Birth of the Ghost Story

Okay, no one knows that fact. Probably the ghost story was invented shortly after pornography. And both right after language came along…

However, on this day in 1816, according to Wikipedia, “Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, and inspires his challenge that each guest write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness.”