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BRAM STOKER: A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY

1847 Born 8 November in Clontarf (Dublin), Ireland

Lived early childhood (bed-ridden) at 15 Marino Crescent

1860s Attended Trinity College (Dublin)

Awarded University Athletics Championship

Served as President of Philosophical Society

1871 Graduated with Honours in science (Pure Mathematics)

Took job with civil service at Dublin Castle

Started five year stint as theatre reviewer in Dublin (unpaid)
1876 Reviewed Henry Irving's performance in "Hamlet"

Met the actor and close friendship began

1878 Accepted offer to become acting manager at Irving's Lyceum Theatre

Moved to London with wife, Florence (Balcombe)

First book The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland published

1882 Under the Sunset, a collection of short stories, published

1890 Began working on vampire novel (as yet untitled)

Spent summer in Whitby where he came across the name "Dracula"

1891 First novel, The Snake's Pass, published

1897 Publication (26 May) of Dracula

1903 Publication of The Jewel of Seven Stars

1905 Death of Henry Irving

1906 Published Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving

1911 Published The Lair of the White Worm, his last novel

1912 Died on April 20 in London

1922 First movie based on Dracula ("Nosferatu") released in Germany
THE VAMPIRE IN AMERICA

There is perhaps no supernatural creature, outside of ghosts, as closely connected to the graveyard as the vampire is. Although long considered to be nothing more than a myth, the vampire is a still a strangely attractive and enticing being to the modern reader. We think of them as being nothing more than the fanciful creation of folklore and literature, but what if we are wrong? What if vampires are real... and what if they once stalked the fields and towns of historic America?
Impossible, you say? You might be surprised at what you find lurking around the dark corners of New England!


Few can really say what the traditional vampire is. Some believe that he is an evil spirit that wears the body of the newly dead, while others believe that he is a corpse, re-animated by his original soul. What everyone can agree on is what this creature must have to survive and that is blood. This vital bodily ingredient must be taken from the veins of a living person so that the vampire can survive.

In nearly every case, a vampire that is exhumed from his grave, or resting place, is always found to be ruddy of complexion, well-nourished and apparently in good health. This is in spite of the fact that he had been dead for some time. His appearance is always marked by long, curving fingernails (having grown long in the grave) and blood smeared about the mouth. According to European legends, the only way to destroy one of these living corpses is to drive a stake through its heart. After that, the body should be burned. The American legends suggest a different method of disposal. According to old reports, the heart of the vampire must be cut out of the chest and then burned. Often, a potion must be mixed from the ashes and must be given to the vampire victims. In this way, they do not die and become vampires themselves.

The legends of vampires have their roots in traditional fears. In days past, it was not uncommon for people to be fearful about the dead returning from their grave, especially in cases of suicides or of unfortunates being buried without the last rites. Occasional deviants who practiced necrophilia or corpse-stealing often provided apparent that some of the dead could leave the graveyard. An empty coffin was not seen as evidence of theft, but evidence of vampires instead.

Terrible and what seemed to be mysterious outbreaks of disease and plagues were sometimes thought to be caused by supernatural means. In America, an outbreak of the white death or tuberculosis was believed to actually be a string of vampire-related deaths.

Probably the most common source of vampire legends came from premature burials. People suffering from catalepsy and other ailments sometimes found themselves buried alive and when later exhumed, the distorted state of the corpses led many to believe the dead had been coming and going from their coffins for some time. In the 1700s, it was not uncommon for bodies to be dug up to see if they had become vampires, especially when it involved the death of a suicide, a murder victim or someone who had died during a spate of unexplained deaths. If a body was discovered to be in any way out of the ordinary, it was burned to prevent it leaving the grave again.

While vampires had allegedly been around for centuries, became a part of popular culture in 1897 with the publication of Bram Stokers book, Dracula. This was certainly not the first fictional story written about vampires, but it made the greatest impression on history. It also set the standard for the elegant, European vampire, a standard that is still very prevalent today. This image of the vampire taught us to hate the creatures evil nature but to be seduced by his powerful and charismatic charm.

