Mary Shelley kept her dead husband's calcified heart in her desk drawer for nearly thirty years, proving the author of Frankenstein was exactly as goth as you would expect.

A closer look

Mary Shelley kept her dead husband's calcified heart in her desk drawer for nearly thirty years, proving the author of Frankenstein was exactly as goth as you would expect. When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident, his body was cremated on a beach in Italy, but for some horrifying biological reason, his heart refused to burn. One of his friends snatched the stubborn organ from the ashes and eventually handed it over to Mary. Instead of burying it like a normal grieving widow, she wrapped it in the pages of one of his poems and kept it hidden in her writing desk, presumably drawing dark inspiration from the dried-up chunk of flesh sitting next to her inkwells. It is wonderfully fitting that the woman who invented the modern science fiction horror genre by writing about reanimated body parts spent decades working alongside the mummified cardiovascular system of her former lover