CHAPTER TWO
“IT IS A STORY OF A VAMPIRE,” begins the note accompanying the leather-bound presentation copy delivered to former prime minister William Gladstone on May 24, 1897:
It is a story of a vampire—the old medieval vampire but recrudescent today. It has I think pretty well all the vampire legend as to limitations and these may in some way interest you…. The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to “cleanse the mind by pity & terror.” At any rate there is nothing base in the book, and though superstition is [fought] with the weapons of superstition, I hope it is not irreverent.
Because Bram Stoker happily flogged his own books, many people in his wide circle of acquaintance received similar leather-bound volumes—and similar notes. The mystery was how the bluff, burly 50-year-old found time to write his stories and novels while working full-time as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, the toniest stage in London’s West End. No doubt his friends were busy too, for they didn’t acknowledge his gift. Arthur Conan Doyle, however, pulled out his pen and jotted a note: The 38-year-old creator of Sherlock Holmes, already one of Britain’s most popular authors, declared Dracula the “very best story of diablerie that I have read in many years.”
Late Victorian London, in the imagination’s eye, is a sea of jostling hansom cabs, an ocean of bobbing bowler and top hats. It is the largest and most important city in the world, the seat of majesty and the pivot of empire. Yet it cloaks some very real horrors: Jack the Ripper—the midnight stalker who slashes the throats of women and occasionally eviscerates their bodies—is out there somewhere. Nevertheless, the figure standing near Hyde Park Corner one day in the early 1890s, watching the teeming millions passing by, will have a far greater impact on the world’s apprehension of horror, despite the fact that he inhabits only the world of a novel. For Dracula is the original Undead—a name that Bram Stoker coined, and nearly used as the book’s title—personifying the irruption of an archaic, supernatural terror in the complacent heart of civilization. His special diablerie is that, once loosed, he is not easily repressed:
My revenge is just begun. I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.
If we are to understand the vampire, Dracula is the wolf in the path. All roads lead to him.
LANDS OF SUPERSTITION
At the close of the 19th century, anyone in England who aspired to write a vampire story could count on his readers to know something about them, for books had made vampires familiar figures. Hardly a literate household did not possess an old Gothic romance or two, whose stories were set in gloomy castles and featured malevolent noblemen with Italian-sounding names. Most homes would also have a copy of John Keats’s “Lamia” or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel, poems with ancient or medieval settings that featured exotic, vampirelike beings.
Stoker’s genius did not run to poetry; but for a grimly realistic setting, he might have found inspiration in his own heritage. Bram Stoker was born in Clontarf, Ireland, in 1847, when the seven-year potato famine was at its worst. Eventually, it would kill nearly a million people and send a million Irish emigrants to the New World on overcrowded “coffin ships.” Stoker’s mother could also recount the horrors of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which had ravaged her native Sligo; she recalled its victims’ being buried in mass graves while they were still alive. There were also Celtic tales of bloodsucking dearg-due, and English tales (Stoker moved to London in 1879 to work for celebrated actor Henry Irving) such as that of the “vampire” of Croglin Grange in Cumberland: a brown, shriveled, mummified creature—discovered in a vault littered with overturned coffins and spilled corpses—that was said to have terrorized the neighborhood before being burned in the 17th century.
A vampire story, however, cried out for a central or eastern European setting, because that’s where the legend had long been flourishing. That was also the region where four empires had long been grinding against one another. The Ottoman Empire, centered on modern Turkey, still embraced the Near East and most of the Balkans, as it had for four centuries—“the Balkans” being a case of geographic synecdoche, taking a part for the whole, for the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria were just one in a series of ranges rising above the peninsula between the Adriatic and Aegean seas. The various nationalities that lived in this “Turkish Europe”—Romanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, and Greeks—had been gradually winning their independence, though not without a fight. Hidden behind that Ottoman veil, however, was one of the most deeply rooted vampire folklores to be found anywhere.
