I walked farther out into the mud and started looking for anything that could explain how a car had ended up there. Then I saw something caught beneath the roof — a strip of metal with a faded inspection sticker still attached. I scraped away the silt and found a partial license plate. The number meant nothing to me, but the year did. It was from a vehicle registered in 1960.
I called the property owner and asked if he knew anything about a car being sunk there before the pond was filled. He went quiet and said his father had always refused to talk about the pond. Then he asked me exactly where we’d found the vehicle. When I told him, he said there used to be an old logging track running through that area before the pond was dug.
We checked the county maps. The track wasn’t there anymore, but an older survey showed something else — a small bridge crossing the creek on the exact side of the pond where we’d found the car. The owner looked at the map for a long time and then said his father had told him that bridge disappeared one night in 1961, around the same time the pond was constructed.
The next morning, we brought a magnet and started searching around the roof. The magnet caught something almost immediately. We pulled up a rusted metal box with a leather strap still attached. Inside were several papers sealed in plastic, including an old photograph of four men standing beside the same car. On the back someone had written a date and one sentence: “We put it here because nobody would ever think to look in the water…”
