On a dreary day near Lake Geneva in 1816, Lord Byron offered a ghost tale contest, which inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. It was also the birthplace of John Polidori's The Vampyre, his first vampire fiction written in English. Polidori was Byron's personal physician, and he may have modeled his aristocratic bloodsucker on his patient—making Lord Byron the inspiration for the majority of vampire representations that followed. (According to some versions, Polidori took a piece of fiction written by Byron and utilized it in his novel.) Varney the Vampire, a popular penny dreadful from the 1840s, Carmilla, a novella about a lesbian vampire from the 1870s, and, of course, Stoker were all influenced
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