Perched on a hill, 1,200 ft above the village where I live in Germany, is Castle Frankenstein. It is a ruin now, but in 1673 it was the birthplace of one Konrad Dippel, who became in adult life, as Dippel Frank en steina, a physician of repute.
But there was a darker side to Dippel's nature: he was reputed to dig up human remains for use in anatomical research, and to employ strange methods in his attempts to restore dead animals to life. And like Goethe's Faust, he was said to have made a pact with the Devil in exchange for the secrets of eternal youth.
Now, Mary Shelley and her future husband Percy once stayed a night or two in Eberstadt, right in the shadow of this Castle Frankenstein. At the tender age of 17 Mary, you will recall, had eloped to the Continent with Percy, and their stay in Eberstadt in 1814 was occasioned by a boat-trip on the River Rhine which flows nearby.
Then two years later, in 1816, the pair found themselves in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva, where with the writer, Polidori, they were house guests of picaresque Lord Byron.
The summer of 1816 was a dreary one throughout the whole of Europe. The previous year Mount Tambora in the East Indies had erupted, hurling tons of dust and ash into the upper atmosphere. Twelve months later the by then worldwide veil of dust reduced the penetration of the sun's rays, and caused a significant drop in average global temperatures.
Most of the Continent that year was cold and wet; indeed, throughout Europe and North America conditions were so unusual that 1816 is remembered as "the year without a summer".
Mary herself described what happened: "It proved a wet and uncongenial summer, and the incessant rain often confined us to the house for days on end. `We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron." And so, indeed, they did.
The efforts of Shelley and Byron were quickly abandoned. Polidori, however, produced a story called The Vampire, and Mary Shelley's tale became a classic; it was published in 1818 under the now famous title Frankenstein - a bizarre Gothic novel which no doubt owes its name and theme to the stories Mary heard in Eberstadt about the ruined castle that still stands above my house.
Widowed at the age of 24 when Percy drowned, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley returned to England to live in genteel poverty for the remainder of her sad life. She died of a brain tumour 149 years ago today, on February 1st, 1851.