Episode 43: The Dirt on Dracula’s Castle

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

“The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests. But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!”

That is how Jonathan Harker describes Dracula’s castle in the 1897 novel Dracula by Irish author Bram Stoker. 

The castle Harker describes is what we usually picture when we think of a vampire: a decaying medieval fortress, stone walls and towers, with a crypt in which the undead sleeps in a coffin.  From the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, through the Universal Horror Dracula, through today’s versions found everywhere from the BBC Dracula to the animated Hotel Transylvania series, Dracula lives in a crumbling, cobweb-filled castle.  Harker later describes the structure: “In the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky,” wolves howl, bats fly and everything is just creepy. 

We have Stoker to thank for the aristocratic vampire who lives in a dilapidated castle. 

His castle is so significant in the novel that it is hard to think of a dwelling of greater importance and influence in gothic literature.  Maybe Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, but even then, Dracula’s castle has an enduring influence. It has inspired many movies, television stories, novels, video games, and even, appropriate for the Halloween season, haunted attractions and theme park rides.  There is a Dracula’s Haunted Castle in Niagara Fall, Canada, and a Dracula’s Haunted House in Queensland, Australia, not to mention several Dracula’s Castle Ghost Trains as part of what the British call “fun fairs.”  There is even a hotel in the Borgo Pass named “Dracula’s Castle,” where Stoker located Dracula’s castle. There is money to be made in basing your haunted attraction on this famous castle – the name recognition and potential for a fright are instant.  Several castles in Romania claim to be the “real” castle of Dracula, and at least one Scottish castle claims to have inspired Stoker. All of these castles are open to tours, and on some occasions, they welcome overnight guests.

The thing is, both the castle and the aristocratic vampire who lives in it are almost entirely Bram Stoker’s invention.  My travel in Romania & its neighboring countries initially caused me to look for the locations that may have inspired Stoker…only to learn later that he never went to Romania, and there is no Castle Dracula.  Clearly, this can be disappointing when you want to believe that there may have been some fragment of truth behind vampire lore.  But in many ways, the origin of the vampire story is as spine-chilling as the legend.

Before Dracula, vampires were usually peasants, buried in the village graveyard, walking from their graves, sometimes in broad daylight, who preyed on their neighbors and needed to have their heads cut off, their mouths stuffed with garlic, and then reburied face down at a crossroads to prevent them from rising again.  Stoker’s novel changed everything, and the vampire you know is mostly the product of this Irish author’s imagination. Paradoxically, much of what is popular knowledge about vampires is the result of Stoker, and sometimes even invented by him, but much of what we know about Dracula is from the plays and films – Stoker’s Dracula is very different from the pop Dracula.  Most folks know the count only through pop culture – movies, television shows, cartoons, and even a certain chocolate-flavored breakfast cereal.  The Dracula of the novel inspired, but bears little resemblance to, the Dracula of popular culture.

For example, in the novel, Dracula first appears as an old man with a long white moustache.  When he arrives in England, and has had access to fresh blood, he has a stylish black beard.  That’s right, Dracula always has facial hair in the novel.  But we are used to the image created in the 1931 Universal film – a clean shaven Bela Lugosi, in European formal wear, widow’s peak to his hair, hypnotic eyes, greeting us with lines from the novel.  He still lives in a creepy castle filled with cobwebs and bats, though.

This is not an episode about how Hollywood gets books wrong, however.  I bring it up because we will walk a path today with dirt strewn from a vampire’s grave and from Romanian history. Soil and land are integral to both the vampire myth and the story of Dracula, and the story and modern tourism link in odd but interesting ways. 

Another myth entirely of Stoker’s invention was that vampires must sleep in their native soil.  In Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Harker observes the “earth placed in wooden boxes” when Dracula is preparing to leave Transylvania for England, and how when he opens Dracula’s coffin, on “a pile of newly dug earth lay the Count!” (54). Later we learn that the Count has transported “fifty cases of common earth” to England, so if one is discovered, he has others strategically located throughout England.  Van Helsing oversees the team of heroes to locate each of the caskets and place a holy Eucharist within them, so the vampire can no longer rest in them.  With a single remaining casket of native soil left to him, Dracula flees London for Transylvania where (spoiler alert), he meets his end in the Borgo Pass.  His end, it should be noted, did not occur with stake through the heart.  I told you most of what you know about Dracula comes from the movies and not the original novel. 

