S05 Episode 7 Extra: One Night by the Lake

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in your shoes. Get to know the wool runners, pipers and loungers at Alberts dot com. That's alll bi rds dot com. Welcome to Unexplained Extra with Me Richard McClain smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't

make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, A Man of Wealth and Taste, we traveled with the enigmatic Count of Saint Germain, who seemingly strange inability to age has left many questioning if he'd somehow discovered the secret to immortality. It's one of those stories that, on first hearing, leads you immediately to suspect it all must

have been fabricated. And yet Saint German was very definitely a real person whose existence was attested to by a number of esteemed individuals throughout the eighteenth century, such as the mystery surrounding the man in the excitement to fill in the gaps of who he might have been and where he came from. His story has only gotten more and more strange. In truth, I could have filled an entire episode just listing the many avenues are neglected to

go down in telling his story. Some, such as infamous occultist Madame Blavatsky, champion Sant German as a master adept high up in the Rosicrucian order, unparalleled in his knowledge of ancient esoteric truths and secret rites. Others, as the episode's title implied, believe he was, or rather is, nothing less than the devil. The author, Chelsea Quinn Yabos San German cycle historical novel series portrays the Count as a

vampire born in the Carpathian Mountains in twenty one nineteen BC. Indeed, with his reportedly refined manner, aversion to eating food, and his elegant sartorial style, not to mention being a count, it isn't hard to see where she got the idea from. Interestingly, however, although the notion of vampires existed during San German's time, or at least the time he is most prominently associated with, the eighteenth century, his characteristics were not ones that would

have been associated with them. It wouldn't be until one turbulent night in the summer of eighteen sixteen that the idea of a vampire as a suave and sophisticated operator, as opposed to the foul smelling wretch it had previously been thought of, would first be conceived. It was a night that has since gone down in horror history as the night that spawned not one but two of the

genre's most affecting and enduring creations. On April fifth, eighteen fifteen, Sambawa Island in Indonesia was rocked by acious explosion equivalent to the detonation of an eight hundred megaton nuclear bomb, blowing the top from Mount Tambora in the north of the island. It was five days later, just after seven pm, that the island's residence watched in horror as three giant columns of flame burst from out of the volcano, merging together in a hellish fountain of molten rock and fire.

The column of flame was seen raging unabated for the next hour, until the sheer density of matter spewing from the mountaintop completely obscured it from view, and then the stones started to fall, Giant rocks of pumice, some the sides of a fist, raining down across the island as local villagers tried in vain to run for their lives. This was followed by a violent rush of hot air that swept down the mountain, destroying everything and anything in

its path. By the time, the largest volcanic eruption in thirteen hundred years had finally dissipated. Ten billion tons of igneous rock had been expelled into the atmosphere, and Mount Tambora was more than a kilometer shorter than it had been before. Seventy one thousand people are thought to have died as a direct result of the eruption, but the

effect on the world's climate was only just beginning. Within months, due to the volume of ash ejected into the atmosphere, the planet found itself in the grip of a volcanic winter, causing temperatures to plummet and setting in motion a vicious cycle of endless storms and flooding. By the following year, the world seemed to be experiencing some terrifying affliction of biblical proportions, with red snow falling in Italy and candles having to be lit by midday, such was the lack

of sunlight. By the afternoon, evens had fallen silent. As Lord Byron said of that most ominous year, known as the Year without Summer, I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening

in the moonless air. In May eighteen sixteen, Byron twenty eight at the time and his personal physician, twenty one year old John Polidori, were en route to Lake Geneva in Switzerland to rendezvous with another group of fellow travelers from England, for whom all was not well. Never was a scene more awfully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large and stand in scattered clumps over the

white wilderness. The vast expanse of snow checkered only by these gigantic pines and the poles that marked our road. No river or rock encircled lawn relieved the eye, so wrote then eighteen year old Mary Godwin, as she and her boyfriend Percy Shelley, along with their four month old baby William, slowly made their way through the mountains to Lake Geneva. But it wasn't just the landscape that was

weighing heavily on her mind. Only the year before, the couple's first child, Clara, died a few weeks after her birth, having been born two months premature. Not a day went by that Mary hadn't thought about her Mary's travel sickness, and Shelley's struggles with mental illness at the time did little to lighten the mood. The trio were joined on the trip by Mary's stepsister, eighteen year old Claire Claremont.

It was in fact Claire's idea to meet with Byron, whom she knew was also keen to meet Percy Shelley, a new kid on the block whose work he greatly admired. For her part, Claire had hoped to use the meeting to rekindle the brief romance that she and Byron had shared a few weeks previously. Having eventually arrived at the Hotel D'angletaere, the group were joined by Byron ten days later, announcing himself with characteristic flare by pulling up just after

midnight in a grand Napoleonic carriage. The following day, with the women expected to entertain themselves, Byron and Shelley spent the morning getting to know each other as they danced and probed around each other's egos. By the end of the day, having established themselves as firm friends, the pair decided to leave the hotel and rent houses near by instead.

