Perhaps because the tale is familiar, we often forget how odd it is that Frankenstein began as an entry in a ghost-story contest. The monster, after all, is an unlikely candidate for a ghost – constructed by a scientist out of dead body parts into a grossly oversized, undeniably living organism. How did a hyper-physical creature come to stand in for a ghost? As Mary Shelley recalls in her 1831 preface, her “unbidden” imagination worked with the diverse materials at hand – which by chance included transcendental fantasy and reports of scientific experiment. A “wet, uncongenial summer,” so the story goes, confined her party – including her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and his doctor, John Polidori – to the house. They entertained one another by reading aloud German ghost stories until Byron proposed that they “each write a ghost story.” A few nights later, Mary was racking her brain for an idea when she listened in on a discussion between her husband and Lord Byron: