It's a dead ringer!
NJ dad builds $125K Ghostbustin’ replica
Who you gonna call? This guy! A New Jersey dad has spent years and a small fortune to build his own “Ghostbusters” Ecto-1 car — the perfect ride to tour the iconic Big Apple locations featured in the original movie.
Lifelong “Ghostbusters” fanatic Nicky Ferrara, 38, had dreamed of owning the Ecto-1 over the years but his quest for the car started rolling with an eBay find of a 1959 Cadillac Landau hearse that had been stored in a California garage for nearly 50 years.
“Honestly, when they sold this car, they didn’t even know what they had,” the licensed customs broker told The Post during a recent tour in his replica ride.
“My wife said, ‘If you want to buy a hearse and make it a ‘Ghostbusters’ car, do it,’ ” he said.
Ferrara immediately clicked the “buy it now” button, shelling out a cool $55,000 for the vintage hearse — he said it still reeked of formaldehyde when it rolled into the driveway of his Essex County home in 2014. All told he’s spent about $125,000 on the attentiongrabbing vehicle.
He then embarked on the ultimate scavenger hunt, contacting scrap yards and garages from California to Toronto and across the Midwest for hard-to-find parts.
“I’m calling junk yards in the Midwest asking, ‘Do you have this piece? Do you have that piece?’ ”
Close study at Sony
His ambition for a perfectly screen-accurate Ecto-1 even brought him to Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, Calif., to get a closer look at the original car used in the 1984 film, which was displayed on the lot.
“I watched the movie a gazillion times to piece together the car but I wanted to get the exact measurements for the roof rack,” he said.
Armed with a selfie stick and tape measure, Ferrara snapped pictures of the car’s roof so he could reproduce every detail.
Using a motley assortment of bits and bobs — including brackets and lights from a 1980s police cruiser and a siren from a 1960s fire engine — Ferrara successfully Frankensteined his Landau into a screen-realistic, road-ready version of the Ecto-1.
He says his kids, Nicky, 5, and Domenica, 3, think “having this car is normal life, like, ‘Oh, everyone has a ‘Ghostbusters’ car!’ ”
Ferrara estimates there are a small handful of comparable Ecto-1 replicas out there, but says “all the other owners keep it in a showroom or museum — they really don’t take it out like me.”
He’s since put the car to work, taking fans of the franchise on spook-tacular tours around Manhattan to spotlight film locations.
Stops include the New York Public Library, Tavern on the Green and the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, which the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man squashed.
And of course, the Ghostbusters’ iconic headquarters, the FDNY Hook & Ladder Company 8 firehouse in Tribeca.