The Russian Empire also harbored deep deposits of upyr, or “vampire,” folklore, mined by such writers as Nikolai Gogol and Aleksey Tolstoy, uncle of another and more famous author of the same surname. Germany, too, would make a tempting choice for a vampire-story setting. When Jane Eyre, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name, compared the madwoman in the attic to “that foul German spectre—the Vampyre,” she was associating the monster with a tradition in German literature that had begun a century earlier, in 1748, when Heinrich August Ossenfelder wrote his poem “Der Vampir.” The genre included such masterpieces as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth,” in which the eponymous heroine wanders from her grave to seek “the bridegroom I have lost / And the lifeblood of his heart to drink.”
Stoker had certainly read Gottfried Bürger’s Lenore, one of the most popular ballads of the late 18th century. It is the tale of a spectral soldier who returns from the wars one moonlit night to claim his bride. Spiriting her away by horseback, then galloping past the ghosts that haunt gallows and graveyards, he leads her to their marriage bed: his coffin, all “plank and bottom and lid” of it, in Hungary. That ballad’s most quoted line, “Die Toten reiten schnell”— “The dead travel fast”—not only became proverbial, meaning that the dead are soon forgotten, but also appeared in a deleted early chapter of Dracula, where the four words were carved on Countess Dolingen’s tombstone.
Nevertheless, Stoker chose to set his vampire story in the sprawling, polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty from the fin de siècle Vienna of Strauss waltzes and Freudian psychoanalysis. He initially placed his castle in the mountainous Duchy of Styria, the setting for Carmilla, an 1872 vampire story he admired whose author, Sheridan le Fanu, was a Dublin writer and newspaper editor who had once employed Stoker. In Carmilla, Styria was a Gothic landscape of limitless forests, lonely castles, and ruined chapels. And there Stoker’s own fictitious castle might yet be standing had he not come across an article written by the English-born wife of an Austrian cavalry officer; her account described an even more remote corner of the empire, one tucked away in the isolation of the Carpathian Mountains: “Transylvania might well be termed the land of superstition,” Emily Gerard had written in a July 1885 article for The Nineteenth Century, “for nowhere else does this curious crooked plant of delusion flourish as persistently and in such bewildering variety.
“It would almost seem,” Gerard continued, “as though the whole species of demons, pixies, witches, and hobgoblins, driven from the rest of Europe by the wand of science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that here they would find secure lurking places, whence they might defy their persecutors yet awhile.”
Bristling with caves and strange rock formations—Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden), Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain), and Yadu Drakuluj (Devil’s Abyss)—the landscape and superstitions that Gerard described must have appealed to Stoker, because he soon moved his castle to Transylvania. That decision would place the “land beyond the forest” (the literal translation of Transylvania) squarely on the imaginative map of Europe. Even though its paper position would change after World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and Transylvania was ceded to Romania, it was thanks to Dracula that Transylvania, not the Balkans, came to be identified in most people’s minds as the vampire’s true native land.
“…THE MASTER IS AT HAND.”
Dracula is an epistolary novel, told through letters, journal entries, and even telegrams—all of which should warn astute readers to be alert to the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator. It is also a sprawling novel, overflowing with characters and incidents. But we might glance anyway at how Count Dracula is portrayed throughout the course of the narrative.
The story opens with the journey of Jonathan Harker, a young English attorney, to Count Dracula’s castle, situated in a remote reach of Transylvania. There, Harker is to help the count buy some property in London, where the nobleman hopes to move. As the castle door swings open, Harker beholds a seemingly courteous, if slightly creepy, figure:
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation, “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!”…I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest….
His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.
Despite his unsettling appearance, Dracula seems at times almost cozily domestic—playing coachman and maid and cook, making the bed and setting the table, chatting all night about different subjects, eager to practice his English. In his library—apparently the only cheery room in a long-disused castle—he reclines on a couch, studying English travel guides or the London Directory, Whitaker’s Almanack, and other reference books that must have been hard to obtain in that faraway place. He is a proud old dragon, proud of his Szekely origins, believed at the time to be descendants of Attila the Hun:
Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace, and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.
But this Transylvanian Gemütlichkeit doesn’t last. Dracula, who has coarse hands with hairy palms and long nails “cut to a sharp point,” is simply repulsive. “As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me,” Harker writes, “I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.” Harker is trapped in the castle.
