When I was 11 I had the weirdest friend I've ever met.
His mom would make us do chores when we went over. We'd spend 4 hours doing the laundry, cleaning the house or some other stuff and then maybe we'd get to play for 1 hour. Also his mom would constantly tell him that he was useless, and that as he became older he'd be more and more useless. Really weird.
That friend kept inviting kids over every week. Naturally after a while we didn't want to go because none of us wanted to take care of his house for his mom. But the kid would beg us to come over and would even start crying if we didn't give in. Looking back I think his mom forced him to bring friends over to clean the house, and he was being punished if he didn't.
Another odd thing was his "dad". He kept saying he had a dad, but I never met him. When I was over at his place, sometimes he'd come back to his room from downstairs and tell me "My dad got home" or something like that. He'd talk about his father like the guy was really there, coming and going. One time when I was leaving my friend pointed to his father's shoes (which were not there when I came), and told me "That's my dad's shoes, it means he's home". The thing was, I saw his mother earlier in the afternoon take the shoes out from a drawer and put them there.
Years later, while thinking back on this, I realized that my friend had told me several times that his dad would punish him, but he never said his mom punished him. So I think she was convincing him he had a dad who was around the house, and somehow she convinced him that any punishment he received came from him, not her.
Then one day he didn't come to school anymore, and a week later the teachers explained to us that we wouldn't see him anymore because his mother killed him.
And then it just gets weirder. Several weeks later, I saw him in town with another woman, about his mother's age. I saw him with that woman on 3 or 4 occasions in total, over a few months. At first I thought it was another kid who looked like him because he was dead, but on the third occasion I went up to him to say hi and he coldly told me "Go away, I'm not allowed to speak to you anymore". A few other friends also saw him, and those who approached him got the same reaction. They also agreed he was acting cold, as if he was angry or hated us. Some of my friends said he looked scary (the complete opposite of what he was like before he "died").
I never found out what was up with that. I don't know who that woman with him was, why he did not want to talk to us, or even why the teachers told us he died.
Edit: For what it's worth, I think he was being abused, it was so bad the school would rather tell us kids he died than the truth (which is pretty creepy when you think of it, I'm sure they could have found a better explanation), and he was taken in by social services or a relative (that mystery woman might have been a social worker or an aunt who took him in). Someone must have deemed it was better for him to be taken out of school as well for whatever reason (he might have been placed in another school, or he became home schooled). But that's just my own assumptions, I really have no way to know what happened to him.