It smells like someone's pants are burning, and these people know whose. Nothing is more thrilling than catching a pathological liar in the act. Whether he/she has been hiding several little white lies or one huge secret, the truth always finds its way out to bite the liar in the rear. These innocent witnesses share the messiest, most tragic, and most memorable ways they watched the truth unfold.
All content has been edited for clarity.
A True Party Pooper
“A guy I used to work with had been attending graduate school and my work threw him a party shortly after his graduation. He shows up to the party with his diploma – which of course is a huge red flag to everyone there (my company was full of alumni that attended the same school, and knew that you wouldn’t receive a diploma for at least several weeks/months after graduation).
One of the HR ladies called up admissions to the school to verify that he was previously registered there. He was not, and was never a student. He was confronted about this and pretty much had a meltdown, telling her he had issues ‘at home’ and was currently trying to deal with them through the employee assistance program at the company. So the HR lady calls up the EAP to verify he was a client – at that very minute the guy runs into the EAP office and has another meltdown. He was immediately thrown off the premises, never to return.
To put this in perspective, his employer had adjusted his work schedule for 2 years so that he could attend classes. The company he worked for is a well known engineering firm, and he worked on a government contract that required a high level of security clearance. Also, the company had an educational reimbursement program that allowed (during his time-frame) an allowance of around $10k tax free to the employee for schooling expenses (I am hazy as to if he was enrolled in this program or not). Being fired for pretty much embezzlement and lying to your employer is not a good thing. Also, I think his wife divorced him.”
Kim, The Mother Of Lies
“When I was in junior high, I had a ‘best friend,’ let’s call her Kim, who basically treated me like a dog. She was always insulting me, always bossing me around – basically she was just an awful person all around. I don’t really know why I was her friend, but I was. Anyway, on top of being a little brat, Kim was also a RAGING pathological liar. She was constantly trying to one-up me with these huge, obviously not true lies, but since I was a pushover and she was my only friend, I usually just took it and pretended to believe her.
But one day, Kim told a lie and I decided I had enough.
She waited until we were at the bus stop with a bunch of other kids and started telling them a very elaborate lie about how she had been visited by God in a dream and was told that she was pregnant with the next Jesus Christ, and that the baby was the biological son of the most popular guy in school (who she knew I had a crush on). She went on and on and on all day about how she could now feel this child kicking in her womb and how God said the baby’s father was her soulmate and they would be married in a year’s time, blah blah blah, and some of the idiots on the bus actually believed her, or at least pretended to. I stayed quiet about it all day, nodding politely whenever she started in on her story about how she was the new Blessed Mother Kim.
After school, I would always get off the bus at Kim’s stop and spend the afternoon at her house doing homework until my mom got home. That day was no different. I got off the bus with Kim, smiled and nodded enthusiastically as I listened to her jabber on about how she was supposedly gifted with God’s holy creation.
‘You’re okay with me being pregnant with Ryan’s baby, right?’ Kim asked me as we started up her driveway. ‘I know you were kind of in love with him, but I feel like this is fate, you know?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Okay, good,’ Kim sighed with her smug smirk. ‘I mean, it’s not like you’re really Ryan’s type anyway, you know? He’s always hanging out with those really skinny girls.’
Prick.
But I said nothing. I just nodded and smiled like I had done all day and followed Kim into her house, down the hall, and into her kitchen, where her mom was sitting at the counter reading a book.
‘Hi, girls!’ Kim’s mom sang out as soon as she saw us. I always liked her. ‘How was school?’
‘It was fine,’ Kim said.
‘Did anything interesting happen?’
The polite smile on my face slowly crept up in the corners to a full-on Grinch smirk.
‘Kim, why don’t you tell your mom the story you told everyone at school?’ I looked into Kim’s eyes and could almost hear the sound of her stomach falling out of her rear. ‘About how you’re pregnant.’
I calmly sat in the nearest chair, folded my hands in my lap, and watched as the world burned down around me.”
