Castle Dracula is Missing
And there’s a hot twist…
Search every inch of Transylvania, you won’t find a Castle Dracula.
For those contrarians who’ve already started googling: yes, if you type “Castle +Dracula” into a search engine, you’ll get no shortage of keeps and fortresses claiming the name “Dracula”. But none of these are in the right place and none correspond to the text of the book.
The historical Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler, didn’t even reside in Transylvania. He couldn’t get invited to a dinner party there. He was from Walachia, next door to and the Division I rival of Transylvania.
But forget the voivode Vlad III Tepes and the businesses that ride his bloody coattails. Here we are concerned with the residence of the fictional Count Dracula as written by Bram Stoker.
Stoker avidly read and researched his masterpiece novel, but he was cagey about pinpointing the location of his Count’s manor. Various intriguing interpretations have been offered for this that fit within the context of the novel. One idea is that the character of Dracula purposefully obscured his home. Or, through some dark magic, the castle could not be found by normal humans unless they were “led” there.
There’s also a simpler explanation: it’s not there and never was.
Bram Stoker didn’t know Romania all that well. He relied on 19th century travelogues, such as Emily Gerard’s “The Land Beyond the Forest”.
So when Bram Stoker placed Castle Dracula some undetermined distance from the Borgo Pass, nestled in the Carpathian Mountains, he was relying on his 1897 readers to not check Google Street Maps. And for almost 100 years, readers kept their end of the deal by not verifying or, y’know, asking anyone from Transylvania.
So here we have a simple case of an author making up some facts for the convenience of his book, more or less correctly predicting that no one would check up on him.
But wait!
Comparing the text with notes Stoker kept helped researcher Hans de Roos locate where the castle _should_ be. And that is a very real place called Mount Izvorul Calimanului.
This is where Stoker set Castle Dracula, where the terrible Count lured Jonathan Harker and was eventually destroyed.
Here is what it looks like:
Totally. Kidding. This is all that’s on top of Mount Izvorul Calimanului:
Nothing but that haunting bro posing on top. He’s always there… waiting… getting stronger…
This image is far more terrifying than vampires.
Mount Izvorul Calimanului is hours from anything, and that’s by modern cars. And while Dracula probably liked some solitude, days of horse travel to get a fresh neck was probably a bit much.
Why didn’t Stoker use a real castle? Romania is stocked full with them. Maybe he didn’t want to defame anyone. Or maybe he just didn’t know the land well enough. Maybe he couldn’t be bothered. The dude was grabbing surnames from Wallachia and geography from Transylvania and clans from Hungary and cowboys from Texas and doctors from Denmark — maybe he wanted to tell a good gothic horror tale and not sweat the details that his readers weren’t going to nitpick anyway.
But bear with me here; I won’t sign off as Captain Killjoy. Because there is something very interesting in all this.
At the end of Dracula, as published in English, the castle still stands. But a pre-publication typescript surfaced in 1980, covered in notes made by Stoker, including a deleted ending.
Okay, see how the castle is swallowed by a volcano? Got that?
Turn that over in your mind for a moment. Because:
Mount Izvorul Calimanului, the place that smart people have triangulated as the location of the fictional Castle Dracula
IS A DORMANT MOTHERFUCKING VOLCANO!
And you were doubting Bram Stoker’s research chops. Shame!
More recently, Bram Stoker’s great-nephew Dacre Stoker, himself an author and researcher, has campaigned to erect some sort of marker on Mount Izvorul Calimanului; but I think they would need to build it around the mountain’s terrifying lone guardian.
And I’m not messing with that guy.
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Image sources: Shutterstock, my own camera, Google maps, WB, and a bunch of places I’ve sworn to secrecy.
