Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pliny the Younger purchased the house in Athens in the year 113 and discovered the ghostly figure bound in heavy chains shortly after acquiring the property. This event stands as one of the earliest documented instances of a haunted house narrative, predating the modern horror genre by nearly two millennia.
Horace Walpole published the first edition of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and initially disguised the work as a genuine medieval romance discovered in Italy. The novel launched a literary revolution that defined the genre for centuries and created a template of gloomy castles and supernatural events.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and published the novel in 1818. The work drew inspiration from the ancient myth of Hippolytus and introduced the concept of the modern monster created by human hubris.
H. P. Lovecraft published the story Cool Air in 1925 as part of his development of the Cthulhu Mythos. The story posited that the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin in 1967, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty in 1971, and The Other by Thomas Tryon in 1971 created an enormous commercial success for three books that established horror as a profitable marketing niche. These novels demonstrated to publishers that horror was now a profitable marketing niche, leading to a surge in the production of horror novels.
The Chicago Tribune designated librarian Becky Spratford as the Chicagoan of the Year in Books in 2025 for her career tirelessly nudging horror literature into the American mainstream. Spratford has written three textbooks on horror, added a horror column to Library Journal, and held roles with the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Horror Writers Association, and the Bram Stoker Awards.