Whitby, England is a small fishing village that lies along the edge of the North York Moors at the mouth of the River Esk. The river splits the town into east and west as it slides into the North Sea. Both halves of the fishing port perch atop sheer cliffs overlooking the harbor and the sea beyond; pleasant jumbles of small red-roofed houses line either side of the river, like carelessly tossed dice.
It is an ancient village first settled in the 5th or 6th century AD. In 637 AD a Catholic abbey was built nearby that pulled Whitby into history when, in 664 AD, the abbey was the chosen location for the Synod – council – of the Celtic and Roman Catholic Churches to come to an agreement on the celebration date for Easter. In 1077, the abbey was rebuilt in the foreboding gothic style of the medieval time. Now, the abbey ruins brood on the outskirts of Whitby. The commanding presence of towering stone façades pierced with sightless arches can cast the eerie shadow of folklore on even the most unimaginative mind.
It was into this harbor of history and myth that Bram Stoker sailed in 1890. He had been working on a novel inspired by Hungarian adventurer Arminius Vambery who had regaled Stoker with eastern European tales of the blood-hungry living dead. Whitby proved to be the perfect setting for Stoker to derive some of the more intriguing details for his book. He was so impressed by the surrealistic, menacing aspects of the immense stone abbey and St Mary’s Cathedral looming over the small town, that he used Whitby in his novel Dracula as the place where the seductive Count meets and kills Lucy.
While in Whitby, Stoker stayed at a small inn on the river. Every evening at dusk the local pigeons would sit on the window ledge and tap mindlessly at their reflections in the glass. Stoker incorporated this sound into his novel as Dracula tapping with long, sharp nails on Lucy’s window, demanding entrance. The bats residing in the stable behind the inn lent another aspect to Stoker’s main character: his ability to shape-shift into not only bats, but also black dogs and mist.
Perhaps Whitby’s largest influence on the novel was the name of Stoker’s main character. He had originally thought to bestow the Count with the Hungarian name “Wampyr”. Then, while researching vampire lore in Whitby’s library, he came across a book entitled An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820) by William Wilkinson. In the book, Wilkinson mentions a Vlad Dracula who warred with the Turks. Stoker discovered (mistakenly) that the word ‘dracula’ in Wallachian language meant ‘devil’* From there, it was not a far leap in imagination for ‘Wampyr’ to become ‘Dracula’.
The means of Dracula’s arrival to Whitby in Stoker’s novel was also loosely founded on truth. A ship named the ‘Demetrius’ had foundered off Whitby’s coast a few years earlier and emptied its grisly cargo of occupied coffins into the North Sea. The townspeople related to Stoker the horror of discovering bodies in various stages of decomposition scattered along the beach the next morning. Stoker eagerly incorporated the blood-chilling tale into his novel by having Dracula shipwrecked off the Whitby coast in the Russian schooner ‘Demeter’. This so delighted the town of Whitby that they placed a bench on the spot above the cliff where Stoker is said to have received inspiration for the shipwreck. On the bench is inscribed “The view from this spot inspired Bram Stoker (1847-1912)”.
Stoker visited Whitby several more times over the next few years. The novel Dracula was completed and published in 1897 to little acclaim. The book did not become widely popular until Hollywood began filming versions of the work in the early 1900s, a few years after Stoker’s death in 1912.
Bram Stoker was a prolific author who wrote numerous short stories in addition to his other novels: The Snake’s Pass (1890), Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). It’s a regrettable irony that Stoker’s legacy is a blood-sucking creature that drained life from not only the characters in Dracula, but his other tremendous works as well.
*In 1431 the Romanians, whose language was Latin, actually gave Vlad Tepes the nickname Dracula from the Latin ‘draco-onis’: devil/dragon. Not for his temperament, but for the golden medallion he wore that was imprinted with a dragon.
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