L.A. Thrift Store Was Randomly Hiding a Famously Haunted Painting, Priced at $250

Only a Carpathian would end up in a thrift store! Seemingly by random, on Ghostbusters day this past week (June 7, 2025), a reproduction of the famous painting of Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia and the Sorrow of Moldavia, was discovered in a Los Angeles thrift store by a man with the handle @razimus on X. This painting is 100 percent a replica of the painting from Ghostbusters II (1989), in which the spirit of Vigo the Unholy (or Vigo the Cruel) is trapped in an old oil painting, and eventually, is released on New York City.

The news was picked up by the fan site ghostbustersnews.com, and revealed that the painting itself is pretty convincing as the real thing. To be clear, this is not the original painting from Ghostbusters II, but rather a collectible replica that somehow made its way into this particular thrift store. The price tag? An affordable $250 dollars.

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The original Vigo painting was a real painting. Sort of. The painter specifically responsible for the portrait that inspired the one in the film was named Lou Police, and he was who was hired by another artist named Glen Eytchison, who had been tasked by Industrial Light and Magic to create the "living painting" special effect in the movie.

However, as Mental Floss revealed back in 2023, the actual Vigo "painting" we see in the movie is a blown-up photograph made to look like an oil painting, and based on the portrait that Police created with Eytchison and director Ivan Reitman's input.

The "real" Vigo painting in Ghostbusters II is doubly fake; not only was it created for the movie, but the painting we see in the movie isn't really a painting, even though a different real painting was created at some point. 

So, if you squint, finding a giant Vigo painting in a thrift store is just as authentic as the faux painting used in the movie. And this means, if we're being honest, the chances of any Vigo paintings being haunted are all equally high.

Ghostbusters II streams for free on the Roku Channel and PlutoTV.

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