For those interested, Harker stabs Dracula through the throat with a kukri knife, cutting his head off while Texan Quincey Morris simultaneously stabs the Count in the heart with a Bowie knife. The idea that vampires must sleep in their own soil shows up in numerous popular vampire texts, including the 1922 film Nosferatu, the Universal Dracula films, the 1944 film The Vampire Returns, several of the Hammer Studios Dracula films, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features Gary Oldman sleeping in his native soil, as do Van Helsing, the Underworldseries, and even the television show What We Do in the Shadows. Today, we are going down a dark path through the Borgo Pass, down into the forests of the land beyond the forest, and into the imagination of an Irish writer and the tourism industry of an Eastern European country to learn the dirt on Dracula.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and this is the My Dark Path podcast.  In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  Since friends stay in touch, join us on YouTube.  I just released our third full video episode about Peenemünde and the birth of the rocket.  Eventually, I’ll release a video as often as I release a podcast…eventually.  My Dark Path is a labor of love…and sometimes love takes time to develop fully.  I’m delighted at the progress we’re making on YouTube!  I’d also like to say thank you to our growing number of listeners who subscribe to My Dark Path Plus via Patreon.  In July, every Plus subscriber received a limited edition My Dark Path t-shirt!  Everyone who is a subscriber in August will get an autographed copy of my latest novel, Like Clockwork.

Thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 43, Vampire Soil, and walk the dark path from England to Romania to America to see the deep connections between a certain famous vampire and soil.

PART ONE

Before Dracula, vampires were virtually all peasants.  The count has but a single aristocratic ancestor.  In the summer of 1816, the so-called “Year without a Summer” due to global cooling from the eruptions from Mount Tambora in Indonesia, Dr. John Polidori was in Geneva with George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Percy and Mary Shelley.  On a stormy night the four agreed to a ghost story contest.  Mary Shelley, of course, wrote Frankenstein from that night, introducing the doctor and his monster to the world.  I shared the entire story of the writing of Frankenstein’s monster in Episode 15 of My Dark Path, Frankenstein & the Pacemaker. 

Lesser known, but equally significant, Polidori wrote a story that he then revised into the novel The Vampyre.  The title character, an aristocratic vampire named Lord Ruthven [pronounced RIV-ven] meets Aubrey, a noble orphan, and they agree to travel Europe together. Ruthven first seduces the daughter of a mutual friend, and then, when Aubrey leaves him to go to Greece alone, he follows Aubrey, killing the Greek girl he has fallen in love with.  Ruthven is seemingly killed by bandits, but Aubrey meets him again in London a year later, and realizes Ruthven is a vampire.  What’s more, Ruthven, now calling himself the Earl of Marsden, is engaged to Aubrey’s sister, whom he then drains of blood, killing her on their wedding night.  Aubrey dies as Ruthven flees into the night, on to his next victims.  It is clear The Vampyre, published in 1819, had a profound influence on Stoker’s novel.  As soon as Polidori’s novel was published, however, it was immediately adapted for the stage under several different titles, the most famous being James Robinson Planché’s The Vampire in 1820.  For much of the nineteenth century, for every person who read Polidori’s book, a dozen saw a play based on it, creating a vogue for vampire plays and even leading to a new piece of stage technology: the vampire trap, a device that allowed the actor playing the vampire to escape, often replaced with a bat or a cloud of mist.  By all accounts the effect was quite spectacular.  This brings us to an important point: for all the literary significance of Polidori’s and Stoker’s novels, it was first the theatre, and then eventually the cinema, that is most responsible for how we think about vampires in general and Dracula in particular.

The first stage appearance of Dracula was on 18 May 1897, organized as a staged reading by Stoker at the Lyceum Theatre in order to establish and protect the dramatic copyright of the text.  The Lyceum, tangentially, was the theatre that had premiered Planché’s The Vampire back in 1820, and had had a working “vampire trap.” Stoker had asked Henry Irving to play the eponymous character, and Irving declined, although he attended the reading and responded, “Dreadful,” when asked what he thought of it. The count would not return to the stage until twelve years after Stoker’s death in 1912. 

