The Geneva villa. That's where Mary Shelley, during one stormy week, invented Frankenstein.

The year without a summer

April 1815 saw Mount Tambora explode in Indonesia. It was the largest volcanic eruption ever recorded. So much sulfur shot into the stratosphere that by June 1816, the world had cooled by almost a full degree Celsius. Snow fell in New England that July, and Europe shivered through weeks of freezing rain.

It was into this climate, in May 1816, that Lord Byron leased the Villa Diodati. This grand house on the shore of Lake Geneva had once welcomed Milton. Byron was accompanied by his physician, John Polidori. In a smaller cottage nearby lived Percy Bysshe Shelley, his 18-year-old lover Mary Godwin, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who was carrying Byron's child.

"We will each write a ghost story"

The weather kept them housebound for days. They passed the time reading German ghost stories aloud by candlelight. On the evening of June 16, 1816, Byron suggested a challenge: everyone would write their own ghost story.

Mary struggled. For days, nothing came to her. Then, on the night of June 22, after a long discussion between Byron and Percy about galvanism and bringing dead tissue back to life, she experienced what she later described as "a waking dream." She saw a "hideous phantasm of a man stretched out" next to its terrified creator. She sat up and began to write. She was 18 years old.

That initial draft grew into Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which was published anonymously two years later. From the same week, Polidori produced The Vampyre. This story introduced the world to the aristocratic, seductive vampire type that Bram Stoker would later build upon.

The villa still stands today, just outside Cologny, on a peaceful road overlooking the lake. There is a small plaque. It hardly tells the whole story.