Vampire legends and tales date back to the Bible and before, sure. But on April 10th, 1815, Mount Tambora on one of the Sunda islands in Indonesia erupted with a violence that hadn’t been seen in almost 1600 years.
The eruption was so powerful that it demolished villages all around, and sent up a global ash cloud that screwed up Earth’s climate so much that people in the northern hemisphere referred to the year 1816 as the year without summer.
In places like Geneva, for example, the summer was cold and rainy. And people like Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, and their other friends had their Switzerland vacation dampened by the rain. Bored one day, they decided to hold a horror story competition. Mary wrote a story that eventually became known as Frankenstein.
What most people don’t know is that one of the guys there, Lord Byron, wrote a short story about a vampire. He forgot about it, but his personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, picked it up and eventually published it as “The Vampyre” in 1819.
So what it breaks down to is that a bunch of bored Europeans couldn’t go swimming in 1816 because of the terrible weather induced by a volcanic eruption on the other side of the Earth, so they wrote the tales that became the classic backbones of modern horror fiction.
Not the non-fiction that is gruesome, dirty bugs, but the common Twilight, Anne Rice-type frilly fiction. Where vampires wear medallions and know wine like James Bond.
And that, my friends, is how a volcano erupted vampires.