Monster Mash
1962 single by Bobby Pickett
"Monster Mash" is a 1962 novelty song by Bobby "Boris" Pickett. The song was released as a single on Gary S. Paxton's Garpax Records label in August 1962 along with a full-length LP called The Original Monster Mash, which contained several other monster-themed tunes. The "Monster Mash" single was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on October 20–27 of that year, just before Halloween.
"Monster Mash" has sustained a lasting impact in various recordings, film inclusions, and re-releases since its initial release.
In 2021, nearly 60 years after its release, "Monster Mash" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart at number 37.
As of 2023, the song was generating $1 million annually in royalties.
Background
Pickett was an aspiring actor who sang with a band called the Cordials at night while going to auditions during the day. One night, while performing with his band, Pickett did a monologue in imitation of horror movie actor Boris Karloff while performing the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'." The audience loved it, and fellow band member Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to do more with the Karloff imitation.
Pickett and Capizzi composed "Monster Mash" and recorded it with producer Gary S. Paxton. The band with which Pickett recorded the song is not known with certainty, except for some session backing singers including Paxton himself: Fred "Johnny" MacRae, Rickie Page and Terry Berg, credited as "The Crypt-Kickers" (in the song is mentioned a fictional vocal group, "The Crypt-Kicker Five").
The public source identifies “Monster Mash” as 1962 single by Bobby Pickett. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Monster, Mash and single.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3861012. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1962, 2021 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monster Mash” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.