Free Undead by Frank Delaney Page A

a remote village where everybody looked terrified and nobody would speak to him. When he asked a question, they pointed in dumb fright to a dank and gloomy place with forbidding walls – a vast, ruined castle, in fact. And would say no more.
    A third legend goes back much further, and we shivered to it in Ireland. Every year, on the night of October 31, known the world over as Hallowe’en , in every churchyard across the Irish countryside, the earth heaves, the graves open and the dead are allowed – for just this one night – to rise and travel out across the land. But they must be back in their graves before sunrise. They tell me that it happens in New Orleans too. And there’s walpurgisnacht in Europe, but isn’t that only for witches to leave their graves?
    There’s a fourth myth, quite a strong one - that Dracula was the real-life Jack the Ripper, the fellow who killed and eviscerated at least five ladies of the night in 1888. Stoker’s novel was published in London less than a decade afterward. And, said the whisperers, Stoker wrote the book because he knew that the murders had been committed by an Eastern European nobleman on a visit to London who had then returned to his castle.
    Good legend this; they never caught Jack the Ripper. And, they said, Stoker had met the man. Personally. You can tell from the text: “Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the center of the palm.”
    Legend number five says that Stoker had in mind a satire on Oscar Wilde, who had tried to seduce Stoker’s sweetheart and eventual wife. Well – Oscar did have big teeth.
    Or - Dracula actually descended from a short novel published eighty years earlier called The Vampyre , which was based on the Romantic-period poet, Lord Byron. Useful myth stuff this; the vampire in the story looked like Byron, was also an aristocratic gentleman, and after all, the poet’s lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, said Byron was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
    Any veracity in all of this mythology? Yes, in bits and pieces - because all legends must have a grain of truth, the rods in their nuclear reactor. They’ve been helped by Dracula’s offspring, not least by that pounding, unstoppable myth-making machine, Hollywood. Count the dozens and dozens of movies the book has inspired: Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula ? Tender Dracula ? And I haven’t even included True Blood or the Twilight series.
    There’s a sense, though, in which the legends and the movies cheat us - because Dracula’s roots aren’t at all shallow; they come from deep down, and they’re visceral.

II: The Red Water of Life
     
    Language is always a good road-sign. Taking us immediately to where we should be, the Oxford English Dictionary gives this background to the word vampire : “ … Of Slavonic origin occurring in the same form in Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian.”
     “Of Slavonic origin” – ha! With one bound we are there – at the foot of Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, where people can’t sleep easy in their beds. The “cheery-looking” old landlady “went down on her knees and implored” Jonathan Harker , a young lawyer from England, not to go on with his visit to the Count. “She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me.”
    But Transylvania’s only one of the theme parks. The dictionary opens out the “vampire” definition into “a preternatural being of a malignant nature (in the original and usual form of the belief, a reanimated corpse), supposed to seek nourishment or do harm, by sucking the blood of sleeping persons.” It adds, “ a man or woman abnormally endowed with similar habits.” And the word dracula comes from the Latin draco , meaning