Stoker was an unpaid theatre critic for Dublin’s Evening Mail when his review of Henry Irving’s 1876 Hamlet came to Irving’s attention.  The actor invited the critic to private performances and meals, eventually inviting Stoker to join the Lyceum Theatre as its manager in 1878.  His new job proved eye-opening for Stoker, who had experienced theatre from the outside as a critic, but was now in the thick of it. “Now I began to understand why everything was as it was,” he wrote in his reminiscences of Irving (Stoker, Reminiscences I, 53).  Stoker became an excellent manager of the theatre and his writings reflect both a deep understanding of the theatre itself and of his own complicated relationship with Irving.  So not only was the author of the book a man of the theatre, I argue the titular character is actually a product of the stage.

Scholars and biographers virtually all agree that the actual character of Dracula was inspired by and based upon Henry Irving. Barbara Belford writes, “Like Dracula, Irving was tall, thin, with a saturnine appearance” and a hypnotic voice.  In his personal reminiscences of Irving, Stoker admits to being enthralled, almost entranced, the first time he met Irving.  The power, the presence, the charisma, the vanity, the arrogance, the cruelty, and the sensuality. Stoker had hoped Irving would want to play the count on stage.  Irving, however, was not interested.  A British actor/manager, an American playwright, a Hungarian actor, and an American producer, however, would work to create the vampire we know as Dracula.

Hamilton Deane, a member of the Henry Irving Vacation Company in 1899, had become a manager and writer in his own right by the early twenties. Stoker’s widow Florence gave Deane permission to adapt the novel for the stage, which he did in 1924, opening first in the provinces before bringing the show first to London’s Little Theatre with Raymond Huntley in the title role, transferring first to the Duke of York’s Theatre and then the Prince of Wales Theatre.  The show was then brought to the United States with additional script changes by John Balderston to make the script more comprehensible for Americans.  This version premiered on Broadway to the same acclaim Deane’s version did in London.  It was in the fertile soil of the United States, in New York and Hollywood, that the count grew into the vampire we know and fear.

The star of the Broadway version of the play, Hungarian actor Bela Blasko had been cast as the title role, changing his name to Bela Lugosi and achieved critical success in the role.  Later, Carl Laemmle Jr purchased the motion picture rights to Dracula, he wanted another actor to play the Count on screen.  But the actor passed away before filming could begin and the producers grudgingly said the “Broadway actor” could do it, thus forever linking Dracula with Lugosi and Lugosi with Dracula, and setting the standard for all the film adaptations that would follow.  But let us remember – the 1931 Universal film was not adapted from the novel, but from the play which was dramatic adaptation of the novel. Tangentially, because of the success of the film, Lugosi, the actor Lammle Sr. did not want, was offered the role of the monster in Universal’s next film, an adaptation of Frankenstein. Lugosi, figuring he would be unrecognizable under the makeup, turned the role down, and it went to a British actor named William Henry Pratt.  Pratt was told he needed to make his name more Eastern European, like Bela Lugosi’s, so he took the stage name “Boris Karloff”.

The play had to streamline the novel, so it cut the entire first third of the book, set in Transylvania.  The play takes place mostly in London and the surrounding environs, focusing on the recovery of Jonathan Harker from his mysterious trip to Transylvania, and the threat to Lucy Seward.  In the novel, there are two women, best friends, Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancé who becomes Mina Harker, and Lucy Westenra, who is courted by three men but ultimately seduced, killed and turned into a vampire by Dracula. The play combines the two women into one character, Lucy Seward, the daughter of Dr. John Seward (one of her suitors in the novel).  Harker, Seward and Van Helsing realize the new neighbor Count Dracula, is a vampire, and set out to defeat him before he can kill Lucy.  The film, which could do what a stage play could not, added the Transylvania sequence back in, with the classic lines from the novel, “I never drink…wine,” “The children of the night, what music they make,” and, of course, “I am…Dracula,” the first words we hear Bela Lugosi utter.

It is the Universal film, based on the stage play, and not the novel that became the template for all Draculas that followed. 

