The story written by John Polidori during the 1816 ghost-story contest was “The Vampyre.”
The contest took place during the famously rainy summer of 1816, when Lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont spent time near Lake Geneva. Byron challenged the group to write supernatural tales after they read German ghost stories from the collection Fantasmagoriana.
Polidori developed his story from a fragment by Byron, often called “A Fragment” or “The Burial.” Its central character, Lord Ruthven, is a charming but predatory aristocrat. The story helped establish the modern literary image of the vampire as a sophisticated upper-class villain rather than simply a folkloric undead creature.
A common mix-up is confusing Polidori’s work with Frankenstein, which Mary Godwin developed during the same gathering. Another is “The Burial,” which was a fragment by Byron and an inspiration for Polidori’s finished tale. The Vampyre was published in 1819, initially and incorrectly attributed to Byron.