One moonlit night Harker looks out the window and sees the count crawling down the castle wall like a human fly. On another night, wandering about in the warren of dust-shrouded rooms, he lapses into a trance and nearly falls prey to three horrifying female figures. Harker is saved by the timely entrance of Dracula, who tosses the harridans a sack containing a human infant for them to feed upon. Eventually, Harker finds his way into the crypt; it is daytime, and all the castle’s vampires are at rest in their coffins:
There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.
Once Dracula arrives in England, the diablerie begins in earnest. Most of the action takes place in Whitby, a Yorkshire resort on the North Sea, and London, where it centers on a lunatic asylum that happens to be next door to the old abbey that Dracula has succeeded in purchasing. The count is rarely seen, and when Harker chances to glimpse him standing among the teeming crowds near Hyde Park Corner one day, seemingly unaffected by sunlight, he looks much younger.
For the most part, however, Count Dracula is an ominous, even insidious presence, taking the form of mist or a bat. Clearly, he has become demonic; to cover his arrival at Whitby by sea, for example, he raises a storm that hurls not only giant waves against the sands but also the Russian schooner on which he traveled—a derelict, because he left all the crew dead behind him.
Stoker must have read in the pages of Emily Gerard about the Scholomance — the iniquitous school, said to exist in the Carpathians, where the devil himself taught magic spells, the language of animals, and all the secrets of nature. One in ten students, Gerard had written, were “detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju (dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in ‘making the weather,’ that is, in preparing the thunderbolts.”
Dracula is even portrayed as a kind of infernal god. The demented Renfield, an inmate at the asylum who seeks eternal life by eating flies and spiders—“for the blood is the life,” as the Old Testament puts it—can sense when “the Master is at hand,” always referring to him (at least on the page) in the uppercase: “I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am Your slave, and You will reward me, for I shall be faithful….”
Alarmed by the gathering evil, a dedicated group of men—including Harker, the asylum director Dr. Seward, the nobleman Arthur Holmwood, and the American sportsman Quincey Morris—have gathered around Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, the canny Dutch prototype of the vampire slayer. Their mission is to protect two young ladies—Holmwood’s fiancée, Lucy Westenra, and Harker’s new bride, Mina—from Dracula’s attacks, for the count is that most dangerous figure in Victorian England: the sexual predator.
“Your girls that you all love are mine already,” Dracula gloats. “And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.” The most horrifying part of the novel might be the count’s seduction and consequent killing of Lucy, followed by her return as the “Blooper lady,” a monstrous vampire who preys on children. Holmwood, her ex-fiancé, is forced to drive a stake through her heart on what would have been their wedding night—a scene never overlooked by Freudians.
Dracula then directs his attention to Mina Harker. After one terrifying night when he fed upon her, Mina recalls that he “pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some to the—Oh, my God! My God! What have I done?”
Much has been read into this scene, too; but in the context of the story, the exchange of bodily fluids gives Dracula the power to control Mina’s thoughts and actions. Yet, Mina can read Dracula’s mind in return—a facility she uses to advantage, though it becomes a race to stop Dracula before he can completely subject Mina to his spell.
The hunters have a second mission, too: They must head off a vampire epidemic in London. When he was trapped in the count’s Transylvanian castle, Harker unwittingly helped a monster escape to London; in that city for centuries to come, Harker agonizes, might this fiend “satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless”? Dr. Van Helsing later underscores the point: “But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and souls of those we love best.”
As the race to save Mina and the city gets tighter, the suspense builds—and the story gains even more momentum. Autumn and the vampire hunters simultaneously close in and destroy one by one the coffins Dracula has scattered about the city. The count is forced to abandon London. While he boards the ship that will deliver him and his remaining coffin to a Romanian port, the hunters use the latest technology—trains, telegraphs, even a telephone—to monitor the vampire’s movements.
As the sun sinks on a winter evening outside the gates of Castle Dracula, the hunters finally catch the hunted. A battle ensues with Dracula’s gypsy carriers. With Mina looking on, Jonathan and the mortally wounded Quincey Morris attack the vampire king just as he is about to emerge from his coffin:
The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart. It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.
