ok. so i didn't carfax. shoot me. the car runs great and thats the important thing for me in my car, but it seems like as i've gotten more and more happy with this car i want more and more for it. i'm assuming that this car had some errm.... front end difficulty at some point. (it was $6000 with 58,000 miles on it!) because my hood is bent. hard to explain and i'll get photos later, but it looks basically like someone tried really really hard to open the hood without using the release latch and kinda peeled the grill area upward. now again, my expertise was under the hood, so body work and such is a fairly big mystery. is there any way to bend it back to the right look? would a body shop be able to do something like that or will i have to replace the hood?

Carfax is only as good as the information reported to DMVs and insurance companies. Case in point my old 95 LSC. I KNOW it was whacked from the rear, but Carfax came up clean.

Anyways..

That area behind the grille is kinda flimsy, so it's very possible someone pulled on it. You can always just try to push it back yourself.

check your local junk yards for a rear end collision LS and yank the hood off of that one.

LSs not real common up here in Upstate NY and I think it'd be cheaper to have a body shop fix it up if i could rather than buying a new hood and painting it..

Don’t forget the hood is aluminum and depending on the damage could be harder to repair than say steel.