Every book tells a story - but sometimes the story behind the book is even stranger, darker, or more mysterious than the tale itself.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (1818)

Few novels have an origin story as gothic as the book itself. Frankenstein was born during a stormy summer in 1816 at Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and a handful of others challenged each other to write ghost stories. What followed was a feverish burst of imagination that gave life to one of literature’s most enduring monsters. But the tale’s real-life aftermath is almost as haunting: within just a few years, both Byron and Percy Shelley were dead, and Mary was left haunted by grief. The “Year Without a Summer,” as 1816 became known, saw volcanic ash darken Europe’s skies — setting the perfect scene for one of the darkest literary births in history.

The Voynich Manuscript - Author Unknown (c. 1400s)

Discovered in 1912 by rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, this handwritten codex has puzzled cryptographers, linguists, and historians for more than a century. It’s written in an indecipherable language with strange looping script, accompanied by illustrations of plants that don’t exist, celestial diagrams, and what look like alchemical formulas. Even Alan Turing’s wartime codebreakers couldn’t crack it. No one knows who wrote it, what it’s about, or even whether it was a sophisticated hoax or genuine encrypted knowledge from the Renaissance.

Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan - Morgan Robertson (1898)

This little-known novella has become one of the most chilling coincidences in publishing history. Written 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic, it describes the world’s largest ocean liner - named the Titan - which is deemed “unsinkable.” On an April voyage, the Titan strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks, with horrific loss of life due to a shortage of lifeboats. When the Titanic disaster occurred in 1912, readers were stunned by the eerie parallels. Was it sheer coincidence, or something stranger? Robertson himself brushed off talk of prophecy, but it remains one of literature’s eeriest premonitions.

The Orphan’s Story - Anonymous (written 1608, published 2018)

This Spanish Golden Age novel has one of the most unsettling publishing histories ever recorded. Written by an unknown monk in 1608, the manuscript was repeatedly passed between editors and academics; but each time, tragedy struck. Over the centuries, multiple would-be publishers reportedly died before the work could reach print, earning it a reputation as a cursed text. It wasn’t until 2018 that the book was finally published by the University of Granada, four centuries after it was written! Its story of a young Spaniard travelling through colonial South America is fascinating in its own right, but its reputation as “the cursed manuscript” ensures it will forever be read with a shiver.

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (1951)

When Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon outside the Dakota building in 1980, he was carrying a copy of the novel and had written inside it: “This is my statement.” He claimed that protagonist and narrator Holden Caulfield’s contempt for “phonies” expressed everything he wanted to say about what he had just done. Only months later, John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Reagan, was said to have been reading the same book and identified with its alienated narrator. In 1989, Robert John Bardo, who murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer, was also found with a copy in his possession.

Supadu can’t explain every literary enigma, we can help publishers make sure their own titles, haunted or not, are beautifully presented and discoverable online.

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