From the Publisher — The Special Halloween Edition of UX Auctions Magazine

Welcome to our Special Halloween Edition, the issue where the auction block gets a little spooky.

After all my years around auctions, I can tell you that some of the strangest things ever sold were not strange because of what they were, but because of the stories that came with them. A car, a castle or a hotel room can sell like anything else, but every so often a lot crosses the block with a legend attached, and the legend never seems to leave with the old owner.

We start with the Golden Eagle, a black-and-gold 1964 Dodge patrol car from Old Orchard Beach, Maine, that went to the auction block and, according to the legend, never stopped finding its way back. It is a Halloween tale told for fun, and it is the perfect way to open this issue.

From there we follow Dr. Jack Kevorkian's 1968 Volkswagen van, the "Deathmobile," which was sold for $150 as scrap, pulled off eBay, parked in the back room of a Detroit pawn shop and finally bought by a ghost hunter for his haunted museum in Las Vegas. Then we answer the question everybody asks this time of year, who you gonna call, with the story of a 1959 Cadillac Ghostbusters Ectomobile re-creation that sold for $297,000 at Barrett-Jackson.

We check into Room 207 of the old Golden West Hotel in San Francisco, where Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman carried on their affair and where guests say a woman still paces the floor, even after the hotel sold at auction last year. We climb into the Colorado Rockies to Redstone Castle, a coal baron's mountain palace that has been seized by the IRS and sold at auction again and again, while the cigar smoke outside its owner's old bedroom never seems to clear.

We cross the ocean to Poveglia, the abandoned quarantine island in the Venetian Lagoon, where thousands of ordinary Venetians pooled their money to bid against a millionaire for the island's future. Back home, we go to the courthouse steps in Weston, West Virginia, where the state sold a giant stone asylum for $1.5 million, and out onto Long Island Sound, where the federal government keeps putting a haunted lighthouse on the block.

We close with two of my favorites. The first is a 1973 Cadillac hearse that sat in a Minnesota city garage until it went up for auction, flat tires and all, and drew 20 bids. The last is a Jason Voorhees hockey mask from the Friday the 13th films that sold for $225,000, more than seven times its estimate.

What ties all of these stories together is the auction itself. Every one of them changed hands in public, in front of bidders who knew exactly what they were buying, ghost stories included. That is what makes the auction world so much fun to cover. You never know what will come across the block next, or what will come along with it.

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Turn down the lights, pull up a chair and enjoy the stories.

Happy Halloween, and welcome to the Special Halloween Edition.

Terry O'Connor
Publisher
UX Auctions Magazine