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Inspired by a visit to Whitby, England, site of the burial of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel, author Steven P. Unger set out to trace the footsteps of the fictional vampire’s real-life bloodthirsty counterpart, Vlad the Impaler. Unger’s quest, naturally, took him to the mountains of southern Romania and to Transylvania.

The graveyard in Whitby where Count Dracula spent his days sleeping in the sepulcher of a suicide looks the part that it plays, with its weathered limestone tombstones blackened by centuries of the everpresent North Sea winds.  

In my mind’s eye, I could see the un-dead Count Dracula rising at night from the flattened slab of the suicide’s gravestone to greedily drink the blood of the living.

That graveyard made the novel more visible, more visceral, to me, and I wondered if the sites in Transylvania and in the remote mountains of southern Romania would evoke the same feelings. As I was to discover—they did.

Eventually I traveled along the Dracula Trail alone, using only public transportation, to some places that I’d seen before and to others I had only dreamed of, trying my best to systematically strip away the layers of myth about Count Dracula and Prince Vlad the Impaler to find the reality within. I discovered in broken stones and parchments signed in blood why Prince Vlad’s monstrous deeds in life would brand him forever with the name of Vlad Ţepeş (pronounced Tzeh·pish), Romanian for Vlad the Impaler, soon after his death.

Bram Stoker’s Transylvania was the pipe dream of an armchair traveler with a genius for writing:  real enough for the 19^th Century reader, but bearing little resemblance to any Romania that ever existed.  For example, Stoker wrote of “hay-ricks [haystacks] in the trees” based on illustrations of Transylvanian haystacks built around stakes, with the ends of the stakes poking out like branches. Thus, generations of Dracula readers assumed that Transylvanians put their haystacks up in trees.

I had traveled to other remote, forbidding places before entering the almost lightless forest of Poenari.  Near Albania’s southern border, I hiked the Vikos Gorge, a dozen miles from the nearest stone-housed village. I baked beneath the unrelenting sun of the Timna Valley close to the Red Sea, where 120º in the shade is considered picnic weather. But never before or since have I felt the apprehension and isolation I did while climbing to Vlad Ţepeş’ mountaintop fortress at Poenari.  The forest was as quiet as a tomb; I can’t recall hearing the song of even a single bird.

The ascent was exhausting. At last I arrived at the lone approach to the fortress, a wooden footbridge. Of all the places I explored that are associated with Vlad Ţepeş, only at Poenari did I feel that he was somehow still keeping watch. Thousands of boyars and their families had been force-marched there from Tărgovişte to die rebuilding the castle for Prince Vlad; it was here that his treacherous brother Radu stormed the fortress with cannons, reducing the once courtly residence into broken turrets and formless rubble.  And it was here that Prince Dracula’s wife cast herself from the highest window of the eastern tower, choosing a swift death over the torture of the stake.

Walk along the top of the thick fortress walls of Poenari, look northward, and you can see part of the Transfăgarăşan Road, leading to a glacial moraine and one of the deepest lakes in the world. (According to local legend, a dragon sleeps at the bottom of the lake, and the villagers nearby will caution you not to throw stones in the water lest the dragon awake.) The view south from the fortress is straight down, to the Arges River far in the distance, and even farther, the road to Curtea de Arges.

©Steven P. Unger. Used with permission. Unger is the author of In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide (2010),  as well as Before The Paparazzi: 50 Years of Extraordinary Photographs with Arty Pomerantz, and a novel, Dancing in the Streets.