The dragon is slain. Mina is restored to health and sanity. The community regroups, the fallen achieve heroic status, and the threat of a vampire epidemic vanishes.
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
Dracula, in his second death, had hardly vanished before his dust was fertilizing what would become, over time, a many-branched tree. It is not so much Dracula the novel as its progenies—the many stage and screen versions—that have had the greatest impact on the popular conception of the vampire.
Somehow the story is never quite the same, however. It has been dramatized, bowdlerized, and sensationalized, truncated here and expanded there. Characters have been dropped or conflated, while Dracula’s female leads have been interchanged with promiscuous abandon.
It all started within a few weeks of the novel’s publication, when Bram Stoker—having written the book, no doubt, with one eye on a possible stage adaptation—gave it a shot himself. Actors from the Lyceum Theatre gave a public reading of Stoker’s redacted play to secure its copyright for the future. But when stage star Henry Irving showed no interest, it was laid aside and never picked back up.
Ironically, the man who did more than anyone else to bring Dracula to the world had grown up just a few doors away from Stoker’s childhood home. Hamilton Deane was a stagestruck youth who had joined Henry Irving’s company in 1899, when he was only 19 years old. By his early 20s, Deane was brimming with ideas for bringing Dracula to the boards. It would take him nearly two decades to achieve his goal.
In 1922, German film director Friedrich Murnau made a film loosely based on Dracula. He called it Nosferatu (an old, folkloric name for the vampire), changed the main character to Count Orlock, shifted the location to Bremen, and brought in a chilling cast of rats to carry bubonic plague into the city.
Bram Stoker had died in 1912, but when his widow, Florence, got wind of Murnau’s changes, she tried to shut the production down. Royalties from Dracula were her main income, and she found the German film a thinly disguised pirating of the novel. So she sued.
After spending the better part of a decade embroiled in legal wrangles, Florence came close to having the negative and all prints of the film destroyed. Much like its protagonist, however, Nosferatu proved exceedingly difficult to kill. One print of the film escaped destruction—much to the benefit of cinematic history, for Nosferatu ranks among the finest vampire films ever made: Max Shreck’s creepy, cadaverous Orlock—all teeth and talons—sets a standard of excellence rarely matched by Dracula’s later interpreters.
During this protracted legal battle, Hamilton Deane won permission from Florence Stoker to mount a stage adaptation of Dracula. Unable to find a competent playwright, Deane wrote it himself. He condensed the sprawling novel to fit within the limitations of a three-act play on a single set. This meant dropping the Transylvanian scenes; all the action would now take place in London.
Crucially, Deane made the count presentable for the drawing room. For the first time in his long career, Dracula donned evening clothes, underscoring his new identity as a suave eastern European nobleman. Because Dracula was only seen in the evening, he never appeared without sporting this garb—which thus became inextricably linked with his name.
Deane’s most distinctive refinement of Dracula’s image was the addition of an opera cloak with a high collar. This served a variety of purposes. Not least of them was providing cover for the vampire’s vanishing act: With his back turned to the audience and cast members holding his cloak, Dracula could drop through a trap door in the stage and “disappear.” That was only one of the special effects—which also included a trick coffin—that thrilled provincial audiences across England. Despite being scorned by West End critics at its 1927 London debut, Dracula would enjoy huge success for many years. It was among the last plays performed at Stoker’s old Lyceum Theatre before it closed in 1939.
By then, Dracula had crossed the Atlantic. Rewritten once more to streamline the cast and plot even further, Dracula became a 1927 Broadway hit starring an immigrant Hungarian actor named Béla Lugosi. The tall, handsome, former Austro-Hungarian infantry officer with the mesmeric gaze had been born in 1882, near the border of Transylvania. Lugosi spoke barely a word of English upon his arrival in the United States after World War I, and he never lost his strong Hungarian accent. That seemed only to enhance his appeal as Count Dracula: The play ran for 261 performances in New York City before going out on tour. Then Universal Studios bought the movie rights.
