Literature · Premium
The night that spawned a monster
In the summer of 1816, remembered as the "year without a summer", due to the eruption of Mount Tambora, five young English people found themselves confined to Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva because of the bad weather. Among them were Lord Byron, the cursed poet, his physician John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his companion Mary Godwin (who would become Mary Shelley), and Claire Clairmont. To pass the time, Byron issued a challenge: to write a ghost story. From that challenge two immortal masterpieces were born: Mary had a nightmare that gave life to "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus", while Polidori wrote "The Vampire", which inspired the modern myth of the aristocratic vampire. That night, between storm, opium and conversations on galvanism, imagination gave life to two monsters that still populate our nightmares.
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