Physician, writer, and dreamer, John William Polidori (1795–1821) was born on this day in London. Best remembered for his novella The Vampyre, he helped shape the dark contours of modern vampire lore—infusing gothic shadows with romantic yearning and emotional depth.

In the storied summer of 1816, he joined Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Claire Clairmont at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Byron’s ghost story challenge, kindled by thunder and candlelight, gave birth to Frankenstein and, in quieter ink, Polidori’s The Vampyre—a tale that would echo for centuries.

Trained as a physician, he served as Byron’s companion but often found himself eclipsed by the poet’s stormy brilliance. Still, Polidori’s sharp mind and moral clarity glimmered in his journals, where he yearned not for fame, but for meaning. He once wrote, “The dreams of poets were the realities of life.”

Melancholy was never far. He was just twenty‑five when he died. And yet, in that brief flicker of time, he touched eternity. Every brooding, elegant vampire since carries something of his soul—a whisper of ink, a wound of longing, a heartbeat in the dark. From David Boreanaz’s Angel to the shadows of literature, Polidori’s creation lives on.