Through her half-sister Claire Clairmont [Miriam Cyr], Mary Godwin [Natasha Richardson] and her future husband Percy Shelley [Julian Sands] came to know Lord Byron [Gabriel Byrne]. During the summer of 1816, Lord Byron invited them to stay for a while at his Villa Diodati in Switzerland. There they met Byron's physician friend Dr John Polidori [Timothy Spall]. On June 16th, while a storm raged outside, the five of them amused themselves by telling ghost stories and revealing private skeletons.