Thursday 1 December 2016

Abandoned French Cars Found in a Mine, Could Have Been Hidden during World War II

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December 1, 2016 at 6:24 pm by | Photography by YouTube/Cold Stone/Vincent Michel

French cars abandoned in mine

This Black Friday, the shopping day post-Thanksgiving, the makers behind Cards against Humanity implored cynics and the deviant to donate money to an operation that would dig a hole. There was no purpose to the hole, nor did the investors get anything in return except for occasional updates on the hole’s depth and size. In the spirit of that, er, achievement, we now bring you . . . a bunch of cars in a hole, courtesy of a story out of France that made headlines in the British tabloids. Where is that hole? Belgian PE teacher Vincent Michel, who found this one while hunting for hidden treasures as a self-styled “urban explorer,” won’t say exactly where.

Specifically, the cars aren’t exactly in a hole, but rather an old mine that’s part of a quarry somewhere in central France. Vincent Michel came across the bizarre storage location and its gaggle of 1930s-era automobiles and, naturally, turned his lens on the rusting, deteriorating subjects. His theory on how the cars found their way into the mine focuses on World War II.

The thinking goes that locals squirreled the cars away as France fell to the Germans, in order to spare them from being scrapped or taken outright, only to find after the war that the moist underground conditions had taken their toll. Assuming that is in fact what happened, it’s likely that postwar economic conditions didn’t support the refurbishment of a bunch of rusting, aging vehicles. A darker possibility is that some of the cars’ owners didn’t survive the war or were displaced, never to retrieve their automobiles.



Like most ruin photography, the photos are fascinating to behold—whatever the story behind them. You can see some of the shots in the YouTube video below or on the photographer’s Flickr page.


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