The Vampire superstition is still general in the Levant. Honest Tournefort tells a long story about these 'Vroucolachas', as he calls them. The Romaic term is 'Vardoulacha'. I recollect a whole family being terrified by the scream of a child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation. The Greeks never mention the word without horror. I find that 'Broucolokas' is an old legitimate Hellenic appellation ~ the moderns, however, use the word I mention. The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested." (Byron)
The April 1819 edition of the New Monthly Magazine contained a story, whose authorship was left vague, but was popularly believed to be the work of Lord Byron: it’s title was "The Vampyre", and the character of the aristocratic Lord Ruthven, the ‘vampyre’ of the title, would set the stereotype for literary portrayals of the vampire for the best part of a century.
The following month’s edition carried a letter from Dr. John Polidori, who had been Lord Byron’s physician on his travels across Europe in 1816, claiming that the story was his own work, but admitting that it was based on a story Byron had begun and quickly abandoned in Geneva. Indeed, the portrayal of Lord Ruthven was unnervingly close to the entrenched public image of Byron himself, that of an immoral and sinister anti-hero - an image which he had courted and even played upon, though he was quickly to weary of it.