For 14 years, Jason Hurdle believed he was familiar with every corner of his rural New York property.
That changed in July, when a garage clean-out at his Waterloo home led him to an overlooked crawlspace that had apparently remained concealed for decades.
Inside the dusty area, Hurdle came across a collection of papers stamped “secret” — a discovery that quickly turned an ordinary day of clearing out clutter into an extraordinary historical find.
The cache, totaling about 300 pages, appeared to include firsthand testimony from American prisoners of war held during World War II.
Hurdle, 74, brought the records to a nearby library, which then contacted the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA officials later arrived to retrieve the documents.
Archivists subsequently verified that the World War II POW accounts were authentic and had previously been classified.
“I’m in podunk little Waterloo, New York, and this went all the way to the National Archives. We’re kind of in shock here,” Hurdle told the Washington Post.
The house has belonged to Hurdle’s wife’s family for generations, though he said the family has no explanation for how the once-secret military files came to be hidden on the property.
Jason Hurdle uncovered a box of secret records in his garage that proved to contain roughly 300 pages of firsthand accounts from American prisoners of war during World War II.
The remarkable World War II documents were found in a garage crawlspace at Hurdle’s home, a property that has been in his wife’s family for generations.
He added that a former neighbor had memorabilia from an ancestor, but was still unsure if this explains the find.
The documents describe in horrifying detail the events prisoners of war endured.
The POWs were told to write down their experiences to gather intelligence when they arrived at Camp Lucky Strike in Normandy.
Many documents from this camp were then used as evidence of war crimes in military tribunals.
Historians had no knowledge of the lost accounts. The National Archives told the Post that they did not have the files on a list of missing documents.
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‘The discovery of these government records is important and meaningful to ensure preservation and public access to our country’s history,’ NARA spokeswoman Grace McCaffrey told the publication.
One account was from a man named Julian Candelaria, who was held captive in a work camp for months, recalling that he witnessed ’60 men in boxcars,’ with ‘no food no water, no sanitary facilities, crowded, exposed to bombing. Walked 3 days + nights with little food, no medical.’
The Washington Post found Candelaria’s obituary, which read: ‘After returning home he refused to discuss the events that occurred during his imprisonment at [the] hands of his captors, the Germans.’
Another POW named Henry Daly wrote that the conditions were ‘a very sad example of what the US soldier was like.’
Hurdle told the Washington Post that he was ‘in shock’ that he discovered the precious documents
POWs were told to write down their experiences to gather intelligence when they arrived at Camp Lucky Strike in Normandy
‘We ran for cover, but two of my companions [whose] names I do not [recall] were killed by the bombs,’ he added.
His great-grandson, Michael Yanes, told the Post that Daly did not talk about his time in the war with his family, but he often slept in a park because he struggled to stay in his house.
‘Seeing these words written is quite heavy. This is all new to us. The emotions. I can’t even describe,’ Yanes said.
The documents have been placed with similar accounts in the National Archives and will be digitized.
NARA also confirmed over the summer that they discovered 145 US Navy records from an engineer who participated in several Apollo missions, including blueprints and sound recordings.
A pardon signed by President Franklin Pierce and a Congressional Tally Sheet of a secret House of Representatives vote were also recovered at auction houses.
A letter to then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis from Army 1st Lt JEB Stuart has been recovered as well and will be digitized.
The Daily Mail reached out to NARA for comment.