PART TWO

The vampiric count of Stoker’s novel is named after Vlad Tepes (pronounced TEP-ish), a fifteenth century ruler of Wallachia, a region in what is now Romania. He was also known as Vlad III, Vlad Dracula, The second son of Vlad Dracul.  Some theorize Dracul means “dragon” and therefore Dracula is “son of the dragon.  This historic figure is best known as “Vlad the Impaler.”  Stoker, as I mentioned earlier, never visited Romania, nor did any research into Vlad Tepes.  So Vlad Dracula, best known for his cruelty, gave only his name to the vampire.  All else was Stoker’s invention.  But in the early 1970s, as a result of scholarship on Stoker’s novel, fans and scholars began to ask two questions: where was Vlad the Impaler’s castle and was it the model for the castle in the novel?  The answers are not simple or easy, and, if you will pardon the pun, require some digging.

In the early 1970s, Romania historian Radu Florescu was teaching at Boston College and researching Eastern European politics and culture. He discovered that his fellow BC faculty member Raymond T. McNally was equally fascinated by the novel Dracula and its depiction of Romania.  The two began to research the history behind the book. In 1972 they published In Search of Dracula, a study of the history of Dracula and vampires that linked events in Stoker’s novel and Romanian history.  It is they who popularized the idea that Vlad Tepes was the model of Vlad Dracula. Their research, in turn, influenced Hollywood, and the 1974 film Dracula, starring Jack Palance as the count, and the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Gary Oldman in the title role, both directly link the vampire to the historic Romanian nobleman.

In the novel, the castle Stoker describes has very specific features.  Jonathan Harker is brought to the castle by a horse-drawn coach in which the coachman vanishes for part of the journey, but a bat seems to be guiding the horses.  The castle is in the Borgo Pass, which is located in in the eastern Carpathian mountains, connecting Transylvania with Vatra Dornei in present day Bukovina, Moldavia.  Harker boards the coach at an inn near Pasul Tihuts, a point near the summit of the pass, and rides a narrow, long road headed south into the mountains. Harker travels at night, and cannot see much from the coach.  He is dropped off in a large courtyard before a large, old, wooden door set in a stone wall. Harker looks and sees the castle sits on a great rock overlooking the surrounding forest which is sliced through with several river gorges.  The terrain is difficult to pass through, except by the narrow road.  To the west is a deeply forested valley and mountain range. The castle is thus very difficult to reach and distant from any other human population.

Over the course of the novel, which, again is epistolary or written in the form of letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, and even a wax cylinder recording, Harker reveals much about the castle.  There are no windows on the lower level, making it nearly impregnable to attack. Windows are only at a level where arrows and other projectiles could not reach, which means the lower levels are cast in darkness, even in daytime, and must be lit with candles and torches. When Harker first enters the castle, he sees a winding staircase and a long corridor. He is shown into an octagonal room, and then to a bedroom that overlooks the courtyard.  Down the hall from his room is a library full of books from England, which strikes him as odd.  Why does the library of an aging count in Transylvania have a significant collection of English books?  Harker discovers that the other doors off the corridor in which his bedroom sits are all locked.

Although told to not venture further, he enters another wing of the castle where he finds dust-covered, comfortable furniture, stained glass windows that look out off the cliff, and he encounters the three brides of Dracula. By sneaking around in the forbidden lower levels, he eventually follows a staircase down to a tunnel that leads to the chapel which is where the aristocratic dead of the castle were buried from medieval times on.  It is in this chamber that he finds the dozens of boxes of soil that the count will take to England. Harker discovers the count lying in one of the caskets, on top of the dirt, in a trance-like state.  He does not notice at the moment, but later in the novel, when he returns to the castle with Professor Van Helsing, that the large tomb at the heart of the chapel is simply labeled “Dracula.”  When Van Helsing discovers it, he opens the tomb and sanctifies it with communion and holy water, ensuring the vampire can never sleep there again.

PART THREE

Stoker did not invent the haunted castle. That trope had existed in gothic literature for almost two centuries before.  Novels like Horrace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto from 1764 used the setting of a decaying, haunted castle, filled with degenerate aristocrats as a source of horror since before the United States ever existed.  Stoker merely took the gothic castle, moved it to Romania and put a vampire in it.  It was a winning combination. Stoker had studied Romania history, and so used some of the things he had learned from his studies to create his own modern gothic novel.

