Castle Dracula is the fictitious Transylvanian residence of Count Dracula, the vampire antagonist in Bram Stoker's 1897 horror novel Dracula. In Stoker's narrative, Castle Dracula is the single most important location. The first and the last part of the plot take place here. The inaccessible stronghold, which initially symbolises the vampire's power, finally becomes the scene of his extermination.
The novel's events taking place in or near the castle
In the novel's first chapters, the young English solicitor Jonathan Harker, travelling from London via Paris, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Klausenburg and Bistritz, arrives at the castle after being picked up in the Borgo Pass by a mysterious driver, whom Harker later recognises as his host, Count Dracula, himself. During the trip, he apparently falls asleep, but wakes up when the calèche reaches the stronghold. The driver disappears and Harker thinks himself lost, until the door opens and the Count bids him welcome. After some tasty meals, which Harker always enjoys alone, and various conversations about the property Carfax near Purfleet, which his host wishes to purchase, Harker discovers that his patron has some disturbing habits, like climbing down the walls of the building like a lizard. Harker finds himself a prisoner in the castle. One night, when he falls asleep in a forbidden room, he is harassed by the three vampire sisters, who are interrupted by a furious Count, claiming the guest for himself. Apart from the scene with the female vampires however, who provoke a strange desire in him to be kissed by those red lips, Harker is not attacked in any way. The Count induces him to stay for a much longer time than planned and write some letters home, to appease his employer and his fiancée Mina Murray. Harker scales the walls of the castle himself, enters the Count's empty room and discovers a crypt in the chapel, wherein fifty boxes with earth are stored; in one of them he finds the Count, who has just fed on blood. Harker tries to hit him with a shovel, but the blow is diverted by the Count's hypnotic powers. In this box, the Count is later transported, to be shipped to England later on. Harker remains in the castle with the seductive female vampires, but finally manages to escape to Budapest, where he is taken care of by Sister Agatha. All events are recorded in Harker's journal, which later serves his friends as a report about the vampire and as a travel guide. After Lucy Westenra, Mina Murray's old school friend, has died from a mysterious illness, Professor Abraham Van Helsing visits Mina and reads the diary, which he confirms to be a realistic account of the unbelievable circumstances Jonathan was confronted with. In the final chapters, the vampire hunters chase the Count, who returns to his homeland by ship. Dracula tricks them by directing the vessel to Galatz, while Van Helsing and his friends are waiting for the Czarina Catherine to show up in Varna. In Galatz, the party splits in three couplings: Van Helsing and Mina travel by train to Veresți near Suceava and continue with a purchased horse carriage over Bukovinan territory to the east end of the Borgo Pass; Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood buy a steam launch to follow the Count's box, transported by Slovak boatmen via the Sereth and the Bistrița River, while Dr. John Seward and Quincey Morris head in the same direction by horse. The box with the Count is taken over from the Slovaks by Szgany, who transport it by leiter wagon. The routes of the Szgany and the three couplings finally converge at a place in the immediate neighbourhood of the castle, where Van Helsing and his men force the convoy to stop. Harker manages to decapitate the vampire with his Kukri knife, while Morris plunges his Bowie knife into the heart. The only person to actually enter the castle during this episode is Prof. Abraham van Helsing, who leaves the night camp shared with Mina to do away with the vampire sisters. Mina is already affected by her "blood wedding" with the vampire and left within a circle of Holy Bread. In a final note, written seven years after their dramatic adventures, Harker reports on the group's return to Transylvania:
Physical characteristics and lay-out of the castle
The first description is given by Jonathan Harker when the calèche reaches the courtyard of the castle: The ruined state of the castle is confirmed by the Count's words: The interior decoration, on the other hand, is still in good shape and the library is well equipped: Harker's window opens into the courtyard, but soon he sets out for a little expedition: All other doors are locked, however. The Count warns him not to sleep outside the rooms he already knows, including the library and the dining room; it seems as if the castle has a life of its own: When Harker finds another open door, though, he ignores this warning and falls asleep in the forbidden chambers: In this room, indeed, the ladies of the castle pay him their tantalising visit. The Count's room is also one storey below Harker's own room; from there, a staircase and a tunnel lead to the chapel with the boxes:
