The following are a few frequently asked questions. If you have additional questions or need support with the app, please use the contact email at the bottom of the page.

 

 

What happens if I download the story after it begins?

If you join the story partway through the summer, content will be unlocked until your day of download, so you can read what has already happened and still receive notifications as new events unfold.

 

How accurate is the timeline?

The timeline was created from original texts written by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John William Polidori. There are, however, a few moments of ambiguity, and other moments that simply aren’t documented. Polidori stopped keeping his journal partway through the summer, and Mary did not begin hers until August, so we have no information about certain parts of July.

Some of the letters are not dated. A few letters and journal entries have conflicting dates due to personal errors. The actual date of Byron’s ghost story challenge isn’t documented. It happened sometime between June 14th-16th 1816.

When there was ambiguity, we set event dates according to scholarly research or to fit the narrative arc. There are very few of these moments. Almost everything matches the original documents exactly.

 

How were the longer entries edited?

Letters that cover a long period of time were divided and set to the days the events actually occurred. For example Shelley wrote one long letter that recounted his journey with Lord Byron, and this is split up across several days.

In other instances we’ve selected extracts from longer letters or entries to give a sense of the writer and the situation without introducing too many other friends or acquaintances. We wanted to share this story without extensive annotation to keep it as immersive as possible for a general audience. Source material is in the public domain and easily accessible for those who would like additional information.

 

Why can’t I read some of the entries?

During the summer of 2016, events are matched in “real” time so that the audience can re-live the summer of 1816 as it happened. Events unlock on the dates they happened and spread over the course of the day. You can peek ahead to see which dates have new content, where the group has traveled, and what the weather was like.

 

What happens to the app when the story ends at the end of the summer?

At the end of the summer, all of the content will be unlocked. You can explore the content in any order or you will have the option to “reset” the app and start over, receiving updates over the next four-month period.

 

How did you decide which days to make rainy?

Weather data from 1816 is in the public domain. It was collected at sunrise and at 2 pm every day, and we generated the app’s weather animations from that data.

 

Why are there some blank days when nothing happens?

These are dates when we have no record of what happened. No letters were written. No one kept a journal. The writers were, most likely, writing and following their usual routines.

 

Other questions?