The Night the Monsters Were Born: Storms Over Geneva, 1816 | Episode 1

In the summer of 1816, the world was shrouded in darkness. The sun dimmed beneath ash from a volcano that had erupted the year before in faraway Indonesia. Crops failed, skies turned gray, and cold rain fell through what should have been summer. Across Europe, people called it “the year without a summer,” and many believed the end of days had come. It was during this strange, unnatural season that five young travelers gathered in a lakeside villa near Geneva, Switzerland, to escape the storms. There, amid thunder and flickering candlelight, they decided to pass the time by telling ghost stories. None of them could have imagined that what began as an evening’s amusement would give birth to two of the most enduring monsters in history: the creature of Frankenstein and the aristocratic vampire of The Vampyre.

The villa was called Diodati. It stood on a hill above Lake Geneva, surrounded by cypress trees that swayed in the wind like dark sentinels. Inside were five extraordinary people. Lord Byron, already a scandalous celebrity at the age of twenty-eight, had fled England to escape gossip about his affairs. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical poet from a noble family, came with his young lover, Mary Godwin, who would later become Mary Shelley. Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, was there too, hoping to rekindle a brief and reckless romance with Byron. The final guest was Dr. John William Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, a man of intellect and fragile nerves. Each brought with them a tangled family story and a shadow of their own.

The storm outside was relentless. Cold wind howled through the shutters, and lightning illuminated the lake like the flash of a camera. The travelers found themselves trapped for days. They passed time reading a German collection of ghost tales called Fantasmagoriana, which filled their imaginations with phantoms, curses, and the restless dead. At some point, Byron proposed a challenge: each person should write their own supernatural tale. That challenge would change the history of literature forever.

Mary Shelley’s imagination turned to the conversation she had overheard between her husband and Byron about the reanimation of corpses through electricity. Scientists of the time were experimenting with galvanism, sending currents through dead frogs and observing how the muscles twitched. These experiments fascinated and horrified the public. One night, Mary dreamed of a pale student kneeling beside the body he had pieced together from stolen limbs. She saw the creature’s eyes open and the spark of life flicker into something terrible. When she awoke, she knew she had found her story. It would become Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Dr. Polidori, meanwhile, took inspiration from his famous employer. He wrote a tale about a charming nobleman who hides a monstrous secret. His story, The Vampyre, was the first to present the vampire as an elegant predator rather than a mindless ghoul. That image would later influence Bram Stoker’s Dracula and shape centuries of vampire lore. Byron himself wrote a fragment about immortality and decay, but it was Polidori who transformed Byron’s image into the archetype of the modern vampire.

The night at Villa Diodati was not simply a creative exercise. It was an inheritance of everything these people carried in their blood and memory. Byron descended from a line of English aristocrats known for pride and madness. Percy Shelley came from a family of baronets who disowned him for his rebellious spirit. Mary Shelley was the daughter of two of England’s most radical thinkers: William Godwin, a political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist who died giving birth to her. Polidori’s Italian family had produced scholars, artists, and eventually the Rossettis, another family of gifted yet haunted minds. Their art and their tragedies were bound together across generations.

It is no wonder that the stories born that summer revolved around life, death, and legacy. Both Frankenstein and The Vampyre reflect their creators’ struggles with family identity and inherited pain. Mary’s creature is a child abandoned by its creator, desperate for belonging and cursed by rejection. Polidori’s vampire feeds upon his own social class, destroying those closest to him, as if reflecting the self-consuming nature of privilege and shame. Both writers turned their personal inheritances into myth, transforming private anguish into universal fear.

What makes that gathering in Geneva so fascinating today is how it mirrors modern questions about science, creation, and ancestry. Mary Shelley’s fascination with the spark of life foreshadowed our own era’s obsession with genetics and biotechnology. Where she imagined lightning reanimating the dead, we now imagine DNA unlocking the secrets of the past. Her dream of resurrection echoes in every genealogist who seeks to revive forgotten ancestors and every scientist who studies how traits travel down the generations. Polidori’s vampire, on the other hand, embodies the darker side of inheritance — how power, addiction, and corruption can pass from parent to child like a curse.

Byron, Shelley, and Polidori would not live long. Byron died in Greece while fighting for freedom, Percy drowned in a storm at sea, and Polidori took his own life in despair. Only Mary survived to preserve their memory, editing Percy’s works and writing her own novels long after the storms had faded. Through her, the ghosts of Villa Diodati live on. Their creations became immortal, not through supernatural power, but through story and remembrance — the same forces that preserve family histories through time.

When we trace the bloodlines of Byron, Shelley, and Polidori today, we uncover more than noble titles and scandal. We uncover how creativity itself can be inherited, reshaped, and passed down like DNA. The monsters they invented in 1816 were born from real human bloodlines — from grief, rebellion, passion, and love. Every genealogist who studies their own family tree touches that same spark: the longing to know who we come from, and whether the ghosts of the past still move in our veins.

The night the monsters were born was not only a literary event. It was a reminder that every act of creation is also an act of remembrance. The storm over Geneva did more than frighten five restless souls. It connected them forever in a lineage of imagination — one that still lives whenever we open Frankenstein or see the flash of lightning in a story’s beginning.

References:

• Brackett, Virginia, ed. Critical Insights: Mary Shelley. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2016.

• Cambra-Badii, Irina, Eduard Guardiola, and Jordi E. Baños. “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: A Classic Novel to Stimulate the Analysis of Complex Contemporary Issues in Biomedical Sciences.” BMC Medical Ethics 22, no. 17 (2021).

• Erle, Sibylle, and Helen Hendry. “Monsters: Interdisciplinary Explorations in Monstrosity.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 6, no. 53 (2020).

• Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: HarperCollins, 1994.

• Meckler, Laura A., and Livia Morrison, eds. Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

• Trelawny, Edward John. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. London: Edward Moxon, 1858.