Like Getting A Phone Call In A Dead Zone
“My friend was helping her boyfriend when his dad discovered he had cancer. He was distraught and went home often. It put a pretty big strain on their relationship. Finally, his father succumbed and passed away. He broke up with her shortly after. Five days later she got a call FROM HIS DEAD FATHER asking if everything was okay between the two of them. The father never even had cancer. He made the whole thing up.
Basically they had been working together at a year long children camp and he went home for a few weeks. Got trapped in a lie and instead of telling the truth, the boyfriend just let it keep going. The father had no clue about the situation.”
His Little White Lie Led To An Explosive Situation
“My girlfriend and I had been dating for a couple of years. A conversation came up where she wondered aloud how much money I had saved. We worked at the same place and she knew how much I made. I had always been a make-money-spend-money guy. She had been raised in a save-all-the-money-you-can household. She suggested that I probably had saved about XXX. I was well short of that, but I figured she was probably correct about where I should be at this point in my life, so I panicked and said she was correct.
At this point, despite owning my own place and never having been in debt, I was now living in a virtual debt. Over the years, I did whatever I could to legally make some money on the side to help make up the difference, but it wasn’t happening.
Fast-forward a couple of years and we got married. We had different accounts so she didn’t yet know that we didn’t have as much money as she thought we did. Still not in actual debt, but expectations made it so I basically was in debt.
At some point we decide to buy a house. The idea was to buy a new single family home with a downpayment using our savings and a home equity loan drawn on my condo. Then, after buying a house, we’d sell the condo and restore some of our savings. At the time, I knew things were coming to a head, but I figured that every house we looked at was snapped up within the first week by people paying cash (we looked in the South Bay and Peninsula area of California and lots of families were looking for homes in that area thinking it was a fast-track path to Stanford, etc), so it would take a LONG time before we made an offer that was accepted.
I was wrong.
I ended up taking out a loan on the condo, borrowing more money than the condo was actually worth. We bought the house and listed the condo for sale. Again, I convinced myself I had time to make up the difference because, despite the fact that SFHs were selling like hotcakes, condos were moving very slowly. I figured the longer the condo was on the market, the more time I’d have to make up the difference (mind you, I had NO idea how to make up that much money… I just knew I’d find a way). Of course, within a couple of weeks of listing the condo, someone made an offer and before I knew it, we were in escrow.
Finally, the day comes where we needed to close on the sale. My wife still had no idea what was going on, and as far as she knew, things were fine. I however, realized that I needed to actually cut a check for money that I did not have to the escrow company so I could SELL the condo that I owned.
So what did I do? I called up a bank and threatened them to give me money because I had wired the bank with several ‘devices’. I couldn’t bring myself to actually go into a bank and threaten someone face-to-face. I figured I could scare someone well enough to have them drop off money at some random location.
That didn’t work. Ended up getting arrested and sentenced to just under three years in Federal prison. Served about two years, got six months halfway house. Currently close to halfway through my three year Federal probation and putting this all behind me.
Everything hit the wife pretty hard. The whole time from arrest to actually going to prison took about 18 months (Federal cases go REALLY slow, even if you are pleading guilty). I ended up getting divorced before going to prison. Haven’t spoken to the ex since a week before I went to prison.”
She Got An A In Lying 101
“My sister went to Atlanta to go to college. My parents mortgaged their house to pay for it. Rents her an apartment in Atlanta, gets her enrolled in school, buys her a cheap car, and off she goes.
About a year and a half later, after bumming money for ‘school expenses’ for the last 18 months, the parental units get curious and go to visit her at school (up until this point, she always had an excuse for them not to visit, too busy studying, tests, etc.) only to find several bums and junkies living in her apartment.
One of the bums tells my parents where to find my sister. She works at a club. She told my parents that she had gotten a part-time job as a waitress a few months before. Well as it turns out, she was stripping. My parents got to see part of her show when they went to find her at her ‘waitress’ job.
After all is said and done, she had gone to school for about 1 month, got bored with it and dropped out. She got a bunch of ‘roommates’ to help her party away my parent’s money. Somehow, my sis had gotten the school to change the address on all the paperwork to her apartment address, so my parents never got the several notifications from the school about her dropping classes. Of course, the school kept the tuition money.”