There are two castles in Bistrita near the Borgo Pass road. The first was built in the thirteenth century about three miles north of the city of Dealu Cetatii. It fell into disuse and by the fifteenth century was a dilapidated ruin as many stones were taken from it to fortify the town of Bistrita against increasing attacks from the Ottoman Turks. The second castle, called Castle Bistrita, was built by John Hunyadi, a contemporary of Vlad the Impaler.  Hunyadi was a sometimes ally, sometimes rival of his neighbor Vlad, who died in the siege of Belgrade, although the Christian forces defeated the Turks and turned them away from this part of Eastern Europe as a result.  Castle Bistrita no longer exists today.  It was destroyed at the end of the fifteenth century by the local German-speaking population, who despised their Hungarian overlords.  Neither of these castles can be considered Castle Dracula. 

Two other castles complete for the moniker “Dracula’s Castle” in present day Romania: Poenari Castle and Bran Castle.  Both are major tourist draws; both have historical links to Vlad Tepes, and both, as I will discuss later, sell soil from their grounds as the genuine dirt from Dracula’s castle.

Vlad Tepes was the ruler of Wallachia, which is actually south of Transylvania, on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains.  Not having visited there in person, Stoker played fast and loose with the geography in his novel, putting a castle where there is none. Overlooking the Dambovita River, near the town of Campuilung is Castle Bran. Castle Bran was originally built by the knights of the Teutonic Order in the thirteenth century.  In the following century the knights were expelled from the region and the castle was taken over by German merchants from Brasov, who used it as a trading post and for defense of the areas of Romania now occupied by the Germans. Although technically part of the Hungarian empire, the Carpathian mountains and environs were often hotly contested, and the Voivode of Wallachia served as the military leader of the area. The Romanian government promotes Bran Castle as THE Castle Dracula, although Vlad Tepes never lived there.  The book is fiction anyway, and the historic Vlad only gave his name to the fictional Dracula, and the castle itself seems very vampire castle-y.  According to Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Bran Castle has the exact atmosphere Stoker attempted to conjure in his descriptions of the vampire's castle in the novel. The Washington Post claims “Images of Bran Castle supposedly reached Bram Stoker, who drew inspiration for his famous work from travelogues and sketches by British diplomats and adventurers in what was then Wallachia (modern-day Romania).”

Another contender for the title of Castle Dracula is Cetatea Poenari. The historic Vlad resided in Poenari Castle in the region of Wallachia. Draculascastle.com claims this to be the “real” Castle Dracula, since it was the domain of the real historical ruler.  However, Stoker did not have this castle in mind when he wrote his novel.  It is not mentioned in any of Stoker’s research. Poenari Castle is associated with the historic Vlad Tepes, and thus, for tourism purposes, claims the title of “Dracula’s Castle” as it was the castle of the historic Vlad Dracula, whereas Bran Castle claims the fictional count and both compete to draw tourists to Romania.

Yet another castle that can lay claim to inspiring Dracula’s castle is Slain’s Castle near Aberdeen in Scotland.  In 1892, five years before Dracula was published, Bram Stoker took a holiday in Cruden Bay, Scotland.  He had taken time off from his demanding and stressful job as the manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre and went to the North Sea coast of Scotland for peace, relaxation and inspiration. He returned at least a dozen times in the next four years to what was then called Port Errol and its environs.  Remember, Stoker had never been to Romania.  He had never actually seen or experienced any Romanian castles, so he had to draw inspiration from drawings and from the castles he encountered in the United Kingdom, one of which was Slains Castle, located in the town where he preferred to vacation.

We know that Stoker was in Port Errol when he wrote the first few chapters of what would become Dracula.  And this makes historian and Scottish author Mike Shepherd argue that Slains Castle was the model for the vampire’s crumbling abode.  The castle ruins currently stand atop a cliff overlooking the North Sea, first built in the seventeenth century, replacing what is now called Old Slains Castle, the former seat of power in the area. Slains Castle was built up over the centuries, with new gardens being built in the 1890s when Stoker visited and worked on his novel.  The castle, however, passed from owner to owner at the beginning of the twentieth century, fell into ruin, and now exists as a roofless shell.  Stoker would later use the castle as the inspiration for Kyllion Castle in his 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, but one architectural element suggests that it might have also inspired Dracula’s castle.  Upon his arrival at the castle, Jonathan Harker is shown by Dracula into a small octagonal room, “lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort.”  This feature would be unusual in any castle; but Slains Castle has just such a distinctive room.

