In Bram Stoker’s novel, Prof. Van Helsing makes a passing remark that he wonders if perhaps Count Dracula is not a descendant of Vlad the Impaler, but, in fact, really is Vlad the Impaler.
As previous posters have noted, one can get into semantic difficulties when discussing vampires. Stories about monsters and demons who survive on human blood go back well into the B.C. period. If we define a vampire as someone who was once an ordinary human and now is “undead”, though, we are dealing with a much newer phenomenon. I have read that the first accounts of their existence go back to England in the 11th Century. Sorry: I don’t have a cite handy.
The story is well-known of how Lord Byron attended dinner at the vacation home of Percy Shelley in Switzerland and, in a conversation after dinner, it was suggested that each of the people in attendance–Shelley, his wife Mary, her stepsister Claire Clairemont (spelling?) and Dr. John Polidori might try writing a ghost story. Later that night Mary Shelley awoke from a nightmare about a huge man with glowing yellow eyes, from which she took the inspiration for her novel Frankenstein: The New Prometheus.
A short time later a story was published in England entitled B]The Vampyre**. To borrow Mark Twain’s phrase, it is choloroform in print. This story was originally credited to Lord Byron, but was eventually proven to have been written by John Polidori after Byron had told him the idea for a story he thought he might write. Polidori claimed that the publisher had “misunderstood” him when he sold him the story. Byron never wrote more than the first few pages of his story, and after the Polidori controversy became a popular scandal it was published as A Fragment.
It’s too bad he didn’t finish, as it is an interesting start, and quite crisply written. In it, two Englishmen are traveling across Europe when one day, while visiting a remote cemetery, the one interprets the appearance of a bird as an omen that he is about to die. He makes his friend swear that he will bury him there in an unmarked grave and tell no one. All of this then comes to pass. Had he finished the story, Byron intended to have the man who made the promise return to London and find that his friend is there, and eventually figure out that he is a vampire.
The Polidori and Byron stories seemed to have introduced vampires as a popular subject for fiction in Great Britain. Gothic horror fiction was just coming into vogue, and thereafter there were a number of cheaply-printed sensationalistic novels of a type called “bloods” or “penny dreadfuls” which used a vampire theme. One particularly well-known one was called Varney the Vampire.
The Reverend Montague Summers wrote two books about vampire legends: The Vampire in Europe and The Vampire his Kith and Kin. Like his other books on occult subjects, they make for very entertaining reading, as Summers was an exhaustive researcher who seemed ready to believe anything. He also has a unique style, for instance using the phrase “the cold clay of his inamorata” in relating a story about necophilia.
Summers is referred to in many sources as having actually believed in the existence of vampires, and in some of his other writings–most notably A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic, he insists that there is an international conspiracy of Satanists who can perform real magic, create zombies, etc. IIRC, however, he never actually comes out and says he believes in vampires in either book. Instead, he sort of teases the reader, merely saying that various conventional explanations for vampire legends, taken alone, are not sufficient to account for the tradition.
It has been suggested that Summers was himself an ex-Satanist. In any event, he was a mysterious figure. He wrote as though he were an ordained Roman Catholic priest, yet he never seemed to have an active affiliation with any sort of Catholic ministry, and his books were all published without the advance review and approval of the Church.
