A Hidden Garage With Almost 40 Classic Cars and a 1975 Indy 500 Pace Car

The garage sits behind a line of trees, so you can’t see it from the road. We had to try to sneak over. The first door I tried wasn’t it. The way in was a small gap I had to fit through to climb in. Once I was inside I hoped nobody had noticed us. Then I saw the cars.

I’ll keep the location off this page. The video is about a collection that has been sitting a long time, and other explorers have mostly respected it.

What we found

The first building has cars parked nose to tail, covered in dust, with flat tires and spiderwebs growing on the bumpers. There is a hole right in the roof. A sign inside said they were part of an antique auto collection and asked people not to touch. There were vehicle inspection reports from the state of Colorado on one of them, and later an Illinois one on another. A raccoon was climbing around and the mosquitoes were bad.

There’s a line for this. An antique auto is like another man’s wife. Look and admire, but do not touch. So I did not climb on anything. I did open doors, because I needed photos and TikToks, and I said I’d put everything back as I found it when I was done. You can see footprints on some of the dust, so someone had been in before me.

The cars are mostly from the 70s and 80s. A yellow Buick, a Lincoln, a teal Cadillac, an Oldsmobile diesel, a Mercury Sable, a Buick Riviera, a red Oldsmobile and a yellow Continental Mark III with a yellow interior. The one I couldn’t believe was an official pace car from the 59th Indianapolis 500, May 25, 1975. It is a convertible with the hood pulled back, and the inside was in great shape.

Some of the interiors look brand new. Some of them are moldy, and it’s strange which ones. One Cadillac had 60,000 miles and brown leather seats that looked incredible. A Lincoln Town Car had a perfect headliner but moldy seats and door panels, and I think the plastic and the leather just aged differently. A Cadillac with a cover on it still looked nice, and the emblem had been uncovered by somebody else a while ago.

There was a car with flip out headlights like a Miata, and a section in the back that had been alarmed a long time ago. I was a little worried about being seen at one point and turned my light down. The noise on the ceiling kept me guessing.

I wanted a shot from above, so we tried a ladder on the side. Roots had grown right through it, so that was out. The other person on the explore got up another way and got me the footage, and I owe them a dinner.

Then we found our way into the second building. I had guessed about 50 cars early on, and I was wrong. I counted 33 in the first building and six in the second, so it came to 39, almost 40. There were also birds all through it, seven nests. I thought they were bats at first. They are birds. I did make the joke that if people complain about trespassing, they should arrest the animals.

On the way out I noticed a Starfire, which I had never heard of. I saw a 2018 date written on the wall, so other explorers have been coming here for years. All I want is for it to stay like that, or for somebody to contact the owner and save the cars. The only thing I don’t want to see is people smashing the windows and stomping on the cars.

Why places like this end up empty

I don’t know who owned these cars or what happened to them. But cars like these get stranded in a predictable way.

Hagerty Media reported in 2021 that when a collector dies the cars pass to heirs like any other possession, and the heirs often don’t share the owner’s passion. An attorney quoted there said cars carry negative cash flow because of storage, maintenance, repair and insurance. Probate can delay things for months or years, with one lawyer citing up to three years in Massachusetts. Its example is a Lamborghini Miura whose owner died in 2015. The car sat in his brother’s garage until an auction house sold it in 2019. The article also notes that few collectors sell while they are alive.

Multiply that by 39 cars.

The last thing I filmed was a tan leather interior with a cassette deck, in a building with seven bird nests.