We’d Thought He’d Come Clean
“I have a step cousin (the main character of this tale) who’s a few months younger than I, and we were both about 20 when this story occurred. This played out over the course of about a week, although details weren’t made clear to the family until months after the fact.
So after graduation my cousin decided not to go to college. I don’t usually judge people for that decision, but in my cousin’s case I kinda did. Reason being: he was in a band, and even though his grandparents offered to pay full freight for college, he opted to quit school and focus on his band. That’s all well & good… except the band wasn’t good. They weren’t necessarily bad, except that every song sounded exactly the same – a whiny ripoff of Blink 182 with always-the-same lyrics about some girl. My cousin is the guy who will show up at a party with an acoustic guitar, ignore everyone else in the room and sit there serenading the neediest-looking girls he can find. Honestly, he had a great success rate when it came to banging teenage groupies at his shows. He had this weird little following of local girls that was kind of creepy. Anyway I think you all understand my disapproval of his band scene so I’ll stop there.
So my cousin was living in his mom’s condo, not working, not doing anything but playing around with his band and doing little gigs in his back yard or at Pizza Hut. His mom was never there (she was/is a single mom and a totally absent parent, which explains the majority of his behavior if you want to get all psychological about it) and he had the run of the condo. Word starts to spread amongst the family that he was smoking a lot of weed. Now everyone in my family has smoked weed at one point or another in their life, but we saw how much of a disaster my cousin was and we were a bit concerned. My brother, a big strong role-model of a Marine, sat down with the kid and had this big heart-to-heart with him. The brother came back to me/the rest of the family and basically said, ‘That went well, he was responsive, said he’d stop smoking and would try to work on getting back into school. Stop worrying.’ So we stopped worrying.
Two months later… my uncle gets a call from the Fire Dept. The smoke alarms went off at the condo and my cousin was currently getting medical treatment at the scene. His mother is unreachable and they need someone to come over and make decisions. So my uncle drives over and arrives to this scene:
Firetrucks filling the condo driveway, the fire alarm going off inside, an ambulance and a ton of police cars all lined up with lights blaring. My cousin is sitting in the ambulance getting his foot stitched up and the police are contemplating arresting him. My uncle went over to my cousin and asked what happened. The story unfolded like this:
My cousin got home and decided to smoke weed, so he went into the bathroom and lit some candles to cover the smell and took some hits in the bathroom. The candles were placed on a glass shelf above the toilet. My cousin smoked and promptly passed out, leaving the candles still lit. They burned all the way down and the heat finally caused the glass shelf to break and the candles to fall. The linoleum floor started smoldering, causing the condo to fill with smoke, which set off the alarms and woke up my cousin. He ran into the bathroom to put the candles out, gashed open his foot on the broken shelf, then proceeded to bleed all over the carpets while he tried to hide his weed. The sprinklers started going off, soaking the entire condo, so my cousin ran outside right as the first fire trucks were showing up. They kept him outside for treatment so he couldn’t finish hiding everything. The fire fighters went inside, found close to two ounces of weed (he had started selling it to his friends) and wanted to arrest him for possession/intent to distribute.
My uncle asked him, ‘Do you have anything else hidden upstairs?’ and my cousin responds, ‘Yeah I have another ounce under my bed.’ My uncle told him to flush it. My cousin got mad, and responded, ‘No I’m not flushing it, do you know what that’s worth?’ At this point, my uncle was fed up to the point that he just left the scene. The cops found the rest of the weed and arrested my cousin on the spot. His charges included not only the weed, but also the fire (not sure what the official charges were, but they were along the lines of negligence, property destruction, etc).
Not only did he face charges, but the sprinklers destroyed everything in his mom’s condo, everything in the two adjoining condos on the floor below them, and everything in the two adjoining condos on the floor below those – for a total of 5 soaked & ruined condos, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of a $1million + insurance claim.
The condo association voted unanimously to kick my cousin out of the complex. Apparently he decided not to leave, because a few days later one of the other residents heard footsteps in the building’s attic (to this day I have no idea what he was doing in the attic), called the cops, and the cops came to find my cousin sneaking out of the attic. Arrested again for trespassing.
