Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) was a founding member of the New York Conference of Spiritualists, President of the Theosophical Society, and an internationally influential Buddhist convert, as well as serving as a colonel in the American military and working as a lawyer. Olcott also wrote and translated several works, including a short essay on ‘The Vampire’ (The Theosophist, vol. xii, 1891). In this, he examines the vampire as ‘one of a group of psychical phenomena’, blending its East European origins with nineteenth-century medical science and Asian and Buddhist thinking to present the vampire as a complex and contemporary phenomenon. This chapter will consider the influence of late-Victorian vampire tales on Olcott’s essay, arguing that the figure was being contested in different ways during the period that Bram Stoker was writing Dracula (published 1897), and explaining how Stoker was able to combine these elements and incorporate them in his work.