Tales of the Dead

Tales of the Dead was a book which Lord Byron read to Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori at Villa Diodati in June 1816. (TV: The Haunting of Villa Diodati)

"At midnight, we took a torch to the chapel. With pallid countenance and trembling limbs, we descended to the vault. Hildegarde's leaden coffin loomed before us. The Count was seized with the sensations of terror. He opened the coffin with a stifled cry of dread and inside we saw..."

- An excerpt from Tales of the Dead as read by Lord Byron

Behind the scenes
Tales of the Dead was an English anthology of horror fiction published in 1813 and consisting of six short stories. Though mentioned, but not made explicit during The Haunting of Villa Diodati, the story which Lord Byron reads is called The Death-Bride. The horror story was written by Friedrich August Schulze, a German novelist who wrote under the pen name Friedrich Laun.

Tales of the Dead was based on Fantasmagoriana, a French anthology of German ghost stories published in 1812. In an 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley states that when she and Percy Shelley spent time with Lord Byron in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, they were often forced to stay indoors for days at a time due to heavy rain and they amused themselves by reading "some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French". These ghost stories were Fantasmagoriana. Shelley specifically mentions "The Death Bride" in the 1831 preface, saying "There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted." Though the excerpt of "The Death-Bride" read by Lord Byron is based on the actual story, it is not the same as the real-life version.