So Dracula’s castle does not actually exist, but seems to be an amalgamation of several different castles, some Stoker visited, some he only read about, and some that people simply associate with Dracula, both because we seem to need to seek the fictional to the real and also because there is money to be made.

PART FOUR

In Stoker’s novel, Harker and Quincey decapitate and stab Dracula.  But the work isn’

Van Helsing tells the others, “And now, my friends, we have a duty here to do. We must sterilize this earth, so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant land for such fell use. He has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still. It was sanctified to such use of man, now we sanctify it to God.” Let’s unpack that.  Dracula filled fifty caskets with dirt from the graveyard of his castle, as that was the dirt he was buried in, and (according to Stoker) vampires must sleep in the consecrated soil they were buried in.  But vampires may not enter consecrated land. Just as a crucifix stops Dracula, so, too, would a church, or presumably a synagogue or mosque or temple or any consecrated building, as vampires may not enter anything holy.  The astute reader, or in this case, listener, may ask why Dracula must sleep in consecrated soil if he cannot be near consecrated things, and the answer is that taking the soil from the ground desecrates it – removes it from that which is holy and makes it unholy.  By using holy water and communion wafers, Professor Van Helsing makes the desecrated dirt holy again and therefore anathema to Dracula.

But there is something more in Stoker’s invention here.  Dracula must sleep in the soil of Transylvania, and so he brings it with him to England.  There is a larger metaphor here, I suspect, for us bringing our homeland with us when we travel, after all, we are a product of our homeland, and it is in us. In Dracula’s case, he sleeps in soil that must be from the vampire's home country because they need a connection to their "home ground," and because that earth is drenched in all the blood that has been spilled on it throughout history. It is not just desecrated soil, it is the soil of the traumatic history of the Carpathians, Transylvania, and Romania.  Dracula, in short, is linked with soil, and not just any soil but Transylvania soil from his castle. And the soil, both the land of Romania and actual dirt have become very important for Dracula fans.

Stoker’s Dracula came from the land beyond the forests and died in the Borgo Pass on the way back to that land.  When Romania was still a communist dictatorship, however, enterprising entrepreneurs still found a way to connect vampire fans with the soil of Transylvania and Dracula.  In the mid-1970s, advertisements appeared in Warren Publishing magazines as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, advertising soil from “Dracula’s Castle.” It is clear based on the timing that the folks at Warren Publications were taking advantage of the explosion of interest in Dracula’s castle created by the publication of In Search of Dracula. “Authentic soil from Dracula’s castle” proclaimed the ad in blood red letters.  “A fascinating memento of the Greatest Horror Story Ever Told!” the ad promised. “One gram of soil in each amulet!”  The magazines advertised a gold-colored plastic coffin with a clear plastic cover on a gold plated chain. Inside was the promised one gram of soil from “Dracula’s Castle.” But which castle? The ad only specified “Dracula’s Castle.”  Warren Publications later announced the soil was from “a castle near the edge of Transylvania tied to Vlad’s reign.”  That might make this necklace the ultimate postmodern souvenir: genuine, authentic dirt in a cheap plastic coffin claiming to be from a castle that never actually existed. Only 5000 were made, declared the ad each with a certificate of authenticity announcing its number.

More recently, Poenari Castle also sells vials of earth, taken from the castle grounds.  The internet company Mini Museum sells glass vials containing a small amount of dirt from Poenari Castle. “It was gathered from the base of a very old building” the advertisement reads, so “it is possible you may find small bits of stone or clay mixed in with the soil.” Another advertisement reads, “The earth in this vial comes from the grounds of Cetatea Poenari, the citadel of Tepes’ ancestors. Perched high on a steep precipice of rock, the castle was one of his favorite haunts.”  Note the language at the end which connects Poenari Castle with Stoker’s description of Dracula’s castle. 

