Strangest item ever found in car purchase

In the late '80s I bought an Oldsmobile Omega (the Olds version of the Chevy Citation) for to fix up and resell. As a bonus, I later found a plain, but valuable Breitling watch under the back seat.

Early in my car sales career, I had a somewhat interesting late-model convertible come in on consignment (I'll refrain from mentioning it because the owner is known to frequent this forum). In the center console were a handful of little blue diamond-shaped pills.

I wonder if the car would have been more valuable to a buyer of a certain age with the Viagra included?

Those things are about 30 bucks a piece.

I used to get abandoned vehicles from the Indiana toll road. One such vehicle was a 1969 Chevy shortbed that was in very good condition. The windshield defroster tubes werestuffed full of peyote root. <o:p></o>

my brother bought a mid 70s chrysler for scrap-in the glove box was an original 1933 cadillac v12 repair manual......................

This was over thirty years ago. It is not a car I bought but one that had been abandoned several miles on to a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert east of Reno. It was a '53 Olds two door sedan and had most likely become mired in the alkali mud after a rain. Those dry lakes are not always as dry as they seem. It had been pretty picked over during it's years there but still had a few good parts left. I needed the window mechanism for the left rear window. When I pulled the side panel I found a canvas bank bag with almost $2,500 in gaming chips from various Reno casinos and a loaded 1911 Colt .45 in perfect condition. Sadly the chips were all out of date and no longer useable or worth their face value but brought a pretty good price from collectors. Actually some were worth more than face value but total it was way less. The Colt shows more wear now. I have often wondered who left the car there and why they never returned for their valuables. Was the person who left the car it's owner? Did the person who left the car even know the stuff was there? Did the owner even know? Did they make it back to the road or are they still out there? Was there a crime involved, foul play? The car was removed a few years later. I wish I had taken pictures. It would surely make the basis for a great short story.:cool: That's not all I've found in old cars but by far the most interesting.

We had a large live rat ride into the shop in the trunk of a Healey 3000 we picked up at a farm.

Found a large snake skin under the seat of a Chevy pickup I brought back from Texas. Thankfully the snake was gone.

Not too strange, but I found clues to the prior owner's lifestyle in the '89 MB 560 SL - out of curiousity one day I opened up the factory first aid kit one day and a bunch of condoms came out - I highly doubt they were OEM... He also had golf tees under the seats, and in the trunk. So I guess he was a "Playboy Type"...

A lot of times I have found other old car parts in the older (prewar) cars; or old tools.

We had a large live rat ride into the shop in the trunk of a Healey 3000 we picked up at a farm.

I just remembered a rebuilder Econoline van that I bought from a salvage pool here in MN. It had been a delivery vehicle for a bagel company in Cherry Hill, NJ. (Lots and lots of rebuilders used to come to Minnesota to get repaired, be inspected and have clean (though still salvage) titles issued. It never had a radio, so when I went to install one I reached up under the dash only to find a large rat skeleton. I suppose that the darned rat lived a happy life, though, in a bagel van.

A friend of mine found a wallet under the rumble seat. No money but it did have an ID, he called and the guy was still around and in his 90's. He sold the car about 1949. The guy who bought it in 1949 never did anything but store the car and sold it over 50 years later.

Not a car story but that last post reminds me of a time I was pulling an old cloth covered romex wire out of a wall and I found a rat skeleton that had bitten into the wire and got electrocuted. the teeth were still into the copper.