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Joy Lanzendorfer<\/b>\u00a0and Mental_Floss<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>present 10 Blood-Curdling Facts About Dracula<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Here are three of my favorites<\/span>…<\/p>\n 2. VAMPIRES SHARE A HISTORY WITH FRANKENSTEIN<\/em>.<\/span><\/strong> 3. STOKER STARTED WRITING DRACULA<\/em> RIGHT AFTER JACK THE RIPPER.<\/span><\/strong> 9. IT WAS ALMOST CALLED THE UNDEAD<\/em>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n
\nIn 1816, on a gloomy day in Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed a ghost story contest that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein<\/em>. It was also the birth of The Vampyre<\/em> by John Polidori, he first-ever vampire story written in English. Polidori was Byron\u2019s personal physician and he may have based his aristocratic bloodsucker on his patient\u2014which would make Lord Byron the basis for the bulk of vampire depictions that followed. (Other accounts say that Polidori stole a fragment of fiction that Byron wrote and used it in his story.) In any case, The<\/em> Vampyre<\/em>influenced Varney the Vampire<\/em>, a popular penny dreadful from the 1840s, and Carmilla<\/em>, a novella about a lesbian vampire from the 1870s, and, of course, Stoker.<\/p>\n
\nStoker began Dracula<\/em> in 1890, two years after Jack the Ripper terrorized London. The lurid atmosphere these crimes produced made their way into Stoker\u2019s novel, which was confirmed in the 1901 preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula.\u00a0<\/em>Stoker’s reference links\u00a0the two\u00a0frightening\u00a0figures in such\u00a0a way that raises more questions than provides answers, but no doubt confirms the terrifying real-life influence on his fictional world.<\/p>\n