Elvis Presley Reportedly Didn’t Love the ‘Monster Mash,’ But the Song Never Stopped: 13 Facts About the Halloween Hit

Every October, a hopelessly kitschy classic rises from the dead to the delight (and occasional dread) of millions. Since its release in 1962, “Monster Mash” has become a beloved slice of mid-century novelty-music cheese.

Though it’s musically nothing special, the tune is saved by the singular chutzpah of its singer, co-composer and huckster extraordinaire, Bobby “Boris” Pickett, whose spirited impressions of monster movie mainstays like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula, respectively) have made the tune immortal.

But the song is just the start of the saga for Pickett, whose unique life saw him survive gangsters and warfare, date Hollywood stars and score a Top 10 smash, only to go back to driving New York City cabs — before rising to the top again and reuniting with the daughter he never knew he had.  

Read on to learn more about one of the greatest Halloween songs of all time. And for more behind-the-scenes stories and little-known details about “Monster Mash,” check out the recent episode of the iHeartRadio podcast Too Much Information, hosted by former PEOPLE editors Jordan Runtagh and Alex Heigl.

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1. Bobby “Boris” Pickett went from the gangster capital of Boston to dating Hollywood stars. 

Pickett was born in Somerville, Mass. in 1938. As he explained in one interview, “You had two choices as a young man, you could either be a gangster when you grew up or an athlete … Somerville was a tough, tough place to live, but it was a place where you could leave your door open and no one would rob you. Everyone knew everyone, even though it was a city three miles long.”

If Somerville rings a crime-related bell with you, it might be because its Winter Hill neighborhood – where Pickett grew up – was the principle operating area of Whitey Bulger, famously fictionalized by Jack Nicholson in The Departed. By the mid-’50s, Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang would become the most powerful Irish gang on the East Coast for half a century.

But Pickett grew up in a more idyllic time in Somerville. His father managed a movie theater, and he spent a lot of time taking in the horror hits of Universal Studios, watching Karloff, Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. stalk the screen in iconic films like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolf Man. This, plus an early interest in comedy, sewed the seeds of “Monster Mash.” 

Pickett didn’t grow up singing. He served for a year-and-a-half in the Korean War as part of the Army Signal Corps, and it was on his return that he got his first experience with a group. “On the ship we came back on, they were putting together a show,” he said. “There were these three or four guys who were singing Doo-wop and a cappella stuff, and they needed a bass/baritone, so I became a member of that group.” 

Not long after being discharged, Pickett moved to Hollywood to try and make it as an actor, during which time he dated Oscar-winner and comedienne Cloris Leachman and triple Academy Award nominee Dyan Cannon. 

2. The producer of “Monster Mash” was a true eccentric. 

Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, Pickett ran into a group of wannabe singers from his hometown of Sommerville. They welcomed him into their fold and sang doo-wop in any club that would have them. Ever the comic, Pickett would frequently pepper their set with impressions — including a version of Karloff from his beloved monster movies. 

One night, Pickett claimed a young woman came up to the group after a gig and said she knew someone who can get them a record contract. That someone was Gary Paxton, one of the true eccentrics in the early fly-by-night Hollywood rock ‘n’ roll industry.

Once, after a radio station turned down one of his songs, Paxton assembled a protest parade down Hollywood Boulevard with 15 cheerleaders and a live elephant pulling a Volkswagen convertible. (The stunt got Paxton arrested when the animal relieved itself in the street.) 

In 1980, he was shot five times by men hired by a country star he was producing, who was supposedly attempting to get out of his contract. This sidelined him for eight years and he lived with two bullets in his body for the rest of his life. (He visited the men in jail to forgive them personally.) In 1987, the Washington Post reported that Tammy Faye Bakker had developed a crush on Paxton around the time that her husband, Jim Bakker, had a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a secretary at his evangelical church. 

In 1999, he moved to Branson, Mo., and began performing in a mask and cape as Grandpa Rock. He died in 2016. He once estimated he’d written 2,000 songs; a sampling of titles include “Jesus Is My Lawyer In Heaven,” “If You’re Happy, Notify Your Face,” and “When I Die, Just Bury Me at Wal-Mart (So My Wife Will Come Visit Me).”

3. “Monster Mash” has musical ties to James Brown.

By 1962, the monster craze of the ’50s had blossomed. An actress named Maila Nurmi created the character of Vampira (inspired by Morticia Adams) in 1953 and launched a successful show the year after in which she’d introduce classic horror films. (This is where Elvira got her schtick.) She was the first “horror host” on television, and though her show only ran for a year, it was enormously successful. 

Soon any TV station that could afford the rights to these old films had its own version of it, including one in Philadelphia hosted by John Zacherle, who, assisted by his buddy Dick Clark, cut a proto-“Monster Mash” novelty song called “Dinner with Drac” that climbed to No. 6 on Billboard in 1958 — the same year the influential fan magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland debuted. Within two years, both The Addams Family and The Munsters would debut on network TV. 

