Tis the season to creep yourself out with a good story — especially a true story. ID the Future features a special Halloween podcast that delves into the real-life inspiration for a fearful favorite:

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On this episode of ID the Future, John West shares the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In his book, Darwin Day in America, West examines the experiments Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini conducted on human corpses. His gruesome work provided the inspiration for Frankenstein and foreshadowed the rise of a virulent strain of materialism that attempted to use science to reduce human beings to mere matter in motion.