Not one week later the family gets word that my cousin’s been arrested for a third time. This time was yet another curve-ball (for some of us, anyway… I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see this coming): apparently he’d texted an inappropriate picture of himself to a 16 year old girl, and her parents found it and were pressing charges.
Now this is a tad exaggerated, but my punchline for the past few years has been: ‘So that’s how my cousin went from being a regular guy to being a weed-dealing-arsonist in the space of 8 days.”
Lies Can Reveal The Worst Truths About People
“I had a ‘friend’ in high school who turned out to be downright crazy.
It started with her suddenly withdrawing from our group of friends. After a week of avoidance I noticed she had written ‘I want to die’ over and over again in a notebook. I freaked out, talked to her and she made it clear she was unhappy. Her parents were going through a divorce etc. I set her up with a guidance counselor and she seems to get a bit better.
Fast forward a few months and something else is going on. I ask her what’s up and she breaks down and tells me she has cancer. I was shocked as I’d never known someone my age to have cancer. When pressed as to what kind she had, she became inconsolable and didn’t want to talk about it. Her hair started looking thinner because of the chemo and she was becoming paler and thinner.
She became depressed again and she told me she was given some anti depressants. One day she called me, crying and screaming saying she had swallowed all the pills and was killing herself.
I freaked out, went and got my dad and told him the whole situation. We drove over to her house, and he was in the process of calling 911 when we pulled in to her driveway. We find her dad hanging around and we grab him and run inside.
She’s watching TV with the most ticked off look I have ever seen. It’s pretty clear she has not swallowed any pills. She grabs me, drags me to her room and pushes me against a wall, tells me I should have ‘minded my own business.’ All this is going down while our dads are downstairs talking.
Turns out she never had cancer. She never wanted to kill herself. She used it as a means to isolate me from my friends at the time and manipulate me to do what she wanted. She kept going to the hairdresser to get her hair thinned out, used pale make up and was seriously dieting to appear thinner.
We stopped being friends after that, and 9 years later my dad still doesn’t like her.”
She Smoked Him Out
“My sister is very absolute in her hatred of smoking, so when she started dating former smoker, she made it very clear that if he started smoking again he’d have to choose between her and the habit.
Well, three of four years later, after they were living together and engaged, she discovered some cigs in his car. She was pretty peeved, figuring he’d smoked a few while out at the bars with his friends. They got into a big fight about it and then he somehow lets it slip that he’d been smoking without her knowledge for years.
Whenever an errand needed to be run, he’d go… just so he could smoke. He’d carry mouth wash and a spare shirt so she wouldn’t notice the smell. She seriously thought he was just the cleanest, most helpful guy ever.”
“He’s Too Far Gone Now”
“Yesterday I learned that my favorite cousin has been an addict for the last two years. He was recently caught because lots of my family’s belongings went missing. From my Aunt, he stole all her jewelry, and he hacked her Sprint account to buy two iPhones then sell them. He stole all of my grandfather’s collections. He had multiple rare coin collections and stole all his class rings. My grandfather worked for Hughes Aircraft for 30 years, and my cousin stole commemorative pens given to my grandfather from Hughes for his years of loyal employment. They weren’t worth much money, but because Howard Hughes himself gave them to him, they had astronomical value to my grandfather. My cousin stole all these things for his addiction, and for a while nobody knew. He is not my cousin anymore, and now my family has to look out for our own property in case he comes after it.
He was a promising baseball player and was even accepted into minor league a few years ago. He’s too far gone now.”
He Sits On A Throne Of Lies
“My bum of an uncle used to have this job where he was away on business trips every other week. His girlfriend and 2 kids didn’t get to see him too often, and treated him like a king when he was in town. Later we found out he was only working at Walmart making minimum wage, and had another girlfriend on the side. Girlfriend #2 also treated my uncle like a king and let him live at her place for free. Girlfriend #1 found out because she had some vacation time and wanted to accompany him on his ‘business trip’. I have no idea how he managed to hide this for so long.”