The 1931 film version of Dracula, directed by silent-film veteran and former circus performer Tod Browning, is a curious movie to watch today. Though stagy and old-fashioned, its lack of musical accompaniment makes its long silent moments—when only the hiss and crackle of the soundtrack can be heard—chillingly effective.
And then there is Lugosi. His eyes burning, his dark hair slicked back, his attire immaculate, he stands in his cobweb-enshrouded castle and, as wolves howl outside, intones in that incomparable accent, “Listen to them, children of the night. What music they make.”
For millions of people, this was their first encounter with a vampire, and audiences everywhere ate it up. Over the next 80 years or so, countless actors would play Count Dracula—Christopher Lee (who in the 1950s was the first to sport fangs), Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman—but every portrayal invited comparisons with the image of Lugosi that was so deeply ingrained in the popular imagination. And most of them performed the role in evening clothes and cape.
The actor who forged the mold could never quite escape the clutches of the character he had fashioned. Béla Lugosi died in 1956. When he was buried in Hollywood’s Holy Cross Cemetery, graveyard to the stars, he was wearing Dracula’s cape.
RAVENOUS HARPIES
That opera cloak had an additional critical function: When the actor lifted his arms, the cape spread out into the semblance of bat wings. Wolves may have been his familiars, but Dracula preferred to take the form of a bat.
When Lucy Westenra’s increasingly anemic condition is linked to the presence of a giant bat outside her bedroom window, Morris (the American sportsman in the tale) recalls an experience on the South American pampas: “One of those big bats they call vampires had got at [the mare] in the night, and, what with his gorge and the vein left open, there wasn’t enough blood left in her to let her stand up, and I had to put a bullet through her as she lay.”
Bats have long been associated with the powers of darkness. Streaming out of their underworld caverns at twilight, their leathery wings and hideous faces have long been appropriated for depictions of devils.
A new twist was added to immemorial bat lore in the 16th century, when conquistadors returned from tropical America bearing lurid tales of bats “of such bigness,” Pietro Martyre Anghiera wrote in 1510, that they “assaulted men in the night in their sleep, and so bitten them with their venomous teeth, that they have been…compelled to flee from such places, as from ravenous harpies.”
These vampiros, as they came to be called, were accused of all kinds of predatory activities. By the time his Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil was published in the 1860s, Captain Richard Francis Burton could sum up in one sentence three centuries of loathing for vampiros: “It must be like a Vision of Judgement to awake suddenly and to find on the tip of one’s nose, in the act of drawing one’s life blood, that demonical face with deformed nose, satyrlike ears, and staring saucer eyes, backed by a body measuring two feet from wing-end to wing-end.”
If anything, that was likely a case of mistaken identity. The vampiro was long assumed to be the large, fearsome-looking monster that Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus had classified in 1758 as Vampyrum spectrum, or the spectral vampire bat. Similar giant bats, in the Far East as well as in tropical America, were also given names such as Vampyrops, Vampyrodes, or Vampyressa.
Because the activities of bats were cloaked by darkness, it was centuries before naturalists discovered the truth about the creatures: Of the hundreds of bat species worldwide, ranging in size from the five-foot Malay kalang to the tiny bumblebee bat of Thailand, only three were bloodsuckers, and they were all in the New World. Among the “false vampires” and “ghost bats” spread from Africa to Australasia, some are said to occasionally decapitate their victims. But the primary culprit responsible for vampire-bat legends is an unprepossessing little fellow called Desmodus rotundus, found from Argentina to Mexico.
Measuring little more than a foot from wingtip to wingtip, Desmodus generally settles on the necks of livestock for a midnight meal. But it is a stalker, too, quietly alighting near slumbering humans and stealing up to an exposed toe or nose. Its bite, at most a slight tingle, rarely disturbs a sleeper, and from the tiny puncture, a long tongue laps up the blood. Although only rarely a killer, Desmodus can weaken horses and cattle by repeated bloodlettings. It can also carry rabies—though that would not be discovered until the 1920s.