Despite each renting a property, the incessant rain eventually forced them all into Byron's place, a large, grand porticoed house on the edge of the lake known as Villa Diodati. You know all that time you spent playing games on your phone, There's actually a way you could be playing your favorite games and winning money and prizes. Join me

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may vary, and winning is not guaranteed. See website for details. One night, with the newly acquainted friends forced to find ways to pass the time indoors, Huddling round the fire as the endless thunderstorms raged outside, Byron suggested they take advantage of the atmosphere and read ghost stories to each other.

After a few evenings reading from Phantasma Gorriana, a collection of German horror stories, Byron eventually board of the game and suggested they try something else, challenging them all to come up with the horror story of their own to share. And so it was, under the flicker of candle light, with the thunder rolling off the mountains and violent stabs of lightning flashing into the room, the group set about

penning their latest masterpieces. Percy attempted something inspired by his childhood, while Byron composed a story written in the form of a letter describing a journey taken by the narrator while in the company of a strange man named Augustus Darville. As the journey progressed, the man appeared to become weaker and weaker, until finally he succumbed to whatever illness had

been ailing him. Byron had intended to have him rise again as a vampire, but neglected to finish the story, while Polydori tried something involving a skull headed lady that was roundly regarded as a miserable effort. As for Mary or though she tried her best to come up with something that would, as she put it, speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken a thrilling horror,

in the end she had nothing. It was a few nights later, as lightning flashed and the wind and rain continued to whip unceasingly at the windows, the talk eventually turned to the nature of life and the contemporary fascination with galvanism, the use of electricity to stimulate muscle movement. Although it was mostly the men who talked among themselves all the while, Mary sat listening quietly as talk moved on to whether it might even be possible to bring

a dead body back to life through such methods. It was for her an especially difficult conversation, bringing back memories of the night her baby died, and although dreams she'd had since of her and Percy sat by the fire with the child in her arms, hoping that if only they could warm her up, she might yet come back to life. When Mary's head finally hit the pillow that night, her face lit up by the lightning as it flashed

through the curtains. With thoughts of her dead daughter flooding her mind, there would be little chance of sleep, and so she lay eyes closed, listening to the rain lashing down as a vision slowly came to her. A pale student of the unhallowed arts, kneeling beside a thing he had put together, A hideous phantasm of a dead man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, slowly it began to show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Rising from her bed,

Mary grabbed a pencil and began to write. It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed, and with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected instruments of life about me, and endeavored to infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. The first words of the as yet unnamed Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, was first published on January the first, eighteen eighteen, when Mary

was twenty years old. The book, however, was published anonymously with a forward written by Mary's then husband to Percy Shelley, leading many to suspect that Percy was in fact the true author. Such an arrangement was common among publishers of the time, fearful of the public's response to authors who

were women. When Mary Shelley as she was then known, eventually had her name added to the book, it had become so popular that it no longer mattered, despite a number of critics doing their best to disparage what they now suddenly perceived as its many feminine infused flaws. To day, the book is widely regarded as a landmark in not only Gothic literature, but science fiction too, and is among

the most influential novels of all time. Though many have pointed to the death of Mary's child and indeed those darkling atmospheric nights spent at Lake Geneva as key inspirations for the novel, The tale of a creature so callously created and then abandoned also shares parallels with Mary Shelley's own complicated childhood, with some speculating that the death of Mary's mother in childbirth, celebrated writer and women's rights activist

Mary Wolston Craft had inevitably left Mary angrily pondering her own sense of abandonment. Though Mary would go on to establish herself as one of the most revered writers of all time, life did not get any easier. A third child, Clara, born in eighteen seventeen, died the following year from dysentery, then in eighteen nineteen. The next year, Mary and Percy's son, William, also died from malaria. Though the couple's fourth child, also

named Percy, would go on to survive childhood. Only three years later, his father and Mary's husband, an undoubted genius in his own right, drowned in the Gulf of Spezzia off the coast of Italy. He was twenty nine years old. As for Lord Byron, he died two years later in Greece at the age of thirty six of suspected sepsis, while helping to fight for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire. In fact, within only eight years of that year, without summer or three of the men that shared the trip

with Mary and her steps as Declare were dead. In eighteen nineteen. Having tidied up the scraps of Byron's vampire story, his physician John Polydori, decided to take a stab at reworking it, retitling it the Vampire and reimagining its lead as the suave and the charismatic Lord Ruthven, a thinly veiled impression of Lord Byron himself. Polydori's creation would become the template for almost all vampire stories that followed, most

famously Browmstoker's Dracula. Unlike Mary, however, he would not live to enjoy the success of his creation, dying by a suspected suicide in eighteen twenty one years later, Mary returned to the Villa Diodati on the edge of Late Geneva, saying of her return there that she felt like a companion of the dead, for all were gone, even my young child. Storm and blight and death had passed over

and destroyed all. But something had lived, something that she'd brought to life one dark and stormy night many years before, that would eventually outlive them all. A wondrous story that remains today as thrilling moving and influential as the day it was born. Please note Unexplained will be taking a short break next week, but will return on Friday, January first, twenty twenty one. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via Patreon.

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