In America, our colonial ancestors were well aware of vampires, but they certainly did not see them as graceful creatures of the night. The vampire was a death-bringer and something to be feared. An unsuspecting community that fell under the spell of one of these monsters could very well be destroyed. You see, in historic America, vampires were not mythical creatures from books and folklore, they were unquestionably real!

In parts of New England, stories of vampires were common, especially during outbreaks of tuberculosis, or as it was called at that time, consumption. It is not hard to imagine how consumption may have given birth to the legends of vampires in New England. The disease was the plague of the 1800s. Death tolls from the illness were staggering as it was highly contagious and would pass easily through entire families. It was generally fatal and often referred to as theWhite Death. The name came from the fact that the affected persons skin became very pale, thin and almost ghost-like. There was also a reddening of the face, fainting spells and a general weakening of the body. It was easy to see, in more superstitious times, how this could have been mistaken for the draining of the lifeblood by a vampire. It was thought that when someone died from consumption, they might come back from the dead and try to feed off their living relatives, who by this time, had probably come down with the disease themselves. In order to stop them from coming back, family members would go to the grave and try to the deceased again.

You might think that one look at the decaying corpse would dispel any rumors of vampires, but you would be wrong! In fact, when the coffin was opened, the recently dead consumptive would be found to be bloated in death, even though the disease had made them wasted and thin when alive. Their fingernails would have appeared to have grown (as when the flesh retracts, the nails appear longer) and worst of all, their mouths would be filled with naturally regurgitated blood. The evidence of vampirism was blatantly obvious! Or so it was thought.

While there were a number of cases of supposed vampires in New England, the most famous was undoubtedly that of Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island.

The story of Mercy Brown may end in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery in 1892, but it actually started a number of years before that in 1883. George Brown was a hard-working farmer who prospered in the Exeter area. He and his wife, Mary, had raised six children and lived a comfortable but simple life. In late 1883, the first in a series of terrible events occurred on the Brown farm. Late that year, Mary Brown began to show signs of consumption. The sturdy, once healthy woman began to suffer from fainting spells and periods of weakness. Most of all, she was gripped with a harsh cough that kept her awake through the night. The disease began to ravage her body and on December 8, she slipped into unconsciousness and did not awaken.

The following spring, Mary Olive, Georges oldest daughter, also came down with the dreaded illness. She began to complain of terrible dreams and of a great pressure that was crushing her chest at night, making it impossible for her to breathe. Mary Olive grew paler and weaker with each passing day and on June 6, 1884, she followed her mother to the grave.

Several years of peace followed the death of Mary Olive and during this time, Edwin Brown, George and Marys only son, got married and bought his own farm in nearby West Wickford. Here, he hoped to make a life for himself and his new bride while he worked in a store to support his family and save money for the future. All was going well until about 1891, when Edwin began to notice the symptoms of the disease that had killed his sister and mother. He resigned from his job and following advice from friends, moved west to Colorado Springs. Here, he hoped that mineral waters and a drier climate might restore his health.

While Edwin was out west, things got worse for the family in Exeter. In January 1892, he received word that his sister Mercy had become sick and had died. He also began to realize that his health was not improving either. He came to the decision that he should return home and spend the remainder of his days with his family, friends and loved ones.

By the time he reached Rhode Island, he found his father in a dreadful and worried state. He had become convinced that the family was being preyed upon by a vampire. After much debate, it was decided that they should exhume the bodies of the other family members and see which one of them it was. How they convinced Edwin to go along with this is unknown, but a group of men went out to the cemetery during the early morning hours of March 18,1892.

It is likely that this exhumation would have remained a secret, if not for the fact that the men sought official sanction for it from the local doctor. They approached the district medical examiner, Dr. Harold Metcalf, and asked him to come to the graveyard to examine the bodies. He discouraged them but eventually agreed to go along, realizing that he could not persuade them from what they believed was their duty. By the time that he arrived at the cemetery, the bodies of Mary Brown and her daughter, Mary Olive, had already been unearthed. Dr. Metcalf took a look at them and found them in a state of advanced decay. They were just what might be expected from a similar examination of almost any person after the same length of time, he stated with certainty.

