The nineteenth-century Western model of the vampire is that of a person, most often aristocratic and with a castle to be somewhere in Eastern Europe, where it is not even clear whether he/she is dead or not, but which causes sickness and death to the unsuspecting people around him/her, most of the time by sucking their blood. The Carpathians, which extend from Bohemia to Serbia, passing through Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary, represent the scenario par excellence in Western vampire fiction to this day. Anyone who knows these mountains knows how beautiful and pleasant they are. However, it was necessary to create a counterpart to the amenity of the western countryside,in particular to the English countryside, therefore the Carpathians were to become the most dismal and sinister place in the world. Our study starts from the etymology and the original meaning of the word vampire, and focuses in particular on the literary aspects that have caraterized this figure, very present, albeit with different names, in the folklore of the whole planet, to take on ever more different aspects compared to the past, but then crystallized on an idealized nineteenth-century Gothic model.