The coronavirus has brought about many strange stories. The saying idle hands are the devil’s plaything comes to mind as most people are on some form of quarantine or lockdown and are sitting at home doing very little. With all this time on their hands, people have fallen in love with jigsaws, home repairs, cooking, baking, gardening, and more. The number of bizarre stories that are starting to appear as a result of these isolated times is a clear example of the weird and wonderful world that we live in. While there are lots of negative things to focus on at the moment, there are plenty of positive things emerging to take our attention away too. One of the strangest things that we have come across since the lockdown began is the story of one man finding a car in his back yard.
John Brayshaw lives in West Yorkshire in England. He moved into a new house six months ago and all seemed pretty normal. It has a standard-sized backyard and is a nice cozy home. The house is not too small but certainly not a mansion either. It is the type of home that if there was a car in the backyard it would be hard to miss. Unless of course, it was buried underground.
Like most of us, John wanted to do something with all this spare time that he had. When he bought the house he had thought that it would look nice with some new decking out the back and planned to chip away it over the next few years. When he was placed on leave due to the quarantine he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He went straight to the hardware store and decided to build a new deck.
John began by digging parts of the ground to bury some post panels. A couple of panels in and his shovel hit something. Assuming it was a rock he dug wider and wider trying to find where the edge of the rock could be found. It soon became obvious that this was no rock but part of a car. The more he dug the more he realized that it was an entire car buried in his back garden!
John started to take a little more care and went into full archeologist mode in his back yard. After a few hours, he had excavated an entire car. The car dates back to 1955 and is a Ford Popular model. The car was a common model back in the 50s as it was a budget-friendly choice for the average family. The obvious question is why did someone go the bother of burying it in their back garden?
The least exciting theory is that it had to do with the price of steel at the time. During the 1950s the price of steel was so low that if you wanted to dump anything you actually had to pay to have scrap metal taken away. The huge effort to go to make the car disappear makes us think something more exciting happened. Perhaps the car was used in a bank robbery or murder and the criminals thought the best way to get rid of the evidence was simply to bury it? What if spies owned the car and had been spotted in it and needed to change their cover quickly? Perhaps it was some elaborate scheme related to an insurance claim?
We have no idea why the car is down there but John says he will continue to investigate and try to get to the bottom of the mystery. For now, John’s decking plans are on hold as he has to wait to remove the car but something tells us that he now has plenty to occupy his mind. Keep digging John, who knows what you will discover next.