What the bats lacked in size, however, they made up for in conjured ferocity. Probing the same Brazilian highlands that Burton had two decades earlier, British explorer James W. Wells was warned by Indians in the 1880s that “vampire bats…were said to exist in such numbers in a part of the valley of the Sapão, about sixteen miles away, that it is there impossible for any animal to live through the night.”
Those must have been the fearsome creatures Quincey Morris had in mind. The Vampyrum spectrum of the American tropics hunts only rodents, small birds, and insects. The spectral vampire bat, however, still haunts our nightmares, still beats at our bedroom windowpanes. Before Bram Stoker, cartoonists had occasionally used bats to depict political vampires, and as we shall see in the next chapter, sensationalistic “penny dreadful” novels had likewise employed them as vehicles. But not until Dracula, and that grimly flapping stage prop that dominated its 1931 incarnation in film, did the bat become the symbol it is today: the most widely recognized iconographical emblem of the vampire.
DRAGON OR DEVIL?
And finally there is the matter of that name.
Had Bram Stoker not come across a copy of William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, in which he learned of a 15th-century Romanian prince named Dracula who fought the Ottoman Turks, we might today have a forgotten 19th-century novel about a Count Wampyr—the author’s original choice for his main character’s name. Happily for literary posterity, however, Stoker responded positively to the name Dracula: Drakul is Romanian for “dragon,” but it also means “devil,” as in those distinctive Romanian landscape features Gregynia Drakuluj (Devil’s Garden) and Gania Drakuluj (Devil’s Mountain).
That may be all there is to it. Stoker might never have known about Dracula’s other Romanian sobriquet, Vlad Tepes, or “Vlad the Impaler.”
A portrait of Vlad Tepes hangs in Ambras Castle, Austria, alongside one of a man so hirsute he resembles a were-wolf and another of a person who lived with a lance sticking through his head. Vlad won a place in this notorious “Chamber of Curiosities” because he was considered the archetype of the bloodthirsty ruler. This reputation had been fostered by a series of best-selling German pamphlets that depicted him, in one case, dining serenely while severed limbs covered the ground and all around him bodies hung from sharpened stakes.
Over the past several decades, a fierce debate has erupted about whether Stoker knew of Vlad’s bloodthirsty reputation. If so, did he model his Dracula directly on that historical figure? The debate is not merely academic; many, if not most, tourists visiting Romania today equate Count Dracula with Vlad the Impaler. And many, if not most, Romanians object to this misconception, for Vlad is a national hero as the defender of their country. Celebrated in poems and ballads, his statue gazes over Romanian towns, and his visage has appeared on commemorative stamps. Under no circumstances, therefore, should Vlad be associated with the world’s most famous vampire. Some locals, perceiving a business opportunity, shrug their shoulders and opt not to sweat the distinction; others justifiably resent the Vlad-vampire conflation as a myth imposed on them from outside.
No doubt both camps are correct. Whatever sins may be attributed to Vlad, however, vampirism cannot be counted among them. True, Vlad was accused in the old German pamphlets of dipping his bread in the blood of his victims. But it’s unlikely that Bram Stoker knew much about him. The general traits of Stoker’s vampire seem to have been settled when he was still known as Count Wampyr; from Vlad, Stoker borrowed only the more dramatic name—and perhaps the hint of a proud military past. Otherwise, the fictional Count Dracula owes more to the traditional villain of Gothic romance than he does to the historical prince of Wallachia.
That prince—he was actually a voivode, generally translated as “prince” or “duke”—was born in Transylvania in 1431. That was the year when Vlad’s father, in charge of guarding the Carpathian passes against the Ottomans, was summoned to Nuremberg, Germany. There, the Holy Roman Emperor inducted Vlad’s father into the Order of the Dragon, a military fraternity dedicated to defending Christendom against the Muslim Turks. As voivode of Wallachia, he became known as Vlad II Dracul, or “Vlad the Dragon.” When his son eventually succeeded him as voivode, he naturally became Vlad III Dracula — “the Dragon’s Son.”
