In 1816 Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley and John Polidori spent a wet summer at Lake Geneva, where they told ghost stories that produced Frankenstein. Polidori, Byron's young physician, resented his employer's wit and fame, and his story 'The Vampyre', published in 1819, became the first fully realised vampire tale in English. It turned the rough, mud-caked vampire of folklore into an elegant aristocrat in drawing rooms, and that character is partly modelled on Byron himself.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.