Mercys body had not yet been buried. As she had died in the winter, the ground was too hard for a burial. Her body had rested for the past two months inside of a small crypt on the cemetery grounds. The coffin was placed on a small cart inside of the tomb. Once the casket was opened, Dr. Metcalf looked inside and began a quick autopsy of the corpse. What he noted, mainly decay and the marks of consumption on the lungs, did not convince him that she was a vampire. He finished the examination and quickly left.

The other men remained behind. To them, Mercy seemed relatively intact, or at least more so than she should be after two months in the grave. In addition, they were also sure that her body had moved. She had been laid to rest on her back and somehow, the corpse was now resting on her side. Could she have left the casket?

They were nearly sure that Mercy was a vampire and what happened next convinced them entirely. One of the men opened up her heart with his knife and was startled to see fresh blood come pouring out of the organ. It was quickly removed from her chest and burned in the cemetery. As it was engulfed in the flames, ashes were gathered with which to make a tonic that would hopefully cure Edwin of the disease.

Edwin consumed the macabre mixture, but it did no good and he died soon afterwards. On May 2, he too was buried in the cemetery. While tragic, all was not lost. He became the last of the Brown family to die from the mysterious White Death. The exhumation had ended the vampires control over the family once and for all.

Even though these events took place more than a century ago, Mercy Brown has not faded from the memory of those in Exeter. Famous Rhode Island author H.P. Lovecraft even included a thinly disguised Mercy Brown in his vampire tale The Shunned House. In addition, the story has appeared many times in documentaries and books about the supernatural.

Gone, but not forgotten... Mercy Brown lives on as Americas most celebrated vampire

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Dracula: The History of Myth and the Myth of History



by Elizabeth Miller





In spite of all that we know about Vlad Dracula, he is still somewhat of an enigma. Not only are there still unsolved mysteries about his life and death, but there has been much speculation about the exact nature of the connection between Vlad and the Count Dracula of Bram Stoker's classic novel. Most assume that Stoker, inspired by accounts he had read or heard about the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler, made a conscious decision to base the character of Count Dracula on the historical personage. But this assumption is highly speculative. All we know for certain is that Stoker borrowed the name "Dracula" and a few scraps of information about Wallachian history from William Wilkinson's An Account of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820).

On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that any more than a few historians would be paying the slightest bit of attention to Vlad Dracula today, were it not for Stoker's novel and the revelations in Florescu and McNally's In Search of Dracula (1972; revised 1994). Much has been written about this, and I do not intend to pursue it here. Rather, I want to focus on how Vlad is viewed in Romania, and how many Romanians respond to the "fact" that for many Westerners, Vlad and the Count have become one.

To begin with, there is the question of nomenclature. The name "Dracula" has links with the Romanian word "drac" (derived from the Latin "draco") which can mean both "dragon" and "devil." The general consensus among historians now is that Vlad adopted it as a sobriquet derived from the Order of the Dragon which had been bestowed upon his father, Vlad Dracul, in 1431. (There is no evidence, however, that Stoker would have been aware of this connection.) Romanian historians have traditionally resisted referring to Vlad as "Dracula" for two reasons: it was used in late fifteenth-century German documents which maligned the voivode's reputation, and it reinforces the connection to Stoker's vampire Count. However, the name "Dracula" is now being more widely accepted. As Florescu and McNally point out, this is justifiable: Vlad himself used "Dracula" (or variations thereof) in a number of documents bearing his signature, and several of the printed sources of information about Vlad, published in the late fifteenth century, refer to him as "Dracula" or one of its derivatives.

