Villa Diodati at 210: How One Rained-Out Summer Gave Us Frankenstein and the Vampire

I have loved the summer of 1816 since I was a kid, which probably tells you what kind of kid I was. It is the worst vacation in the history of literature and the best thing that ever happened to horror.

Picture the villa above Lake Geneva. The rain will not stop, the cold has no business being there in June, and the dark sits against the windows like it wants a look at the people inside. There are five of them. A poet in disgrace, the young doctor who cannot stand him, two lovers who are not married, and a pregnant young woman the others mostly talk around. Byron, who is bored, says they should each write a ghost story.

Frankenstein came out of that room. So did The Vampyre. Two of the genre’s load-bearing walls, both squeezed by legend into one thunderstruck night. I want to take that apart, because the truth is messier and better.

So, June 16. Probably.

The date everyone uses is June 16, 1816. It is a good guess, not a receipt. Oxford puts the gathering and the dare on that evening, and the best evidence is poor John Polidori, Byron’s physician, who wrote in his diary on June 17 that “the ghost stories are begun by all but me.” One of the quietly saddest sentences in literary history. Everyone else had started, and the new kid had not. If they had all begun by the 17th, the dare landed the night before.

But Mary Godwin’s famous account came in 1831, fifteen years later, and memory at that distance is a storyteller, not a court reporter. The reading, the arguing, the false starts and the writing all happened across several days. So take June 16 as the likely night, held loosely. The chronology is foggy, which for a ghost story feels about right.

The year the weather tried something

The cold was not mood lighting. In April 1815, a mountain called Tambora, in modern Indonesia, blew itself apart, one of the largest eruptions on record. The National Park Service describes an ash cloud roughly the size of Australia hanging in the sky and dimming the sun for months. Crops failed across Europe and New England. People who had never heard the word Tambora went hungry for it.

That is why 1816 is called the Year Without a Summer, and why our five tourists were stuck indoors with the candles lit at noon, reading a French collection of German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana aloud. I do roughly this every October, except I have central heating, a Shudder subscription, and no looming sense that the harvest has failed. They had the harvest failing. You can hear it in what they made.

Everybody in that room

Names first, because the legend loses track of one person in particular.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, run out of England that spring by scandal and a marriage in ruins. He had brought John William Polidori, the sharp young doctor he had hired and already tired of. Percy Bysshe Shelley was there. So was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, eighteen, who had run off with Percy two years before and would not become Mary Shelley until she married him that December, after his first wife was found dead. And Claire Clairmont was there too. Mary’s stepsister, Byron’s former lover, pregnant with his child, still hoping he would soften toward her. He did not.

Only Byron and Polidori actually lived at the Villa Diodati. Mary, Percy and Claire were staying nearby and walking over. The famous night at Diodati was, unromantically, company coming by the house.

Keep Claire in the frame, because history keeps walking her out of it. Mary’s 1831 telling makes the contest a thing among four, and some scholars think Byron’s dare may never have included Claire in the writing. But being left off the assignment is not the same as not being there, and she was carrying the heaviest thing anyone would take home from that summer. She deserves better than set dressing.

What they actually wrote, which was mostly nothing

Go looking for a tidy competition with a winner and you will not find one.

Byron began a story about a dying aristocrat named Augustus Darvell, then wandered off from it, as he did from most things. He kept the fragment, and it saw print in 1819, tucked behind his poem Mazeppa.

Percy started something rooted in his own childhood and abandoned it so completely it is simply gone. No manuscript, no real idea what it was.

Polidori is where retellings get sloppy. His first attempt, by Mary’s later account, involved a “skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole,” which is a wonderful image and also nothing that survives. His own notes suggest he was working on something else. Either way it was not The Vampyre yet, and he did not even start until the others were days into theirs.

And then Mary, whose name now hangs above the whole legend, who at first had nothing. She listened while the men stayed up talking about galvanism and the spark of life and whether a corpse could be coaxed back into motion. The idea found her later, in the half-light between waking and sleep, as a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” That was the seed. The novel took months, and I think about that whenever someone tells me inspiration is a lightning strike. For Mary it was a slow, dreadful bloom.

How a piece of trash became the vampire we know

Byron’s discarded Darvell fragment is the part that gets me. He threw it away, and Polidori built the modern vampire out of it. Lord Ruthven, a smooth, titled predator who works a drawing room and ruins the people who let him in.

The Vampyre ran on April 1, 1819, in the New Monthly Magazine, credited at first to Byron, which must have been a particular insult to the man who actually wrote it. People overstate this, so to be clear: it was not the first vampire in all of literature. Vampires had shuffled through folklore and verse for ages. What Polidori did was take the creature out of the graveyard and seat it at the dinner table in a good coat. Charming, aristocratic, invited in. Every elegant bloodsucker who has swept down a staircase on screen is working from his blueprint.

What one ruined holiday did to the whole genre

Mary’s vision became Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously, in three volumes, in 1818. Not that night. Not that week. A year of real labor by a teenage girl, while everyone around her assumed the talent in the house was male.

Set the two side by side. Frankenstein gives horror the made thing and the cost of playing god, the man who builds a life and then refuses to be a parent to it. Victor is the one with the laboratory. The Creature is the one left holding the wreckage. People confuse those two constantly. The Vampyre gives the other half. The guest who is the predator, the charm that is the trap.

Between them, they pull horror off the road of clanking chains and village ghosts toward fears we still cannot put down. Ambition with no conscience, a body that is not your own, the outsider society builds and discards, and the suspicion that we can build our own monsters and will. Two centuries of Frankenstein films and well-dressed screen vampires trace back to that lake.

And none of them were having the cozy spooky sleepover the legend implies. Byron was in exile and could be cruel. Polidori was unhappy and would die young. Claire’s pregnancy was about to define the hardest years of her life. Mary was a teenager already carrying more grief than most of us meet in decades. The masterpieces came out of a genuinely sad summer, which is usually where they come from.

210 years on

We love a clean origin story. One perfect storm, genius on cue, a single night to circle on a calendar. The real Villa Diodati is stranger. A volcano across the planet, weeks of ruined weather, a borrowed book, five people sick of one another, and ideas that needed months and years to become themselves.

What stays with me, 210 years later, is the size of what crawled out of all that rain and boredom. A handful of unhappy people wrecked their vacation and accidentally built the modern monster and the modern vampire. The weather cleared a long time ago. Those two have never once left the room.