This was also the era when novelty dance songs were multiplying at a staggering rate following the success of Chubby Checker’s rendition of “The Twist” two years earlier. By 1962, it had been supplanted by Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The dance originated with James Brown in the late ’50s in his live shows, and the Godfather of Soul even released a Top 10 R&B instrumental called “Do the Mashed Potatoes” in early 1960. (For contractual reasons the recording was credited to “Nat Kendrick and the Swans.”) The dance was namechecked in hits like Chris Montez’s ” Let’s Dance,” The Contours’ “Do You Love Me,” Chris Kenner’s “Land of A Thousand Dances,” Connie Francis’ “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N” and Sam Cooke’s “Having A Party.” 

All of which is to say, by 1962, the national pump was primed for a guy to do an extended Karloff riff in a novelty song.

In the late spring of 1962, Pickett went over to his bandmate Lenny Capizzi’s house for a songwriting session. “Lenny sat down at the piano and began futzing with various four-chord progressions and I stood next to the piano,” he relates in his 2005 memoir. “Like me, Lenny was a major horror movie fan from childhood. He loved Bela Lugosi as Dracula. He knew I had the Boris Karloff voice pretty nailed, although in retrospect, I feel that what I actually had was a very cartoonish rendition of that wonderful actor’s voice.” 

As Capizzi played the classic doo-wop chord progression under his Dracula impression, Pickett had the idea to fuse them both into a song that would capitalize on both the monster craze and the novelty dance craze currently in vogue. “At that time. I thought the Twist was the latest dance, but Lenny said, ‘No, it’s the Mashed Potato.’ So I said, ‘That’s even better – we can call it the Monster Mashed Potato. We shortened it to ‘Monster Mash.’ ” In about three hours, they cut a piano-and-voice demo on a mono Wollensak tape recorder and brought it to Paxton, who proclaimed it a hit. 

4. Rock legend (and pop Christmas song queen) Darlene Love sings backup. 

Paxton, Capizzi and Pickett wasted little time getting into the studio to record “Monster Mash.” Singer Darlene Love, member of the Blossoms who sang on Phil Spector orchestral pop productions like “He’s a Rebel” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” has said she sang on the track. Love said she learned of the gig through superproducer Lou Adler, who later oversaw sessions for Carole King’s Tapestry. Hilariously, Love recalls not being too enthusiastic about the idea of singing a song called “Monster Mash.” As she later told Billboard, she remembered thinking, “Oh please. A Halloween song? Who’s gonna do a song about Halloween?’”

5. The recording of “Monster Mash” was comically low-budget.

Pickett’s own account of the session — which cost a whopping $300 — is that it took between two and three hours to complete, with his vocals wrapped in a scant 30 minutes. 

“Gary Paxton did all the audio effects,” he explained, per The American Songwriter, “like the straw in a glass of water to get that bubbling lab sound. Gary pulled the rusty nail out of a board to get the coffin creaking sound; he dragged chains across the linoleum floor to get the chain effects.” 

6. Every label rejected “Monster Mash” at first, so the producer got creative. 

Paxton took the finished recording to four major labels, and they all turned it down. Undeterred, Paxton pressed between 500 and 1,000 records on his own label GARPAX, and drove north from L.A., stopping in Ventura, Bakersfield and Fresno to hand-distribute copies of “Monster Mash” to DJs. 

“By the time Gary got back to Southern California, his phone had been lighting up like a Christmas tree,” Pickett said. “London Records, which was one of the outfits that had turned him down, called and said they had changed their mind, of course,” he added. “The records were being ordered on a massive level.”

7. “Monster Mash” was banned in the U.K.

“Monster Mash” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of Sept. 8, 1962. Six weeks later, the single knocked the Four Seasons’ “Sherry” from the top spot to begin a two-week reign that ended four days before Halloween. It returned to the charts multiple times, including in 1970 and 1973. The BBC famously banned it upon initial release for being too morbid, only lifting the ban in 1973 when it hit No. 3 in the U.K.

8. Boris Karloff himself was a fan. 

Sadly, Pickett never met Karloff. But according to Pickett, the inspiration for the song actually got a kick out of it. 

“One of the London Records promotion men, a guy named George Sherlock, ran into Boris Karloff at Wallach’s Music City as he was buying a copy of the Monster Mash album,” Pickett later claimed. 

More definitive proof came on the Halloween edition of the rock TV show Shindig in 1965, which features Karloff (alongside Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on The Addams Family) performing a version of “Monster Mash.”

