Spooky was born from dissent. When Spooky started in the early ’90s, the founders were a bunch of New England punks, straight-edge BMXers and skaters like Christine and Kevin Hopkins and Chris Cotroneo, who didn’t have big investors or fancy backing. The crew sat around a table and sketched a frame on a napkin. They were in search of a non cookie-cutter frame that could actually survive East-Coast trails. To get things off the ground, they sold T-shirts first to fund the bike frames. Those shirts weren’t just merch, they were the manifesto. They carried slogans like: "Bikes, Fun & Positivity" and "Faster Than Your Mother". They built a community before they built a frame. That DIY spirit — screen-printing shirts to bankroll tubing — perfectly defines Spooky’s “make it yourself” ethos. The profits from those shirts bought the tubing, and the tubing became the first bike. That’s how Spooky Cycles was born: funded by grit, ink, and stubborn optimism.
The first frame they built was The Darkside. It was steep, short, fast, and totally unhinged. It rode like nothing else, and suddenly everyone wanted a piece of it. Spooky was officially on the map.
From there, things escalated fast. Frames like the Project-X, Metalhead, June Bug, and Bandwagon hit the trails and made noise. Spooky was suddenly welding hundreds of frames a month; not just for themselves but for other brands that wanted a piece of the chaos. It was wild in the best way possible. The scene blew up, the cult became a movement, and then as suddenly as it started the founders walked. The lights dimmed, but the spark didn’t die. What they built, that mix of bikes, fun, and raw energy, had already turned into something bigger. For a lot of riders, Spooky wasn’t just a bike brand. It was a religion.
Spooky 2.0 fired up in the mid-2000s. Same ideals, different wheels. The crew had grown up a bit, trading knobby tires for skinnier ones, but still refusing to follow the herd. Carbon was taking over, but Spooky stayed loyal to aluminum. That era gave us the Skeletor — a razor-sharp alloy race bike that proved you didn’t need plastic to win. It stomped podiums around the world and reminded everyone that stiffness and soul weren’t mutually exclusive.
When Spooky turned to custom frames around 2010, Frank the Welder — the legend himself — was back at the torch, building one frame at a time with that unmistakable FTW grit. Then, true to form, Spooky slipped back into the shadows.
Enter Brandon Elliott — a diehard Spooky fan who couldn’t stop thinking about the bikes he grew up idolizing. Around 2014, he went looking for a Skeletor and ended up chasing ghosts across the country. Eventually he got the blessing to bring Spooky back.
With Frank the Welder back on the torch, Spooky re-emerged in the Pacific Northwest. The Mulholland, Dune, Gas Mask, Plan B, and Eraser carried the banner — unapologetically aluminum, with geometry that begged to be raced, crashed, and ridden again. Every frame had fingerprints and a bit of attitude baked in.
Welding, Wandering, but Never Dead. Spooky bounced between coasts and crews — from New England to Vermont, to Oregon, to the desert in Scottsdale — but the DNA never changed. Frames were finished by hand, often welded by the same legends who helped define the brand. The Gas Mask kept cyclocross rowdy. The Rovr blurred the line between cross and gravel. Each frame was a middle finger to over-engineered mediocrity.
The Mothership returns, Spooky is back — welded in Colorado, built by riders, for riders. The mission hasn’t changed in thirty-plus years: make bikes that are fast, tough, and fun as hell to ride. The new generation is carrying the torch with models like the Oneway and the Slacker — hand-built aluminum machines that don’t care about trends.
From the napkin sketch to the Rockies — Spooky’s still fueled by the same thing: a love of riding, a hate of pretense, and the belief that if you want something done right, you build it yourself.
Stay Spooky.