The location of the castle
The site of the Vampire's home has always been one of the greatest mysteries of the novel. The route descriptions hardly mention any recognisable landmarks, but focus on evocations of a wild and snow-covered landscape, haunted by howling wolves and lit by supernatural blue flames at night. Because of this conspicuous vagueness, the annotated Dracula editions by Leonard Wolf, Clive Leatherdale and Leslie Klinger simply assume Bram Stoker had no specific location in mind and place the castle in or immediately next to the Borgo Pass. As a consequence, these editions take for granted that the Count's men, pursued by Harker, Holmwood, Morris and Seward, follow the Bistrița River all the way up to Vatra Dornei and then travel the route through the Borgo Pass already taken by Van Helsing and Mina. The same view is adopted by Andrew Connell in his Google Map mark-ups. These theories ignore or misinterpret Stoker's hint that around the 47th Parallel, the Count's men are supposed to leave the river and cross-over to Transylvanian territory: Only recently, the Dutch author Hans Corneel de Roos discovered the site the Irish novelist really had in mind while shaping his narrative: an empty mountain top in the Transylvanian Călimani Mountains near the former border with Moldavia, ca. 20 miles south-east of the Borgo Pass. De Roos also explains why Stoker chose to obscure this location in his novel and compares the vampire's fortress to the Grail Castle as its anti-Christian antipole: It cannot be found on purpose, only by guidance. Harker is brought there by the Count himself, while Van Helsing and Mina – equally nodding off – rely on the instinct of their horses and the mounted men arrive there by following the Gypsies.
Deleted paragraphs picturing the destruction of Castle Dracula
Three paragraphs from the original manuscript, in which the building itself is swallowed by a volcanic cataclysm, do not appear in the printed version. Possible reasons mentioned are that Stoker wanted to leave the option of a sequel open, or that this dramatic finale reminded too much of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher": In his annotated Dracula edition, Leslie Klinger suggests as part of his conceit in considering Dracula a collection of true documents that these lines were part of Count Dracula's efforts to "cover up" the truth about the vampire's continuing activities, but that Stoker sabotaged the Count's editorial intervention by deleting these lines.
Castle Dracula as a tourist attraction
Since 1997, the Bran Castle in Bran near Brașov has been marketed as "Dracula's Castle". The website promoting it claims it was one of Vlad the Impaler's temporary residences. Since Van Helsing and Mina in Chapter 25 do not identify Count Dracula as the historical Vlad III Dracula but as a nameless "other of race", living "in a later age", this claim – true or not – does not support the identification of Stoker's fictitious building with the Bran Castle. However, in Chapter 18, Van Helsing confirms Dracula and Vlad are one and the same: "He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land." For the same reason, the Poenari Castle in Argeș County does not qualify as the "real" Dracula Castle; Stoker never heard of the Poenari fortress. Both the Bran Castle and the Poenari Castle are more than 100 miles away from the site Stoker actually selected and took down in a cryptic handwritten note. The Hotel Castel Dracula, located in Piâtra Fântânele in the Borgo Pass, which promotes itself as being constructed at the place of Stoker's Castle, at least is located at the point where Harker left the post carriage from Bistritz to Bukovina to be picked up by the Count; their route must have led over the former watchpost of Dornișoara towards the Călimani Mountains peaks in the south-east.
Because of its outstanding role in one of the best-known works of fiction of all time, Castle Dracula appears in numerous movies like Blood of Dracula's Castle and other Dracula-based films. There are video games called Dracula's Castle, Escape Dracula's Castle,Restore Dracula's Castle and Demon Castle Dracula ; the latter is best known to the west as Castlevania. A prosecco produced by a descendant of the Bassarab dynasty bears the name .
