Replicating long-lost cars is difficult; replicating Ed Roth’s Mysterion is, perhaps, a fool’s errand. Aside from Roth’s eyeball-it measurements, his casual concern over the show car’s structural integrity doomed it to a short existence. Jeffrey Jones, however, took on that errand and though the end result–which he will put up for auction this December–doesn’t hew perfectly to the original, it’s likely the last word in Mysterions unless the original magically re-appears.

As Jones pointed out in his book on the Mysterion, the show rod is at the same time the most famous and least documented of the artist’s show rods. Tens of thousands of custom car show attendees in the mid-Sixties saw it, it received a good deal of magazine coverage, and it already spawned a replica independent of Jones’s own effort. Yet, in true Roth tradition, the car emerged entirely from Roth’s imagination–blueprints were unheard of in Roth’s studios–and few photographs exist of the Mysterion before its demise.

A replica of a car few had ever seen goes up for auction. Expected bid: $100,000-plus.