Fantasmagoriana is a French anthology of German ghost stories, translated anonymously by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès and published in 1812.
[1] 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" (1819), and Frankenstein (1818), both of which went on to shape the Gothic horror genre.
[2] Fantasmagoriana takes its name from Étienne-Gaspard Robert's Fantasmagorie, a phantasmagoria show (French: fantasmagoria, from fantasme, "fantasy" or "hallucination", and possibly Greek: αγορά, agorá, "assembly" or "meeting", with the suffix -ia) of the late 1790s and early 1800s, using magic lantern projection together with ventriloquism and other effects to give the impression of ghosts (French: fantôme).
The first story ("L'Amour Muet") was from Johann Karl August Musäus' satirical retellings of traditional folk tales Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1786).
[10] Friedrich Laun quoted this review in his Memoirs, attributing it to Julien Louis Geoffroy, and also mentioned that he owned a copy of Fantasmagoriana.