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Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Toronto Star has an article, Dracula’s castle? Don’t count on it, that really gives a good account on Drac and Bran Castle

So why is Bran Castle, a lovely, 13th-century palace near Brasov in Transylvania, known far and wide as “Dracula’s Castle?” Blame a mish-mash of expediency, misconception, and a yearning to connect in some way with the most notorious character in English fiction.

The conventional wisdom goes like this: Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, basing his vampire Count on real-life, 15th-century Romanian nobleman Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), who was infamous for skewering his enemies on stakes. Tepes lived in Bran Castle, which is a dead-ringer for Dracula’s mountain lair as described in the novel. So, the Stoker-Tepes-Bran connection is obvious. Right?

Except that it’s also nonsense, says Dr. Elizabeth Miller, a world-renowned expert on all things Dracula.

“Bram Stoker never even heard of Bran Castle, and Dracula owes nothing to Vlad’s atrocities,” says Miller, a retired professor at Newfoundland’s Memorial University and president of the Canadian chapter of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula (www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/trans_soc_dracula.html), a society dedicated to the serious study of Dracula in fact and fiction.