In 1816, when the planet suffered the volcanic winter known as the “Year Without a Summer”, the English poet Lord Byron (described by his jilted lover Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”) travelled to Geneva to escape scandal back in England.
Confined to the rented Villa Diodati in Cologny on the outskirts of Geneva by the rain and gloom, Byron challenged his assembled friends to each write a ghost story to pass the time. This led, most famously, to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”. A well known story for another Hapidev article!