Part of southern Romania today, Wallachia is a grassy plain bordered on the east and south by the Danube River and on the north and west by the Carpathians. As the gateway to further Ottoman expansion in Europe, it lay fully exposed to the Turkish forces patrolling the river’s south bank. Therefore, Vlad II, despite his oath to the Order of the Dragon, bought a tenuous security by paying annual tribute to the sultan. He also surrendered his two younger sons as hostages for good behavior.
By the time Vlad III Dracula became voivode in 1456, he was nursing two long-standing grievances: His years of captivity had imbued in him a deep hatred for the Turks, and the murder of his father and older brother (the brother had been buried alive) had induced a lasting enmity toward their killers, the Wallachian boyars, or nobles.
This is where the stories of Vlad’s barbarism begin. In 1457, he invited the boyars to Tirgoviste, the Wallachian capital, for an Easter feast. There, Vlad sprang a trap: He impaled those complicit in the murders of his father and brother. The others he marched off to the mountains to build his castle, where he worked them until their clothes fell from their bodies in tatters and they were forced to slave away naked.
Emboldened by his coup, Vlad terrorized the Transylvanians between 1459 and 1460, impaling 10,000 in the city of Sibiu, and 30,000 boyars and merchants in Brasov—allegedly in a single day. In the midst of these killing fields, a table was laid so that boyars who escaped punishment might join Dracula for an alfresco feast. Unfortunately, one of his guests could not stomach the spectacle; the nauseating odors of the rotting corpses, the Impaler noticed, seemed to overcome the man. The sensitive noble was therefore impaled on a stake higher than all the rest, thus permitting him to die above the stench.
Two monks passing through Wallachia were accosted by Dracula, who asked them if his actions might be justified in the eyes of God. The first monk more or less told him what he wanted to hear. The second one, however, condemned his actions as reprehensible. In most German pamphlets depicting this episode, the honest monk is hoisted aloft while the cowardly one is rewarded. In most Russian pamphlets, by contrast, the honest monk is spared.
In another tale of savagery, two ambassadors arrive from a foreign court and decline to remove their hats in the presence of Dracula. Vlad thereupon orders that their hats be nailed to their heads.
There are dozens of such stories, and most of them are clearly exaggerated. This is not to suggest that executions did not take place—death by impalement was a custom in eastern Europe and among the Turks—but the numbers and incidents are almost certainly inflated. A typical impalement seems to have involved hitching a horse to each of a victim’s legs and by those means pulling him slowly onto the point of a horizontal greased stake, driving it through the rectum and running it up through the bowels. The stake with its gory burden was then hoisted into a vertical position. Done correctly—if that is the word for it—the agony of death might be prolonged for hours. Whatever method was employed, impalement was unquestionably labor- and resource-intensive: It demanded time, men, horses, and wood. Vlad’s forces were never very large, and although he had access to abundant timber in the Carpathians, most of Wallachia was steppe.
THE FOREST OF THE SLAIN
Menaced by the Turks to his front and by rebellious nobles to his rear, bled by German merchants in Transylvania monopolizing trade and ignoring his customs duties, Vlad, cruel though he might have been, had a motive for ruthlessness. On the other side, German pamphleteers, informed by refugees that German merchants were being persecuted, had every reason to depict Vlad as a bloodthirsty sadist. In any event, as owners of newly invented printing presses quickly discovered, sensationalism sold.
We are on firmer ground, thanks to Ottoman chronicles, when war between the Wallachians and the Turks resumed between 1461 and 1462. Here, Dracula proved himself an exceptionally able commander, raiding deep into Ottoman territory and waging daring attacks by night. But his forces were greatly outnumbered, and as he retreated deeper and deeper into Wallachia, he engaged in scorched-earth tactics: burning villages, poisoning wells, and sending plague victims in disguise to sow pestilence in the Turkish camps.
The harried Janissaries crumpled beneath their crescent banners. The final straw was apparently the sight of the “Forest of the Impaled”—the rotting corpses of thousands of Turkish prisoners that stood outside the city of Tirgoviste. Sultan Mehmed II, never one to quail easily, was so sickened by the sight of ravens nesting inside the putrid carcasses that he abandoned the campaign and returned to Constantinople.
