Playing a Game of Ghost Stories

The Haunting of the Villa Diodati

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."

The summer of 1816 experiments with unbridled creativity. Experience the passionate writing of classic Gothic Horror stories and Romantic poetry. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley visit Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, in the Swiss Alps. Lord Byron is joined by Claire Clairmont, his lover, and Dr John Polidori, his plagiarist.

After reading aloud from the Fantasmagoriana, Byron proposes Playing A Game of Ghost Stories. He, himself, reanimates the folklore surrounding vampyres into suave Gothic Horror, while Dr. Polidori draws inspiration from Lord Byron's scandalously incestuous relationship with his half-sister to update the myth of Oedipus for modern audiences with Faustian overtones.

Includes the Full Texts of:

• Lord Byron's "The Burial: A Fragment"
• Dr. John Polidori's Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern OEdipus
• Bonus: Friedrich Laun's "The Death-Bride" from Fantasmagoriana

Along with Romantic Poetry of Lord Byron & Percy Bysshe Shelley

Interwoven with Robert Dwight Brown's "A Strange Birth to Frankenstein" an Original Ghost Story About Being Haunted by the Spark of Creativity!