Who You Gonna Call? Ghostbusters Car Sold at Auction!

When there's something strange in the neighborhood, there is one car everybody knows to call. In January 2025, that car rolled across the block at Barrett-Jackson's Scottsdale auction in the form of a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor "Ghostbusters Ectomobile" re-creation, and when the hammer came down, it had sold for $297,000, the highest price of any car that Thursday. It was not the car from the movie, and Barrett-Jackson never said it was. It was a real 1959 Cadillac professional car that a collector spent more than a decade turning into a screen-accurate tribute, and its story is one of the most fun Halloween auction tales we know. At UX Auctions, where we cover government and collector auctions every day, we love a vehicle that started its life answering emergency calls and ended up answering a very different kind.

A Cadillac built for serious work

Long before it chased ghosts, the 1959 Cadillac professional car had a much more serious job. Cadillac sold a special long commercial chassis to coachbuilders, and companies like Miller-Meteor of Piqua, Ohio, turned those chassis into ambulances and hearses for funeral homes and rescue squads across the country. The 1959 models are the stars of the bunch, with the tallest tailfins Detroit ever put on a production car, twin bullet taillights on each fin and enough chrome to blind a ghost at fifty paces.

Under the hood sat a 390-cubic-inch Cadillac V8, rated at 325 horsepower and 430 lb-ft of torque from the factory, paired with a Hydra-Matic automatic transmission. These were working vehicles, built to haul patients, equipment and crews at highway speed, and many were driven hard for years before being retired, sold off and forgotten. That is exactly the kind of car the filmmakers went looking for in the early 1980s.

When Ghostbusters hit theaters in June 1984, the team's ride was a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor combination car, a model built to serve as either an ambulance or a hearse. The production dressed it up with a roof rack full of gadgets, a wailing siren, flashing lights and the famous no-ghost logo on the doors, and the Ectomobile, better known as Ecto-1, became one of the most recognizable movie cars ever made. Fans have been building their own ever since, hunting down surviving 1959 Cadillac professional cars and turning them into tributes, and today a good Ecto-1 re-creation is a serious collector car in its own right.

Twelve years of ghost-busting work

The car that sold in Scottsdale came from the collection of Dr. Stewart A. Berkowitz, who bought it in October 2012. He sent it to South End Kustom in Hemet, California, for the restoration, and Ecto Tech, a New Jersey shop that specializes in Ecto-1 re-creations, handled more of the screen-accurate details inside and out. The body was repainted in the movie's white and red scheme with the logo on the doors, the chrome was repaired and replated, and the car got new whitewall tires, tinted windows and emergency lights modeled on the originals.

The work went all the way through. The 390 V8 and Hydra-Matic were rebuilt so the car could be driven, not just parked, and the rear compartment was fitted with two jump seats and a full set of ghost-busting equipment. The best touch of all is inside the cab, where the dashboard carries autographs from original cast members, including Ernie Hudson, who played Winston Zeddemore.

The day it crossed the block

Barrett-Jackson's Scottsdale auction is one of the biggest collector car events in the world, and on Thursday, January 23, 2025, the Ectomobile re-creation outsold every other car of the day at $297,000. That put it ahead of a 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle custom at $269,500 and a custom 2020 Jeep Gladiator at $220,000, and it topped the $220,000 that another Ecto-1 re-creation brought at Barrett-Jackson Las Vegas in 2021. Its new home is with Gotham Cinema Rides, where it joined another well-known Ecto-1 tribute.

For a car that began life as a working Cadillac professional car, that is quite an afterlife. Retired ambulances, hearses and rescue vehicles still turn up at government auctions every year, and every one of them is a blank slate for the next builder with a big idea, whether that is a camper, a rolling business or, for the truly dedicated, a car that ghosts should fear.

Retired ambulances, hearses and rescue vehicles come up on government auctions all year long, and the next great build could start with one of them. Search them all at once at uxsearch.app.