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I'm cooking up a hypothesis here, as to what decade people of a given age group think is the quintessential or classic time to set a scary story:
• Old folks thought the 1890s was the spooky time, because of Jack the Ripper, plus that decade's huge "Spiritualism" movement that saw the rise of seances and chilling "ghost" photos (double-exposure fakes). To this day, Victorian-style houses look creepy because the association stuck.
• Boomers associate the 1930s with the spooky time, because of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man. Also, possibly the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. These movies were all over the tube in the 1970s.
• Millennials think the 1970s was the spooky time, because of iconic films like The Exorcist, Carrie, and Halloween. Some recent horror movies are set in the 1970s for no apparent reason, like The Quiet Ones.
You can always set a scary story in the present, but for a period itself to seem horror-friendly — that's the thing at issue here.
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Prior to ' Chico time' 
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3 AM.
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I'm cooking up a hypothesis here, as to what decade people of a given age group think is the quintessential or classic time to set a scary story
Interesting theory...
I think it's more historical and where are the strongest anthropologically historical markers of "scary stories", built largely around focal points of religion and spirituality or the lack thereof. Here's my take:
The basic building blocks are mythological / religious, built largely around the mystery of death and concept of being cursed/possessed/punished by unsatisfied gods or evil ghosts and demons. Some form of this has existed in societies for roughly 100,000 years since hominids became aware of death, and further became codified and spread en masse through recorded works like the bible.
A lot of mileage was gotten out of religions and I'd say that was the predominant source of "scary stories". I also think it's the lens through which much of what is scary is what the supernatural world can do and what humans can do. From there you just take your pick of historical events that provide subject matter for spooky stories.
Historical events like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Black Plague, bloody revolutions, witch hunts, Native American genocide, etc.
Historical figures like Caligula, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Hernan Cortes, etc.
The timeline you lay out centers roughly around the time the novel as a form of literature took firm root, in the 1800s. That marks the rise of science-fiction with the stories you mentioned like DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN. Those have settings though that reference a lot of the historical time periods I mentioned.
You can also look at science, like FRANKENSTEIN does, as a horror - dissection, amputation, surgery - all of these horror themes share the same qualities of the desecration of the body or spirit in some form or another.
For the 20th century, early movies were just hitting on classic sci-fi/horror literature as HORROR.
Then the 1950s brought fear of radiation / aliens / monsters.
The 1960s/1970s were religions / cults because people were seeing the horrors of Vietnam and questioning their own spirituality, giving rise to the spiritual listlessness of the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the slasher film around this time was in part due to the horrors that other people could commit upon one another, echoing the horrific cults of the time.
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