Girl Comes to Collect 'Mean' Grandma's Things, Opens Trunk in Basement & Is 'Shocked' to Find Pic

• A woman never had a close relationship with her grandmother, finding her mean and unpleasant to be around.
• She knew her grandmother as a teacher all her life until she uncovered a photo from a trunk and saw she wasn't one after all.
• What she discovered changed how their entire family saw the grandmother, who had an entirely different life than what she told them she had.

A woman never liked her grandmother because of the harsh words she said about her son and daughter-in-law. She grew up hearing her say many hurtful things but never understood why.

To avoid the toxicity, the woman stopped hanging out with her grandmother and refused to talk to her on the phone. One day, she moved out of town to live in the United Kingdom with her daughter, and they lost touch entirely.

They Uncovered Boxes of Secrets in the Basement

One day, the woman's aunt called to say her "mean" grandmother decided to move to the United Kingdom for good. She asked if the family could pack the things she left behind in her house so they could send them over.

The woman's dad obliged, and because the woman was in town after graduating from college, she agreed to help. Her grandmother's house was on the city's outskirts, a long drive from where they lived.

When they got there, the dad headed straight to the basement. Growing up in that house, he was forbidden to explore the basement, so it intrigued him.

They were surprised to discover several large metal trunks scattered inside. The room was neat, save for the dust accumulated from years of being untouched.

The woman's dad opened three trunks and found old, brittle books. Meanwhile, the woman chose to open a brown chest and was "shocked" to see it was a trunk filled with photos.

In the photo, the woman's grandparents sported a type of uniform. While it looked like a defense uniform, it wasn't for the Indian army, where her grandparents supposedly originated.

More photos showed people wearing the same uniform, standing on hilltops. Each photograph had something written at the back, which the woman presumed to be dates, along with a description written in another language.

When the woman asked her dad about the pictures, he shrugged and said her grandfather was in the Indian army. However, the woman insisted the uniforms weren't that of the Indian army and asked whether her grandmother was in the military, too.

The woman's dad explained that the Indian military uniform changed through the years, and maybe she just couldn't recognize them. A gut feeling told her there was something more to the photos, so she walked over to her dad to show him.

What Secrets Did the Grandmother Keep?

She pointed out a symbol on the photographs and asked whether it was related to the army. Then, her dad's demeanor changed.

"When he saw the photos, his smile dropped, and his face seemed grim. He asked me which trunk were these photographs in and I pointed to the brown trunk." she described. He went through several trunks, checking the pictures individually, before looking for documents in the other trunks.

What they discovered next changed their outlook. They found the dad's birth certificate and those of his siblings.

However, these birth certificates did not match the ones they had in their files. The dad's birth certificate showed him to be three years older than the Indian birth certificate he had.

The most shocking detail was that none of the birth certificates showed their grandfather's name, save for the eldest son. The locations of their births were in different places, and they weren't born in India like they've always known.

The woman's dad, in particular, was born in Russia. He didn't remember ever being in Russia, so it was all news to him.

The woman and her dad spent the entire night unboxing the crates. They took photos and sent them to a government archivist to decode.

The archivist revealed that the uniforms were the old Soviet uniforms. However, the uniform the grandmother was wearing was Chinese.

One of the trunks they opened were files on several high-ranking officials, their partitions, political parties, and more. One of the high-ranking officials was her maternal grandfather, who used to be in the army.

Then, they found another locker that had more documents stashed. There was a foreign birth certificate, papers on the grandfather's enlistments, and more documents on high-ranking army officials. There were also documents about a Calcutta-based brothel.

All along, the family thought the grandmother was a teacher. Uncovering these files showed she was not Indian, the name they knew her by wasn't her real name, and she was a woman who operated out of a brothel.

The discovery left the woman's dad restless. He was told not to try to seek answers, as it was assumed she was one of the spies sent by the KGB to India.

When the grandmother found out that they had discovered her files, she had a heart attack. When her granddaughter wrote about the story online, she had yet to regain consciousness.

In a similar story of deceit, a grieving widow discovers her late husband's old papers, discovering he lied to her for 64 years, and led a double life as a secret agent. Click here to read all about it.