In June of 1816, while on a journey with Lord Byron (for whom he was serving as personal physician), John William Polidori found himself in Lake Geneva in the company of a teenage Mary Wollstonecraft, her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. On a dark and stormy night, Byron suggested they each sit down and attempt to write an original ghost story. In response to this challenge, Wollstonecraft would create a tale that later became the basis for Frankenstein, while Polidori borrowed a character created by Byron to craft The Vampyre, the first vampire story published in English.

Presented here is that story, the Grandfather of all Vampire Fiction: John William Polidori's "The Vampyre," just as it was originally published, in its unedited and unabridged format.