Fantasmagoriana


Fantasmagoriana is a French anthology of German ghost stories, translated anonymously by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès and published in 1812. Most of the stories are from the first two volumes of Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun's Gespensterbuch, with other stories by Johann Karl August Musäus and Heinrich Clauren.
It was read by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland during June 1816, the Year Without a Summer, and inspired them to write their own ghost stories, including "The Vampyre", and Frankenstein, both of which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre.

Title

Fantasmagoriana takes its name from Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Fantasmagorie, a phantasmagoria show of the late 1790s and early 1800s, using magic lantern projection together with ventriloquism and other effects to give the impression of ghosts. This is appended with the suffix s, phantoms, etc.; translated from the German by an amateur".
The book and its title went on to inspire others by different authors, named in a similar vein: Spectriana, Démoniana and Infernaliana''.

Stories

Eyriès chose a selection of eight German ghost stories to translate for a French audience. The first story was from Johann Karl August Musäus' satirical retellings of traditional folk tales Volksmärchen der Deutschen. The next was by Johann August Apel, first published in 1805, but reprinted in his anthology Cicaden. Of the remaining six tales, five were from the first two volumes of Apel and Laun's Gespensterbuch, and one was by the highly popular author Heinrich Clauren, which had been parodied by Apel in one of his Gespensterbuch stories. Fantasmagoriana was partly translated into English in 1813, by Sarah Elizabeth Brown Utterson as Tales of the Dead containing the first five stories ; thus three of the five stories from Gespensterbuch. Three editions in three countries and languages over a period of three years shows that these ghost stories were very popular.

List of stories