Savior or psychopath, it seems unjust that Vlad would be arrested soon afterward by the Hungarian king. Preferring a policy of appeasement toward the Ottomans, the king schemed to replace Vlad with his younger, pro-Turkish brother. After that brother died in 1476, Vlad returned to Wallachia and resumed his campaign against the Turks. Forsaken by his allies, however, he was forced to march with fewer than 4,000 men against a far larger Ottoman army. It would be his last fight.
Yet, even Vlad’s death and burial have their legendary elements. Dracula was most likely assassinated by a Turkish agent in the marshes of the Vlasia Forest near Bucharest in the last days of 1476. By all accounts, his severed head was then sent to the sultan. Whatever further indignities may have been inflicted on his body, it was said that monks eventually claimed it and ferried it across the deep waters of a lake to the island monastery of Snagov (reminiscent of the dying King Arthur’s journey to the Isle of Avalon). There, Vlad was buried in the chapel, at the foot of the altar beneath a stone slab polished smooth by generations of piously shuffling feet.
Between 1931 and 1932, Romanian archaeologist Dinu Rosetti removed that slab and found a tomb containing nothing but scattered animal bones and a few bits of ceramic. Then another—and nearly identical—stone slab was discovered near the church doors. After removing it, Rosetti beheld a coffin covered by the remains of a gold-embroidered purple pall. Inside the coffin was a headless skeleton. It was clothed in disintegrating silk brocade, and in place of the missing skull were the remains of a crown, worked in cloisonné and studded with turquoise. There was also a ring such as the sort of token a 15th-century noblewoman might have bestowed upon her favorite knight—and indeed one did bestow such a prize on Vlad II Dracul, the father, on the night of his 1431 investiture in the Order of the Dragon, and he is believed to have passed it on to his son.
Rosetti, understandably, believed he had found Dracula’s remains. Perhaps some abbot, discomfited by the notion of that man so near the altar, had moved the remains from their original crypt? However they got there, they were now transported to the Bucharest History Museum. From there, they disappeared during the chaos of World War II. They have not been seen since.
And the head? Reportedly, it was taken to Constantinople and displayed high atop a stake before the sultan’s palace, where all might behold the Impaler impaled.
THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST
“There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept,” as James Joyce wickedly described the vaults of Dublin’s St. Michan’s Church, where for centuries the morbid and the curious have filed down the narrow corridors to gaze at the bodies. Sprawled and tumbled among the narrow arched galleries are coffins; here and there an arm or a leg protrudes, as if its owner were frozen in the very act of crawling out. Bodies dry and mummified, with taut skin and spidery hair, are everywhere on display. One is said to be a nun who died four centuries ago. Another, six and a half feet tall, is reputedly that of a crusader, cut in half to fit the coffin. Several—hanged, drawn, and quartered—belonged to leaders of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. One, no one knows why, had its hands and feet severed. Everywhere lies a deep and muffling dust—proof, if more were needed, that dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.
Legend has it that Bram Stoker visited these vaults as a child, or perhaps that his family had a crypt here, and that the vivid impression they made on the young boy found expression in the adult author’s description of the vaults beneath Castle Dracula. Whether that connection is apocryphal or not, Stoker was not interested in letting his remains molder time out of mind in the sterile air of a magnesium limestone vault. When he died in 1912, he chose not dust to dust, but ashes to ashes.
Cremation had been a legal option for only ten years. Yet, public disgust with unhygienic graveyards had become a rising tide in the 19th century, culminating in 1884, when an eccentric physician named William Price, who strutted about from time to time in a druid’s costume, was arrested for incinerating the body of his young son, Jesus Christ Price. His acquittal finally overturned the old Judeo-Christian abhorrence of cremation, and in 1902, it was legalized in Britain. Shortly thereafter, the Italianate doors of Golders Green Crematorium, the first such establishment in London, opened for business. Bram Stoker was among its early customers.
That way, the dead travel fast indeed. Yet, Dracula went to dust, not ashes, even faster, in the twinkling of an eye—and with a sigh of relief, readers could close the book, the irruption of the supernatural healed over, the imagination cleansed by “pity & terror.” After all, it was only a story of a vampire.