It is both fascinating and rather obvious that in the seventies in the wake of Florescu and McNally’s book and in this decade, looking for authentic connections to the past, that dirt from a castle would be a commodity sold, allowing fans to link to a favorite fictional character.  What is especially interesting is that, as we have discussed today, there is no real “Dracula’s castle,” only a series of castles linked with his namesake or that inspired the description in the fictional work.  Yet there is something deeper happening here.

The history of Romania is a sad and proud one.  Standing at the crossroads of central and southern Europe and central Asia, Romania was the front lines in the wars between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire.  For much of its history Romania was defending itself from Germany to its West and the Ottomans to the South. Then, in the twentieth century, it had a military dictatorship backed by the Nazis.  After the overthrow of the dictatorship, Romania switched sides during World War II and, after having fought alongside the Germans and participating in the Holocaust, Romania then fought against the Germans for the Soviets, who installed a communist regime in 1946.  In 1965,  Nicolae Ceaușescu took power and ruled Romania as a communist dictatorship until he and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day, 1989 in the revolution that swept the nation with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain.  Romania was a poor nation, with many resources that had been poorly managed during the Ceaușescu regime.  One thing Romania did have, however, was Transylvania and a world obsessed with Dracula.  Very rapidly, Romania developed a tourism industry centered around Dracula, accounting for over five percent of its GDP by 2013, with almost 10 million tourists a year visiting, many of whom seek out the castles associated with the historic Vlad Tepes and the fictional Dracula.

In a sense, Bram Stoker owes Romania a debt for giving him a setting, a name, and the inspiration for his novel.  And Romania owes Bram Stoker a debt, for, as folklorist and professor of cultural studies at the University of Turku Tuomas Hovi observes, Romania has made Dracula a very lucrative part of its cultural heritage.  People can go on Dracula tours, visit the castles we’ve discussed here, purchase Dracula souvenirs, and experience the novel in the place it is set. “Dracula tourism is unique,” he writes, “as it combines a known historical figure with a fictional character that derives completely from outside the history and culture of the original historical figure.”  Romania has taken this very British vampire from a very Irish author and made it a very Romanian tourist attraction, combining culture, history, and heritage with fiction and tourism promotion. And what could be more exciting than experiencing the novel on the very soil where it is set?

Hovi discusses how Halloween has become one of the most significant holidays for the tourist industry in Romania, which is remarkable considering it was historically never celebrated there in any way shape or form. In that way, it reminds me of the interesting and unlikely Japanese fascination with Christmas and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  But Dracula for Halloween tours and events make the end of October one of the busiest times in Romania.  Halloween and Dracula are neither culturally nor historically accurate, but they generate tremendous revenue for Romania and the tourist business.

I guess, in the end, there are three big takeaways from our trip down the dark path to Dracula’s castle.  The first is the power that this novel has had in its 125 years of existence to completely transform how the vampire is understood and to transform Romania into a tourist destination.  The second is how what we know of this novel (and the vampire we all know) is actually filtered through the play, the film, and popular culture, meaning that there is no Dracula, but actually many, many Draculas.  Think about what a profound shaping influence Bram Stoker has had on our culture with a single novel.  Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, how much we value the place where something happened, or even a real place where a fictional event is set. Riverside, Iowa, for example, as a plaque noting it is the future birthplace of James T. Kirk of Star Trek fame.  In Pasadena, people stop every day and take photos in front of the Myers’ house from the film Halloween, perhaps unaware that only the exterior of the house was used in the film.  And Michael Myers is not real.  Yet the home is a tourist attraction.  We value our pop culture narratives so strongly that we will visit replicas of things that never existed, go to places where fictional events were set, and even buy dirt from a castle linked to a historic figure who never actually lived there, but who served as a namesake for a fictional vampire that never existed.  We seek authenticity, the real, in the fictional.  We make objects and places important because the stories give our lives meaning and we seek to connect to them and somehow even own a piece of them, even if that piece is a plastic coffin filled with a gram of dirt.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show; and our audio engineer is Dom Purdie. This story was researched and prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore. I’m grateful to each of them and the entire My Dark Path team.

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Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me, including today’s path, strewn with the soil from a vampire’s grave.  Until next time, good night, and Happy Halloween.