He Got A Bachelor’s Degree In Lying
“My cousin has been faking going to University for the past 2 years, when he in fact flunked out. He never told our family, and only brought it up when our Grandparents had bought their flights to come see him graduate in December.
My cousin apparently dropped out after being denied financial aid due to poor grades. He has been telling our entire family that school has been going ‘fine’ and his grades are on par. My entire family (not that big) was planning on coming to his graduation, which means flights for a couple people. My grandparents just spent over $3,000 for international tickets and reserved a hotel. After learning of everyone’s intention to come to graduation, my cousin finally confessed. Now my household has been a whirlwind of cursing and disappointment, while I sort of find it to be the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed. I know I cannot do worse than what my cousin just did, and that makes me so happy.”
His Social Media Page Told The Whole Story
“A girl I knew in high school had a reputation for being a bit needy. One night she called a good friend of mine up sobbing because one of her best friends from college, someone my friend had never met, committed suicide. My friend went to comfort her, but she was inconsolable the whole night, couldn’t be left alone. My friend stuck with her for almost a whole week, calling to check in, offering to hang out, whatever she needed.
Two or three years later, my friend sees the dearly departed has an active Facebook page. Awfully sociable behavior for a dead guy. My friend was not amused.
‘Hey x,’ she posts on the fibber’s wall. ‘How is it that Dead Guy is posting on Facebook when he’s supposed to be dead?’
The post is deleted an hour later, no explanation.
‘Hey x,’ she posts again. ‘I’m not going to stop posting until you tell me how a guy who supposedly died two years ago, a guy whose loss devastated you so much that it required my immediate presence, is able to reach out from beyond and post status updates on Facebook.’
Again the post is deleted, this time with a private message: ‘Please don’t say anything else, I promise I can explain.’
My friend tells her not to even bother. She’d been feeding my friend and a lot of others little white lies for a long time, but making up a story about another person’s death solely for the purpose of attention was going too far. She’s never spoken to her since.”
“It Bit Him In The Butt Pretty Good”
“My friend made his parents believe he was colorblind up until he was 13. He used it as an excuse for his bad grades, and used it for getting things by trying to get sympathy. I was with him and his family when we were driving to a mall and he said: ‘Woah look at that brown car!’ His whole life pretty much went downhill after that, his parents lost all respect for him. They stopped buying him all these nice things, and they were a wealthy family too. It bit him in the butt pretty good.”
Did You Hear They Took “Gullible” Out Of The Dictionary?
“Several years ago my friends and I had a ritual where we would always sit in my parents backyard by the creek and smoke. We would usually smoke at night and on the weekends and just sit there chatting all day long. Anyways every time we went down there we would find various sticks and fruit nut things littered all over the backyard and on our chairs. So one day we decided to mess with my friend by purposely leaving larger branches and fruit nuts all over his chair. We made sure ours had a few too (as to not alert suspicion) but we made sure he had an extraordinary amount on his chair. So after about a month of setting up these sticks and nuts we started to convince him that the tree was evil and was trying to kill him. He was obviously skeptical at first but after some convincing he started to believe in it. To make matter even better a huge branch had randomly fallen from the tree not two feet away from him while we were sitting down on Saturday afternoon.
So now that we have him convinced there is some evil tree messing with him we decide to take it to the next step. We have one of our more nimble friends scale the tree 20 minutes before my gullible friend shows up. We then spend the next 20 minutes throwing sticks and nuts up to my friend while he searched for a few branches to cover himself up with. So my friend finally shows up and we wait for about 15 minutes before we cue my friend in the tree to start throwing sticks and branches. He throws a few well placed stick and ends up hitting my friend near his head. At this point my gullible friend is freaking out. He can’t see my friend in the tree so he naturally assumes it was the evil tree trying to finish off what he started a month ago. My friend ran away and we all had a good ol laugh.
Now flash forward 6 months later. My friends and I (the gullible one and the one that climbed the tree) and someone spilled the beans regarding the evil tree incident. The look on my friends face was priceless. He got beet red and just stared at me like a deer in headlights mumbling several expletives.”