The Dead Farmer Who Became the Vampire Lord

How did a dead farmer become the vampire lord? Before Dracula, vampires were dead farmers in Serbian villages. The trail to the castle and the cape runs through an empire’s paperwork, a rainy summer beside Lake Geneva, and a magazine that put the wrong name on a story. In this episode: a 1725 report that reached Vienna, the newspaper letters of 1732 that printed the word “vampyre” in English, the doctor who wrote the vampire as a lord (John Polidori, Lord Byron’s physician, in The Vampyre, 1819), the London stage in 1820, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. Whether Polidori did it to get back at Byron is our reading, not a proven fact, and the episode says so on screen. Last stop: why “vampire” now means whoever drains you. Did you learn anything new about the vampire today? Tell us what in the comments. 0:00 Picture a vampire 0:13 How did a peasant become a count? 0:38 Chapter 1: The first vampires 2:24 Chapter 2: The word gets out 3:29 Chapter 3: A wet summer 6:35 Chapter 4: The lord takes the stage 8:08 Chapter 5: A word for whoever drains you 8:33 So how did a peasant become a count? Related: How a Norwegian monster ended up in your comment section:    • How a Norwegian monster ended up in your c...   Related: The volcano that gave us Frankenstein:    • The Volcano That Gave Us Frankenstein   Sources and further reading Johann Flückinger and others, Visum et Repertum (Belgrade, 1732) Augustin Calmet, Traité sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires (1746; fuller edition 1751), English translation “The Phantom World” on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29412 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), article “Vampires” Lord Byron, The Giaour (1813) and “Fragment of a Novel” (printed 1819) Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon (1816) John Polidori, “The Vampyre”, The New Monthly Magazine, vol. XI, no. 63 (1 April 1819) James Robinson Planché, The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (1820) James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest, Varney the Vampire (1845-47) Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla (1871-72) Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) Image credits Portrait of Augustin Calmet, photo by Samuel Wernain, CC BY 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/..., https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi..., cropped. Portrait of Gerard van Swieten, photo by El bes, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/..., https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi..., cropped. Other portraits, book covers and illustrations are public domain works, via Wikimedia Commons. Maps use Natural Earth data (public domain). This video uses AI-generated voiceover. #Dracula #Vampires #Halloween