The majority of Romanians, however, still refer to Vlad as "Tepes" ("The Impaler"), the name first bestowed on Vlad by Turkish chroniclers, and view the "Dracula" connection as an affront to their history. There is a fairly widespread view in Romania that the vampire connection has been deliberately emphasized in the West to undermine a figure who, to many Romanians, is something of a national hero. One Romanian historian, Alexandru Dutu, has stated that "In 1897, Vlad Tepes was transformed into a vampire in the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, a late reflection of the slanders concocted to destroy him centuries earlier" (in Treptow, Dracula: Essays on the Life and Times of Vlad Tepes, 242). To suggest that Stoker deliberately sat down with the intention of discrediting a fifteenth-century ruler about which he knew very little is, of course, preposterous. Even more absurd is the view of a few Romanians who, according to Florescu and McNally, view the progressive vampirization of Dracula by western novelists and movie producers as a "Hungarian plot, originally inspired by King Matthias, continued by [Arminius] Vambery, Stoker's Hungarian informant, and given its most masterful stroke by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian" (Dracula: Prince of Many Faces, 220). While there may very well be some grounds for the accusation against Corvinus, there is no evidence that Vambery gave any information about Vlad (biased or otherwise) to Stoker, and the 1931 movie in which Lugosi starred totally ignores even the vague connection made in Stoker.

Such sentiments are part of a somewhat schizophrenic response to the whole Dracula phenomenon in Romania. It begins with Vlad himself. Was he a hero or a psychopathic tyrant? Are his atrocities in any way defensible? It depends on what you read. The problem originates, of course, with primary sources, many of which (especially Beheim's poem and the Saxon pamphlets) are heavily biased against him. Many of the stories about Vlad's atrocities that are so well-known today come from these sources. By contrast, Romanian folk narratives (still told in the villages near his fortress at Poenari) present a very different Vlad: a supporter of the peasants against the treacherous boyars, an upholder of law and order in lawless times, and a valiant defender of his small principality against the might of the Ottoman Empire.

Yet Romanians themselves have been and still are ambivalent about Vlad. This duality of response is evident, for example, in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, a number of writers, swept up in the fervor of a revolutionary movement that culminated in the formation of a Romanian state in 1859, looked back to Vlad as a symbol of independence and nationhood. Ion Budai-Deleanu's epic poem Tiganiada (though actually written in the last decade of the eighteenth century) was published in 1875: here, Vlad Tepes is presented as one of Romania's first great national heroes, fighting against the Turks, the boyars, and the legions of evil. Poet Dimitrie Bolintineanu, in his "Battles of the Romanians," also praised Dracula's military exploits. And the famous late nineteenth-century poet Mihai Eminescu who, in his historical ballad The Third Letter (1881), called on the Impaler to come once again and save his country.

But another picture was also emerging. In 1874, Romanian poet Vasile Alecsandri wrote a narrative entitled "Vlad Tepes and the Oaktree" which reprimands the harshness of Vlad, particularly with respect to the impalements at Tirgoviste. However, the chief challenge to the "Vlad as hero" concept came from renowned historian Ion Bogdan, whose treatise Vlad Tepes (1896) questioned the traditional image of Vlad by presenting him as a bloodthirsty tyrant whose cruelty could only be accounted for in terms of mental abberation, a sick man who killed and tortured out of sadistic pleasure. Bogdan even went so far as to depict Vlad as a politically weak leader. Needless to say, the publication sparked a vigorous debate.

Interest in Vlad Tepes among Romanian historians and fiction writers continued throughout the twentieth century. Literary works such as the poem "Vlad Tepes" by Tudor Arghezi (1940), the short story "Soimul" by Radu Theodoru (1967) and Georgina Viorica Rogoz' novel Vlad, fiul Dracului (1970) maintained the sympathetic image of the Wallachian voivode, while historians such as Nicolae Iorga struggled with the conflicting accounts of his life and deeds. But it was the decade of the 1970s that saw the most significant production. Part of this was no doubt motivated by a desire to counteract the association made by Florescu and McNally between the historical hero and a supernatural vampire. This, however, was only one factor. By the early 1970s, Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had consolidated his power in Romania and was developing a clearly nationalistic policy. He revived elements of traditional Romanian nationalism, coupled with a xenophobia which targeted (among others) ethnic Hungarians and gypsies. Included were constant references to the great heroes of the past, one of whom was Vlad Tepes whom he elevated to a place of honor. The Party line in the 1970s was that, while Vlad Tepes was ruthless (few will deny that), his ruthlessness was necessary under the circumstances in which he found himself and in this respect he was little different from other contemporary leaders in Europe.

