
But before that, after I’d finished the experiments (before I’d discarded the dishes) I got into a dispute with my parents (don’t remember what about). I thought, “I’ll show them”. So I took the nastiest culture and swabbed it onto their bedroom doorknob. They both got sick as dogs and I had to take care of them for a couple of days. That served me right.
dlman
After my first encounter with fellatio I rushed home to tell my best friend in the world at the time. I got on Facebook chat and told him EVERY DIRTY DETAIL…I then left my Facebook open when I went to shower.
My mom, after arriving home, went to check her email… And learned about my new sexual adventures.
sirguitarsalot
I was around 14 and was pretty depressed, so my parents were on guard.
One day, I woke up early with a runny nose, but being tired I just went back to sleep. A few hours later, my mom is panicking as she wakes me up.
My face was covered in blood due to a bloody nose and I looked like a corpse.
Dreygan
When I was young, maybe around 5 or 6, I was trying to find Christmas presents in closets or under beds, but instead I found a load of condoms and sex toys.
At the time I didn’t know what they were so I opened up the box of condoms (thinking it was a balloon) I started to run down stairs with what I thought was a sword (vibrator) and trying to blow up the condoms. I then ran into the room where my parents were and started telling them how I “finally found my Christmas presents.”
My parents still talk about that today.
Bananasluver11
When I was in the 8th grade I was staying the night at my friend’s house, and it so happened that one of my favorite movies, ‘A Christmas Story’, was going to be playing on TBS. My family didn’t have cable and I knew everyone would enjoy watching it on Christmas at my house so I asked my buddy if we could record it onto VHS so I could take it home. He grabbed a blank tape from his dad’s office, popped it in the VCR, and we recorded Ralphie and his Christmas shenanigans.
The following day I went home and told my parents and siblings that I had a copy of the movie. They were ecstatic and we all agreed to watch it the following week on Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve rolls around, and my parents, brothers (about 5 and 8 years old), sister (7 years old) and myself gather around the TV to watch the movie. I rewind the tape to beginning and press play. For the next three seconds (although it felt like an hour) my entire family and I watched a woman performing oral sex before it quickly cut to ‘A Christmas Story’. We had obviously taped over one of my friend’s dads’ adult film tapes.
Nobody flinched. I looked at my parents, who had these bizarre frozen smiles as if nothing had happened and everything was right with the world. My brothers and sister continued watching the T.V but had looks of bewilderment on their faces as they tried to process what they had just seen while simultaneously trying to enjoy the beginning of ‘A Christmas Story’
I was young enough that I took supervised baths. My mom stepped out of the bathroom for just a few seconds and I thought it would be super funny to sink to the bottom and lay motionless. Mom didn’t think it was nearly as funny when she came back in.
mslade
When we were about 5 or 7 years old, me and my brother discovered the similarities between ketchup and blood.
On evening, my mom wasn’t home yet, so we got some knifes from the kitchen, all the ketchup we could find, cut some holes in our shirts for the knifes and staged a huge crime scene in the living room.
We loved secretly watching the thrillers our parents used to see in the evenings from the living room door when we were believed to be in our beds, so we had some experience with a plausible scenario and put a lot of thought into it, creating a huge battle scene with blood on the walls, the couches and of course lots of ketchup on our motionless bodies in the centre of the room.
My mom had kind of a breakdown when she walked in.
emotionpolice