Before There Was Dracula, There was John Polidori’s The Vampyre

The supernatural monster we call a vampire goes back hundreds of years, as reanimated corpses that rose from their graves to terrorize the living, almost the way we view zombies today. But through literature, they were turned into pop culture creatures who are cultured, sexy, and move among the living without being detected until it's too late. We often think of the 1897 novel Dracula as the beginning of that type of vampire, but there were others in literature before. The first aristocratic vampire was Lord Ruthven in the novel The Vampyre. The origin of this story is a story in itself.

There was that one night at a fine house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland in June of 1816 that a group of vacationers waited out a rainy night with a competition to see who could write the best ghost story. They included poet Lord Byron, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron's physician 23-year-old John Polidori. Oh yeah, we already know what Mary Shelley wrote that night. But what about the other participants? They also wrote tales, or fragments of story ideas. Lord Byron came up with an idea that he never fleshed out, but it inspired Polidori to later write a novel about an attractive, cultured vampire. It was published in 1819, with Lord Byron listed as the author! Read what we know about the convoluted route that story went through to become The Vampyre at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: F.G. Gainsford)