“In 1816 Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at his villa in Switzerland. Among other subjects, the conversation turned to the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale. Mary Shelley conceived the idea for Frankenstein and Lord Byron managed to write a short fragment based on va …