Hidden Pages: The Night Mary Shelley Dreamed of Monsters

An astronomer once calculated the exact time a nightmare began. He dated it to between two and three in the morning, on June sixteenth, 1816. Last week on Hidden Pages, we talked about finding these lost moments from history's turning points, but this… this one is different. I found it pressed inside a crumbling copy of Lord Byron’s poetry, a single sheet of paper, folded into a tiny square. The ink is faded brown, the handwriting a frantic, elegant scrawl.

I can barely breathe reading it. It’s a diary entry. And it’s from that exact night. June 16, 1816. Villa Diodati. The rain will not cease. It has been days. Or is it weeks? The lake is a churning grey beast, the mountains are ghosts wrapped in cloud. We are prisoners in this house, trapped by a summer that refuses to arrive. The world feels… undone. Cold. Lord Byron, in his infinite, restless boredom, declared it last night. “We will each write a ghost story,” he said, his eyes glittering in the candlelight.

A challenge. Percy was delighted, of course. He began scribbling almost at once. Even Polidori, quiet Polidori, seemed to have some grim idea taking shape. And me? Nothing. My mind is a barren slate. Every morning they ask, “Have you thought of a story?” and every morning I am forced to admit my humiliating poverty of invention. I want to write something that speaks to the mysterious fears of our nature. Something to awaken thrilling horror… to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.

But I have nothing. Tonight, the conversation turned late. We spoke of Doctor Darwin… of his experiments. We spoke of galvanism. The principle of life. The idea that perhaps a corpse could be reanimated. That a spark, some jolt of powerful energy, could breathe life back into dead tissue. Percy spoke with such passion, his face illuminated by the fire. Could it be done? Could we mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world? The thought was… hideous.

And fascinating. Frightful must it be. Supremely frightful. Now, it is well past midnight. The house is silent but for the wind and the ceaseless, drumming rain. I placed my head upon my pillow, but I did not sleep. Nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me. It was not a dream… it was more vivid than that. A waking vision. I saw. I saw it ALL. I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.

The scene is so clear in my mind. The flickering candle, nearly extinguished. The rain streaking the windowpanes. And on the floor, the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out. A collage of parts. A wretch. I watched the student. His face, a mask of anxiety and exhaustion. He is about to discover if his terrible work has been for naught. He works some powerful engine… there is a spark. And then… the thing on the floor begins to stir. It moves with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

Not the smooth grace of a living being, but a convulsion. A shudder. It is not life. It is an imitation of life, and that makes it a thousand times more terrifying. The creature’s limbs twitch. It breathes a great, shuddering gasp. And then… its eyes open. Oh, God, the eyes. I see them still. Yellow. Watery. But speculative. They are LOOKING at him. The beautiful dream of creation has vanished in an instant, and breathless horror and disgust fill the student’s heart.

He cannot endure the aspect of the being he has created. He rushes from the room. He throws himself on his bed, desperate for a moment of forgetfulness. But he cannot sleep. He is haunted. And when he wakes, when the dim, yellow light of the moon forces its way through the window shutters, he sees it. The wretch. His monstrous creation. It is standing by his bedside. One hand is stretched out, as if to detain him, but he does not wait. He flees. Down the stairs, out into the courtyard, where he remains for the rest of the night, walking, terrified of every sound, fearing that each noise is the approach of the demonic corpse to which he has so miserably given life.

I woke with a start. My heart hammering against my ribs. The vision had possessed me completely. The terror was real. And I knew, in that instant… I have it. I have my story. She had her story. That eighteen-year-old girl, Mary Godwin, not yet Shelley, trapped by a storm, had just dreamed up a monster that would haunt the world for more than two hundred years. What she didn't know, what NONE of them knew, was why the rain never stopped. The year was 1816, what would later be called the "year without a summer." Half a world away, in Indonesia, the volcano Mount Tambora had erupted the year before.

It was one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, and it had thrown so much volcanic ash into the atmosphere that it literally blocked out the sun, causing global temperatures to plummet. It caused crop failures, famine, and that endless, oppressive, story-inducing rain over Lake Geneva. A volcano in Indonesia gave birth to Frankenstein's monster in Switzerland. And that story wasn't just about science. A year earlier, in 1815, Mary’s first child, a daughter, had been born prematurely and died just days later.

She wrote in her diary about a dream she had then: "Dreamt that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived." That waking nightmare wasn't just a ghost story. It was the grief of a young mother, tangled up with the terrifying new promises of science. It was her attempt to understand creation and abandonment, life and death, by writing it onto the page. And she wasn't the only one.

Another monster was born in that villa during that same storm. Lord Byron's physician, John Polidori, took a fragment of a story Byron had abandoned and spun it into his own tale: The Vampyre. It was the first story to portray the vampire not as a grotesque ghoul from folklore, but as an aristocratic, seductive predator. The blueprint for Dracula, and every vampire that came after. Two of modern horror's most enduring icons. The monster and the vampire.

Born in the same house, during the same unnatural storm. Mary would call her novel her "hideous progeny." The offspring of happy days, and of a terror so profound she had to give it a name. She gave it flesh, and bone, and a jolt of lightning. And in the dark of our own imaginations, that creature’s yellow, watery eye has never, ever closed.