A number of historical articles and books about Vlad appeared in Romania in the 1970s, especially in 1976, when the country commemorated the 500th anniversary of his death. Perhaps the most interesting publication, in that it directly addresses the Stoker connection, is a book by Nicolae Stoicescu entitled Vlad Tepes (1976). Stoicescu clearly expresses resentment about how the historical figure of Dracula has been appropriated by the West and converted into a popular horror icon: "Whoever knows something about Vlad Tepes may smile on reading such nonsense, but this nonsense ascribed to Dracula [the novel] is highly popular and overshadows the true image of the Prince of Walachia" (178). "Those," continues Stoicescu, "who would like to go on cultivating Dracula the vampire are free to do it without, however, forgetting that he has nothing in common with the Romanian history where the real Vlad Tepes whom we know by his deeds holds a place of honour" (179). Stoicescu takes great pains to separate Vlad not only from the Dracula legend of the decadent West, but from the highly propagandistic accounts in the fifteenth-century German texts. Writing of the Brasov atrocities, he declares, "Vlad Tepes did what was customary in his time ... to ensure the freedom of his country's trade, and ... to remove the claimants to his throne who had been given shelter in Transylvania and punish their supporters" (67).

During the 1970s, the Communist government also undertook many practical projects to re-enforce Vlad's reputation as a national hero: statues were erected, streets were renamed, restoration of his Arges castle was undertaken, and a commemorative postage stamp was issued in 1976 to mark the anniversary. In 1978, a feature movie entitled Vlad Tepes was produced which, according to Stoicescu, "portrays the true personality of a great prince" (142). Though I found the movie rather tedious, it is an interesting "reading" of Vlad from a contemporary political point of view: it comprises thinly veiled parallels between Vlad's political and military policies and the position taken by the Communist Party with respect to nationalism, the aristocracy, foreigners, and the maintenance of law and order.

As for Count Dracula, the fictional vampire was practically unknown in Romania until the fall of Communism in 1989. While there were a few concessions made to Western tourists who came to the country during the 1970s in search of the vampire Count, Stoker's novel and the movies based on it were not available. However, that is now changing. Romanian tourism officials are realizing the benefits of catering to visitors who travel to Romania to visit Transylvania, home of Count Dracula, the vampire. This has created an interesting dilemma for Romanians: how to accommodate this demand while at the same time keeping clear the distinction between the fictional vampire and their own national hero. It is no easy task!

Most of the sites visited on a typical "Dracula tour" in Romania are associated with Vlad: his birthplace in Sighisoara, his palace at Tirgoviste, the ruins of his fortress at Poenari, the Old Court in Bucharest, and Snagov Monastery, where he is presumed to have been buried. (I do not include Bran Castle in this list. Even though it is still touted by many tour guides as "Dracula's Castle," its connection with Vlad is minimal and its association with Stoker's Count is non-existent.) As for Count Dracula, one must travel further north to Bistritz and the Borgo Pass. In Bistritz, one can find a Golden Krone Hotel (named after the one where Jonathan Harker stayed). And high in the Borgo Pass (Piatra Fintinele) is the Castle Dracula Hotel, built in the early 1980s to accommodate the waves of tourists who were starting the trek to Transylvania to find the Count.

Many Romanians are concerned about promoting their country as "Dracula Country." And with good reason! Tour guides have to contend with uninformed tourists who insist that Vlad Dracula was a vampire and that Count Dracula is buried at Snagov. This, however, can be handled by providing informed tour guides who

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