9. Elvis Presley (reportedly) was not a fan. 

There’s an oft-repeated rumor that Elvis Presley hated “Monster Mash,” tied to an interview with Pickett published in the 1993 book The Wacky Top 40 by Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo.

“I was a real Elvis fan,” he says. “One day after the song had become a hit, I bumped into this girl who used to hang around Elvis’ house in Los Angeles. So I asked her, ‘How’s the King?’ ‘Well, he hates your record, Bobby,’ she said. When I asked why, she told me, ‘He thinks it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.’ So I said, ‘Well, whoever liked him anyway?’ I don’t think he knew who Boris Karloff was, to tell you the truth.” 

Pickett would often retell this story when performing live, ending it with, “If you’re still out there listening, Elvis, I’m still here.” 

10. Pickett followed up “Monster Mash” with a string of even more bizarre novelty songs about smoking, Star Trek and wildlife protection. 

Two years after the release of “Monster Mash,” Pickett rehashed the Karloff impression for a cover of an old novelty Western swing song called “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” backed by The Filter-Tip Kickers. Unfortunately, his timing was poor. The song dropped just as the dangers of smoking were becoming widely known to the public, and the single tanked. 

Pickett did, however, pop back into the mainstream in 1975 with the parody skit “Star Drek,” which became the most requested number for iconic alternative-comedy radio host, Dr. Demento. In 1985, he released “Monster Rap,” which is exactly what you’d expect: Frankenstein’s monster is having trouble learning to speak, so the scientist (who of course speaks in Pickett’s Karloff impression) teaches him how to rap. 

In 2005, Pickett, along with the environmental organization Clear the Air, released “Climate Mash,” which – you guessed it – is just “Monster Mash” with lyrics about climate change. Environmental causes were near and dear to Pickett — just the year prior, he’d released “Monster Slash,” sponsored by the Campaign to Protect America’s Lands and Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund. It encouraged citizens to write in against a proposal to permit logging, mining and other activities in protected areas.

11. Pickett was a New York City cabbie in the ‘70s. 

From the late ’60s to the early ’70s, Pickett pivoted to performing in a folk duo with his then-wife, Joan Payne, working what he called “the ski-resort areas singing soft folk harmonies,” per his 2005 memoir, Half Dead in Hollywood. They toured internationally moving to New York in 1972, where Pickett drove a cab and Payne worked as a waitress right before “Monster Mash” re-charted for the second time.

“It was on the charts for six months before anyone told me that it had been re-released, let alone charted,” Pickett said in 1995. “I called the head of London Records, Walt McGuire, and said, ‘Walt, I hear the record’s doing well.’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m driving a cab here in New York City. I was wondering if I could turn my cab in and come and get a check.’ ” 

12. Pickett was reunited with his long-lost daughter shortly before his death. 

But there was an even bigger twist waiting in the wings for Pickett. His manager Stuart Hersh told Vice in 2014 that at one point Pickett made an offhand comment to him that he might have a daughter. The pair undertook a search and found a likely candidate in 1997, but a DNA test proved negative. 

Soon after, a completely different woman contacted them claiming to be Pickett’s daughter – incredibly, a week before Halloween that year. Pickett’s sister Lynda S. Proctor said she remembered the day of the call; telling the Holland Sentinel that, when Pickett hung up that day his voice confirmed he’d found someone special.

“They met up at the airport, and they looked so similar that they didn’t even have to do a DNA test,” Hersh added. Pickett, he said, “went from this loner to a family guy, and he loved it,” spending the holidays with his newfound daughter and grandkids.  

“When I found him, he was out-of-his-mind thrilled since he thought he was going to grow old alone,” the woman, Nancy Huus, who’d been raised by an adoptive family, told Billboard. “I still remember the night I told my kids that Grandpa is the ‘Monster Mash’ singer.”

13. Pickett’s cremated remains were crushed into a diamond, which his daughter wears as a ring. 

Pickett died in April 2007 of leukemia. He performed until the November before his death. Hersh recalled that Pickett kept a morbid sense of wit about his situation, telling Vice that he’d call Pickett at the hospital to check up on him after his regular blood transfusions and Pickett would inevitably reply in the Dracula voice, ‘Stu, there’s nothing like fresh blood!’” 

His daughter Nancy was at Pickett’s side when he died, and, true to form, Pickett managed to secure one last piece of press after his death. “I saw a show about turning cremated remains into diamonds,” Huus said in 2007, per the Northwest Indiana Times.  “I immediately called my father and told him that I wanted to make a diamond from his cremated remains; he loved the idea.” 

The company, LifeGem, complied, creating a .44 carat colorless diamond from Bobby’s cremated remains, which Nancy wears in a white gold solitaire ring. 

But Pickett’s greatest legacy will always be “Monster Mash,” of course. “I’m glad I did the song,” he told PEOPLE in 1996, “because some people never get to do anything.”