this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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It's not proven but some folks think she wasn't ahead of her time and stole her story. I wouldn't believe it myself but it's sort of hard when she was hanging around "Castle Frankenstein" that was rumored to have a grave robbing scientist that lived there who did experiments to bring creatures back to life..
From a bot: The breakdown of the claims behind this theory includes:The "Mad Scientist" of Castle Frankenstein: Johann Conrad Dippel, an alchemist and physician, was born at Burg Frankenstein (near Darmstadt, Germany) in 1673. Local legends—largely popularized long after Shelley’s time—claimed he practiced grave robbing, boiled bones to create an "elixir of life" (known as Dippel's Oil), and attempted to transfer souls between corpses.
The Travel Connection: In 1814, Mary Shelley, her step-sister Claire Clairmont, and Percy Bysshe Shelley traveled down the Rhine River. They stopped in Gernsheim, Germany, which is roughly 10 miles away from Castle Frankenstein. This proximity led some pop-historians to theorize that she visited the castle or heard local tales of Dippel from boat captains along the river.
The Lack of Documentation: Mary Shelley’s detailed journals and letters from that 1814 trip make no mention of Castle Frankenstein, Dippel, or local ghost stories. When the travelers ran low on money, they rushed back to England, leaving very little time for unauthorized detours.
Where the Name Came From: Shelley famously stated that the core concept of the novel came to her during a waking dream at Lord Byron's house in Switzerland during the "Year Without a Summer" (1816), after a late-night ghost-story challenge. As for the name "Frankenstein," it is a real German surname meaning "stone of the Franks". Linguistic and literary historians note that it was a striking, gothic-sounding word she likely encountered or naturally synthesized, without needing a specific real-world blueprint. Ultimately, while the parallels between Dippel's legends and Victor Frankenstein's fictional misadventures make for a fascinating modern urban legend,
Are you some sort of ai apologist
Just a run-of-the-mill misogynist who can't accept the idea that a woman wrote a piece of foundational genre fiction. See: all the unfounded claims that actually her husband wrote the story.
Relax. I do think she wrote the book herself but also took heavy inspiration from Dippel and never credited the story. This would be like someone hanging around Castle Dracula, writing a book called Dracula, and then claiming the story "came to me in a dream".
nah, the pic just reminded me about this fun fact about shelley.