The thing about buying second-hand cars is that you never know what secrets they might hide. A woman in the US learned this the hard way when she found a whole lot of marijuana stashed inside a car she had been driving for years.

The woman, identified as Melodie Peil from New Mexico, insists that, at the time she bought the van well over a decade ago, she had no idea that it had pot hidden inside the passenger door.

What's more, she claims that neither she nor any of the people who got to ride in it ever smelled anything off. In fact, it was only when the car needed some repair work and got pulled apart that the weed was discovered.

A van with a shady history

Melodie Peil says that she got this 1990 Chevy with a seriously dubious past at an Alamogordo dealership some 13 years ago. All she knows about the vehicle's former owner is that he lives somewhere in Germany.

During the years that Melodie Peil and her family were the proud owners of this vehicle, the van got to travel across the border into Mexico on several occasions. For some reason, border patrol officers never noticed anything suspicious either.

Apparently, whoever it was that hid the weed inside the 1990 Chevy sure knew what they were doing. Needless to say, this just adds up to the mystery about how and why the van ended up on sale at the Alamogordo dealership the woman got it from.

How the weed was discovered

The marijuana bricks recovered from inside this van were discovered by a family friend named Bryan Reyes, who happened to stumble upon them while doing repair work on the vehicle. The man pulled seven bricks amounting to 13 pounds (6 kilograms) from the passenger door.

“When I first pulled out the brick, it was a two pound brick, I was like holy cow! So I put it on the chair, and I looked and there was like six more bricks. I thought this is a lot of marijuana,” Bryan Reyes told the press in an interview.

The police officers handling this case suspect that the marijuana is about 15 years old. An investigation into this incident is ongoing and the car is being closely inspected, just in case it holds other secrets.