Immortalizing Morticia

Often, a customer will contact us requesting a custom order made from their car. We enjoy doing this because it is something that has sentimental meaning to the owner. A few months back, we received such a request from a Mustang enthusiast named Victoria Wagoner. She had crashed her car and asked if we could make a cuff from the Mustang’s striped hood. This is her story.

When Victoria turned 20 she bought her 2006 Ford Mustang 4.0 v6 in performance white. She named the car Morticia after Morticia Addams. At that time, Victoria was living in Nevada, working two full-time jobs, and rode her bicycle to the dealership where she purchased the Mustang.

In 2019 Victoria moved to San Diego where she joined the Immortal Stangs of San Diego car club. Since then she’s driven the mustang all over southern California and Nevada, attending car shows, meeting and making new friends, and creating lifelong memories. In 2020, Gary Patterson even signed the Mustang’s passenger dash!

On April 24th, 2022, Victoria was showing Morticia at the Fabulous Fords Forever show at the Irwindale Speedway. Twenty minutes after leaving the show, she had an accident. She hit a dip in the road that launched the car out of her lane. The brakes locked up and the car slid. The rear end spun around and she hit the median and a road sign on the passenger side. This impact spun Victoria around again and she was suddenly airborne. She hit the other median with the A pillar. This final impact pushed the A pillar in 3 inches and crumpled the frame. Fortunately, Victoria had installed a harness bar and a five point harness seat belt two months before and those safety additions saved her life.

Morticia never made it home and that was devastating to Victoria. She said, “May 13th, 2022 was the last time I saw my car. I know to a lot of people it’s just a car, but to me it felt like I lost my home, my friend. I spent almost all of my twenties with the car, drove it everyday. Was pregnant driving it around, cried the day my belly got too big to drive it. My daughter spent a lot of time in the back seat. I was homeless at one time living in it. I found my friends and family with that little Mustang. So when I lost her, it felt like I lost a part of me too.”

Before making the Mustang cuff, we had a conversation with Victoria about design elements. She asked that we incorporate a bat. We accepted the challenge and engraved a bat on one end of the cuff. The bat signifies the beauty that allows us to survive in the darkest of times. 

And Morticia lives on in the form of a cuff, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.